[Peace] Urbana police and racial profiling discussion tonight July 13 at 5:30pm / Urbana city building, 400 S. Vine

[Karen Medina]

> When: 5:30pm, Wednesday, July 13, 2011 (this evening)
> Where: Urbana City Council Chambers, 400 S. Vine St., Urbana Illinois

This News=Gazetter article has some of the background for tonight's meeting:

Analysis of Urbana traffic stop trends being discussed
Wed, 07/13/2011 - 9:00am | Patrick Wade

URBANA — To get a better handle on why racial groups aren't
proportionally represented in police traffic stops, the city has
conducted and released an independent statistical analysis of three
years' worth of data.

The analysis will be the subject of a joint meeting of two city
committees that concern themselves with policing trends at 5:30 p.m.
Wednesday at the Urbana City Building, 400 S. Vine St.

In December, the human relations commission took its first look at
traffic-stop data released by the Illinois Department of
Transportation, which showed 47 percent of Urbana traffic stops
involved nonwhite drivers, even though statisticians estimate Urbana's
minority driving population to be about 30 percent of all drivers.

That would suggest that nonwhite drivers are 56 percent more likely to
get pulled over in Urbana than they would be if the demographics of
drivers in traffic stops were proportional to the representation of
racial groups in the driving population.

That data was from 2009, the most recently available at the time the
city took up the issue. IDOT has since released its 2010 study, which
shows the number to have risen to 70 percent in Urbana.

According to IDOT, nonwhite drivers were pulled over in 2010 by
Champaign police 48 percent more often than statisticians would
anticipate, up from 45 percent in 2009. Minority drivers were 50
percent more likely to get pulled over by University of Illinois
police in 2010, compared with 36 percent in 2009.

Among the rest of Illinois police, the three local agencies ranked
roughly among the middle of the pack.

But the IDOT study itself is a "screening tool," said Urbana human
relations officer Todd Rent, and it does not identify what may be the
underlying conditions.

"It can't give you a detailed overview of what may be causing or
driving the disproportionality," Rent said.

The city retained a University of Illinois Chicago graduate student to
further analyze traffic-stop data in its relation to the demographics
of the city. The independent report breaks down traffic stops by
region, neighborhoods, time of day, age and other factors.

For example, in a police beat with a higher African-American
population and a lower white population, black and white drivers were
stopped at roughly the same rate. When you exclude that police beat
from the rest of the data, the probability of a minority driver
getting stopped over three years' worth of data for the remainder of
the city drops from 51 percent to 39 percent more likely.

Except for Hispanic drivers, no disparity existed between racial
groups regarding whether an officer issued a warning or a citation.
The investigator found that Hispanic drivers receive a higher ratio of
citations because they are ticketed for offenses for which officers
are more likely to issue citations, like not having a driver's
license, drunken driving and having an uninsured vehicle, according to
the report.

Whether these distinctions hold any significance will be up to the
human relations commission and the civilian police review board, Rent
said. The analysis settles on no specific recommendations, and how to
proceed will be directed by Wednesday night's discussion.

"I think it's clear that the city needs and wants to have a
conversation with the community about the level of policing in very
different areas," Rent said.

He expects the community will have a "serious, thoughtful conversation."

"I think tomorrow should be the beginning of the conversation," Rent
said. "Now we can have the conversation from the standpoint of having
knowledge, greater knowledge, about what's going on than we did in the
past."

Categories (3):
News, Courts, Police, and Fire, Politics and Government
Location (3):
Champaign County, Local, Urbana
Tags (1):
traffic stops

Link to this article:
http://www.news-gazette.com/news/courts-police-and-fire/2011-07-13/analysis-urbana-traffic-stop-trends-being-discussed.html