COPS STILL 'CONSENT SEARCH' MINORITIES' CARS MORE OFTEN, ILLINOIS STUDY SAYS

The latest state traffic study on who gets pulled over by police
shows once again that minorities are more likely to be the subject of
so-called consent searches although police are more likely to find
contraband in the vehicles of white drivers.

The results of the annual state study were not a surprise to civil
rights activists who are opposed to the searches, which are done with
the consent of the driver.

According to the 2008 study, released earlier this month, when a
vehicle of a white driver was "consent-searched," officers statewide
found contraband 24.7 percent of the time. When a vehicle driven by a
minority was searched, officers found contraband 15.4 percent of the time.

"The fact is every single year we see these same numbers," said Ed
Yohnka, spokesman for the ACLU of Illinois. "There is just a
predisposition to believe minorities have contraband. ... The data
and the indisputable nature of this is exactly what the president was
talking about the other night."

President Barack Obama worked on the racial profiling bill that led
to the traffic studies when he was an Illinois state senator.

On Wednesday night, Obama alluded to his work on the legislation when
he discussed the racially charged arrest of black scholar Henry Louis
Gates Jr. by police in Cambridge, Mass., outside his home even after
even after he said he showed them his identification during an
investigation about a break-in.

There are very few consent searches -- about 1 percent of all traffic
stops -- and they have declined by about 30 percent since 2004 when
the first Illinois study was done.

The ACLU as well as other civil rights groups have pushed for some
time for the state to ban the consent searches. In April, as the
state legislature was considering whether to continue funding the
traffic studies, the groups again voiced their opposition in a letter
to Gov. Pat Quinn.

In Chicago, minority drivers were four times more likely to get
searched, down from five times more likely in the last study.

But the consent-search data bucked the trend somewhat, according to
the study. The search of vehicles of white drivers yielded contraband
15.5 percent of the time, not much more than the 14.2 percent of the
time for minority drivers.

"It's always difficult to know what is in the mind of the officer,"
said Alexander Weiss, one of the study's authors. "I think it's fair
to say these are relatively high hit rates. They are finding things
fairly often."

Weiss called the idea of a ban "a difficult question" and said it's
important each law enforcement agency look at its own numbers to
decide whether there is bias.

Yohnka said the Chicago data doesn't change the need for a statewide
ban, saying the problem is severe enough across the state that the
searches should go.

"At the very least there has to be some sort of moratorium given
those state numbers," he said. "There is no question that barring
consent searches does not prevent [police] from protecting the community."

In other findings, the study showed that, statewide, minority drivers
were 13 percent more likely than white drivers to be stopped. That
figure is up slightly from last year when minorities were 10 percent
more likely to be stopped. Also, minority drivers statewide were
about twice as likely as whites to be asked for consent to search their vehicle.