With little fanfare - and nearly no media attention - Illinois Governor Pat Quinn recently signed legislation that extends the collection of data by police of every motorist they stop. The measure was first adopted a few years ago under the leadership of President Barack Obama when he served in the Illinois State Senate. When asked earlier this summer about the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the President described this effort in his home state (discussion starts around 2:00):

Thanks to the President's leadership, we now have five years of detailed data collected by Illinois law enforcement agencies themselves about the racial characteristics of the drivers they target for traffic stops. The data shows that year after year in all parts of our state, drivers of color are more likely to be stopped for routine traffic violations -- the types of violations that vast majority of drivers on our roads, streets and highways commit at any given moment. Just released data for calendar year 2008 demonstrates that African American drivers in Illinois are 25% more likely to be stopped and Hispanic divers are 10% more likely to be stopped than white drivers.

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The data also reveals that the disproportionate treatment does not end with the traffic stops. Once stopped, the data shows, minority motorists are far more likely to be asked for "consent" to search their automobiles. These searches are performed when there is no articulable suspicion of wrongdoing and are at the complete discretion of the police. In calendar year 2006, for example, the Illinois State Police were twice as likely to ask an African American driver for permission to search his or her car and four times more likely to ask an Hispanic driver for permission to search when compared to white motorists. A consultant hired by the Illinois State Police concluded that there is no innocent explanation for the disparate treatment of minorities once they are stopped for a routine traffic infraction.

This lack of an innocent explanation becomes more compelling when one other fact is added: the data collected actually shows that, though police search white drivers less often, they are more likely to find contraband in their possession. Put more directly, an unjustifiable amount of police resources are being directed to search minority drivers that yield less contraband. Despite claims that consent searches are an important law enforcement "tool," the data reveals that for calendar year 2007, as an example, no significant amount of drugs were found in consent searches performed by the Illinois State Police.

On August 25, 2009, Governor Quinn quietly signed into law House Bill 648, a measure that extends data collection for five more years in Illinois. The ACLU of Illinois hopes that this additional data will assist law enforcement officials in our state to take real steps to fix the problem of racial profiling on our highways and streets -- steps like ending the use of consent searches. We look forward to evaluating and assessing the data each year.

Cross-Posted at ACLU Blog of Rights.

SB 212 – Public Act 96-0613

Senate Bill 212, sponsored by Senator Koehler and Representative Feigenholtz, introduces legislation on a CDC-recommended therapy, Expedited Partner Treatment (EPT), which allows a patient to be given a second antibiotic dose to dispense to his/her partner to combat transmission of chlamydia and gonorrhea. This legislation regulates EPT and the treatment of partners of patients diagnosed with STDs. The ACLU of Illinois partnered with a coalition led by public health organizations and the AIDS Foundation of Chicago.

Learn more about Expedited Partner Treatment.

By Kayla Higging, Field Intern

The ACLU of Illinois welcomes Kayla Higgins as an intern. She will be blogging about her work with the ACLU over the next few months:

Hi, my name is Kayla and I am a Jewish-Irish redhead from New York City entering my third year at the University of Chicago. I have many and varied interests, including modern dance, okra, running, "Simply Decadent" Vegan Cookie-Dough Ice-Cream, crossword puzzles, Kashi bars, and listening to "This American Life" on NPR. But above of all, I'm interested in promoting positive social change.

Social justice emerged as one of my top two interests when I was about three years old, at which time I announced to my parents that when I grew up I wanted either to be a rockstar, or a "helper." But as time went on and my rockstar ambition seemed like a less and less a feasible option (I was cast in my high school musicals repeatedly as dancing piece of foliage), as well as a less and less appealing one (the "Behind the Music" specials are always so depressing!), the "helper" option moved more and more to the forefront. But I'd be misleading if I made it sound like becoming involved in social justice was mostly a logistical choice. I have, in fact, many personal reasons why social justice and human rights work has become one of my central missions in life.
One issue that I care deeply about is equal rights and respect for LGBTQ people. Two of my best friends from childhood are gay, I have gained many more LGBTQ friends since then, and I have several gay family members. I have faith that, after seeing some big steps forward in America in recent years (more openness and acceptance in the media, as well as some legislative wins), that progress can be made. Thus, promoting equal rights for LGBTQ's and promoting general openness about sexuality are two of the main issues I have in mind when I talk about creating positive social change.
Another issue that acutely resonates with me is women's rights, and in particular women's reproductive rights. I care about this issue not only because I and about half of the people I know and love happen to be women, but also because a woman in my extended family secretly had to travel to Mexico to get an abortion when she was just out of college, risking death in the process. This makes the dreadfully common story much more than a cliche for me, and the plight of young girls today that much more personally significant.
But there are many routes to take to achieve social justice for LGBTQ people and young women. The reason I decided that working with the ACLU this summer would be my preferred way of tackling these issues has to do with a class I took last year as a Law, Letters, & Society major at the University of Chicago. The class was called "The Political Nature of the American Judicial System," and the take-home message of the course was that changing society and public opinion is what changes the law and court decisions, not the other way around. For that reason, I wanted to work for an organization that focused not only on legal advocacy, but also on spreading the word about civil liberties issues in the public sphere and educating the public. And given I was already familiar with the ACLU through seeing its name in news articles, blogs, twitters, sidewalk handouts, and at parades, I knew that the ACLU was this type of organization.
Thus, I already had familiarity with the ACLU when I attended a Social Justice Law Panel assembled by UChicago's Career Advisement and Planning Services office. And, as luck would have it, one of the lawyers on the panel, Khadine Bennett, was an employee at the ACLU of Illinois. By talking with Khadine over coffee a few weeks after the panel, I was able to find out about summer internship and volunteer opportunities at the ACLU, and felt very lucky to find a volunteer opportunity with the ACLU's Senior Field Manager, Allie Carter, who focuses on the very type of public outreach that I have learned from my classes is so important to enacting social change. I feel very fortunate to be able to work with the ACLU this summer on issues I care so deeply about, and in a way that I think will really cause significant social change.