Black drivers have a higher likelihood of being pulled over for a traffic stop by police of public Illinois universities and of leaving with a ticket than their white peers, including at Illinois State University, according to an analysis from WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times.
The analysis of over 33,000 traffic stops from 2019 to 2023 at 11 Illinois colleges and universities showed one in three Black drivers stopped received a ticket, while the same happened to white drivers one in five times. The report also showed the number of Black drivers stopped by officers increased while white drivers decreased.
It's based on Illinois Department of Transportation's traffic-stop data analyzed by the Investigative Project in collaboration with WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times.
Aaron Woodruff, chief of the university police department of ISU, said a study such as this one is too simplistic and missing context.
“The reality is the world doesn’t exist in proportionality, things don’t happen directly by race,” Woodruff said. “Things don’t happen directly by race or age or gender … in proportionality to what is society, so that’s always a challenge when you take just one number and then try to match it to another.”
Woodruff said ISU Police make the decision to stop a driver based primarily on one factor: risk. He said a driver’s race is not taken under consideration; the security of campus is.
He said one reason for the disparity between races could be correlated to the position of campus in Bloomington-Normal. College Avenue and Main Street both cross through ISU.
However, ISU Police still have the ability to conduct a traffic stop away from campus, as they have jurisdiction in all of McLean County. Woodruff said while they do have the authority to make a stop in a place like the University Farm in Lexington, most stops are on campus.
“We have over 50,000 vehicles a day that are passing through our campus,” Woodruff said. “Some campuses they’re a little more remote, maybe that traffic enforcement looks differently, but at least for us it has to be a part of our job to help keep our campus community safe.”
Woodruff reiterated that race is not a part of when or when not to pull over a driver, and he wouldn’t even try to enforce a rule requiring his officers to do so because then it would become a matter of fairness.
“For example, if the suggestion by some is, ‘Well you just need to stop more of this particular race, or this particular gender or this particular this,’ now we are making decisions based on something that would be a violation of somebody’s rights,” he said.
Woodruff said that the WBEZ-Sun-Times report tries to answer a complicated case with simple explanations, not taking into consideration the context of the stop and the discretion of the given officer. For instance, he said while it is lawful to stop someone for going even one mile over the posted speed limit, each officer makes their own call on when a stop is actually warranted.
“My point is there isn’t always a simple answer,” he said. “Could it be that bias is playing a role in some traffic stops? It certainly could be. I would like to think again that our officers aren’t doing that, that they’re making good decisions for the right reasons.”
Woodruff said similar reports, like the annual Illinois Department of Transportation report on traffic and pedestrian stops, also release findings based on race. He said IDOT’s data assume race based on last name and residency of the individual.
“Those are some nuances that people don’t realize when they read these reports, that there’s a lot of questions about validity and reliability in these types of studies,” he said. “I find it a little disturbing that they’re going to make generalizations about somebody.”
Woodruff said he thinks it is vital communities understand the different factors contributing to studies and have an open dialogue with their departments, because it is what builds trust. However, he said the tendency for people to not see more about the studies further upsets him.
“I find it extremely frustrating, and, again, it’s human nature to look for a simple answer to complex problems, that’s just what we do,” Woodruff said. “The challenge is really getting into the details and seeing, ‘Okay, what really is going on here?’”
As for ISU’s place in the WBEZ-Sun-Times report, it was second to the bottom of the list, meaning the percentage of Black drivers stopped by their police was among the lowest of other state universities. While 26% of traffic stops were Black drivers, that compares to 11% of students being Black and 10% of Normal residents being Black, according to the report.
Woodruff said that number could be drawn back to ISU’s place in between Bloomington and Normal, the cross section of those two popular streets.
“I would venture to say a majority of the stops we are making are probably not students,” he said. “Again, when you look at our community, our surrounding geography … we have I-55 dumping right off on to Main Street, cutting right through the core of Bloomington-Normal.”
The diversity of ISU’s police force is not an issue either, according to Woodruff. In fact, he says the force has good diversity and he takes pride in it.
“Now that ebbs and flows as you lose officers or people retire, but we’ve always been pretty proud of that diversity,” he said. “But the route is that diversity doesn’t always translate into, again, people not having implicit bias … we all carry biases.”
Woodruff said they regularly complete training on bias and racial sensitivity and review body cam footage to correct officers, on top of other communication training to be better equipped for all members of the community.
“It could be learning more about people who are on the [autism] spectrum, people who maybe mental health issues … people from different racial or ethnic backgrounds, you name it, even people with hearing impairment or people who have vision impairment,” Woodruff said.
