The ACLU of Illinois long has been at the forefront of the battle against racial profiling. In the Fall of 2008, we analyzed data released by the Illinois Department of Transportation  - which revealed a disturbing pattern of bias in the way that law enforcement officials conduct consent searches of motorists after a routine traffic stop.

The ACLU’s analysis demonstrated that Illinois State Police ask for permission to search minority drivers more than three times as often as white drivers. Worse, ISP officers were far less likely to find contraband (illegal guns or drugs) in the cars of minority drivers than in the cars of white motorists - demonstrating not only the presence of racial profiling, but also its ineffectiveness in stopping criminal activity. The ACLU helped lead a coalition of civil rights organizations, challenging the former and current Governors to end the practice of consent searches entirely.

“In looking at this data, it is reasonable to conclude that for police in Illinois, a driver’s race is a proxy for suspicion in deciding whether to request a consent search,” said Harvey Grossman, Legal Director for the ACLU of Illinois. “It is clear that police view drivers of color with far more suspicion than their white counterparts.”

This critical data is the fruit of a law passed in 2003 by the ACLU, working collaboratively with then State Senator Obama. During his press conference following the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at his home in Cambridge, President Obama reminded us that “what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact. . . . [W]hen I was in the state legislature in Illinois, we worked on a racial profiling bill because there was indisputable evidence that blacks and Hispanics were being stopped disproportionately.”

During the 2009 legislative session, the ACLU spearheaded the successful effort to extend this initiative of then-State Senator Obama’s which requires law enforcement officers to collect racial data for all traffic stops.