CHICAGO (AP) — A report by the American Civil Liberties Union says African-American motorists in Illinois are more likely than others to be stopped and searched for routine traffic violations.
The report says police asked to conduct searches of vehicles driven by black motorists nearly twice as often as those driven by whites in 2017. Police asked to search cars driven by Latinos 1.4 times more often those driven by whites.
The study examined data collected by the Illinois Department of Transportation between 2015 and 2017 from more than 900 law enforcement agencies statewide. Police made about 6.5 million traffic stops and performed more than 283,000 searches in that time.
The study found that in certain cities, such as Aurora and Champaign, African-American drivers were stopped at rates more than twice that of the African-American population.
In Chicago, African-American drivers accounted for 61 percent of all traffic stops in 2017 while making up 31 percent of the city’s population.
