News & Commentary

The Chicago Sun-Times spoke with ACLU of Illinois associate legal director Ben Wolf about the Governor's plans for spending cuts, which leaked ahead of his inaugural budget address. The proposed cuts to funding for the Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) would end services to former foster children over 18. The ACLU has been representing children under DCFS' care for decades under a consent decree designed to keep the agency committed to a standard of care to ensure quality services for foster children in DCFS custody. Just this week, the ACLU has asked a federal judge to jump-start reforms at the agency as a result of ongoing problems in order to bring DCFS back into compliance.

“Go home – you’re useless to us right now.”

The Chicago Tribune published an article about a new law which will set Illinois public schools to task in investigating and helping students who are cyber-bullied. In the days following the law's enactment, a downstate school district administrator circulated a message stating that schools may require the students to turn over their social media passwords. Misinformation then began to spread about the new law regarding whether or not schools can demand students to provide their passwords. The new law does not permit this. The ACLU of Illinois has a history of supporting anti-bullying measures for students, but opposed this measure, since it could potentially punish students for acts which happen outside of school. The Chicago Tribune spoke with communications and public policy director Ed Yohnka:

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Radio station WBBM 780 aired a segment about the recent ACLU of Illinois study that found significant racial disparity in traffic stops and resulting searches by the Chicago Police Department (CPD). The report found that the rate of black drivers being stopped (46%) was far higher than the rate of black residents in the city population (32%). The report also found that the rates of black and Latino drivers being stopped in white neighborhoods were even more disproportionate to their population rate. WBBM spoke with senior staff counsel Adam Schwartz:

In the wake of the police shootings in Ferguson, MO and Staten Island, NY, the issue of police body cameras has come into public conversation as a potential means to create transparency and to safeguard against police misconduct. The Champaign county town of Rantoul, IL recently equipped their police force with body cameras, having tested and trained their department on the technology for over a year before they began using them in November.  This September, the ACLU of Illinois published suggested guidelines on the use of police body cameras which outline areas of concern ranging from basic privacy protections for the police wearing them, when and where police can turn the device on and off, and storage protocols for the video files once they are recorded. The News-Gazette spoke with ACLU of Illinois communications and public policy director Ed Yohnka on the use of body cameras by law enforcement.

I first met Tatyana a few years after the Wisconsin legislature passed the Inmate Sex Change Prevention Act – a cruel piece of legislation aimed at denying urgently needed healthcare to any transperson in custody in Wisconsin.

What does the ACLU think of the bill?

To the editor: