[Peace-discuss] Urbana 2007: black drivers 3.5 times more likely to be pulled over than white drivers

[Randall Cotton]

Here are statistics (with references) from the state's racial profiling
report, as requested regarding the traffic stop disparity discussed at
this evening's AWARE meeting.

In Urbana during 2007, Black drivers were 3.46 times more likely to be
pulled over for a traffic stop than white drivers. This is worse than 2
years ago when I first drew attention to this statistic (which was 3.26
at the time, for 2005 data).

Here are the base statistics for Urbana during 2007
including footnoted references and the math required
to calculate the 3.46 disparity ratio
-----------------------------------------------------

Black folks:
Driving population (based on US Census data and
estimated by Northwestern University): 3875 [1]
Traffic stops: 1160 [2]

White folks:
Driving population (based on US Census data and
estimated by Northwestern University): 21428 [3]
Traffic stops: 1854 [2]

So there were (in Urbana, during 2007):
1160 traffic stops for 3875 black drivers
and
1854 traffic stops for 21428 white drivers

So the percentage of traffic stops per black driver was:
1160/3875 = .299 = 29.9%
and the percentage of traffic stops per white driver was:
1854/21428 = .087 = 8.7%

That is,
For every 100 black drivers there were about 30 traffic stops
For every 100 white drivers there were about 9 traffic stops

So black drivers were more likely to be stopped than white drivers by a
factor of 30/9 = 3.3.

That is, black drivers were about 3.3 times more likely to be stopped than
white drivers.

You can see I did a little rounding in the calculations, so that's why the
3.3 didn't come out to exactly 3.46, but hopefully this gives you a solid
understanding of the disparity.

Attached is a graph showing this black vs white disparity in surrounding
locales as well as Illinois as a whole and Chicago, as requested.

[1] http://www.dot.state.il.us/trafficstop/2004summary.pdf , p. 161
[2] http://www.dot.state.il.us/travelstats/2007%20Agency%20Reports.pdf ,
p. 1706
[3] http://www.dot.state.il.us/trafficstop/2004summary.pdf , p. 109
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