At Illinois public universities, campus cops pull over Black drivers at higher rates

Michael Burton was stopped by Southern Illinois University-Carbondale campus police so many times that he dreads driving anywhere near the college.

“Any time I got behind the wheel, I was getting pulled over,” said the 21-year-old junior from Austin.

He said he reached a breaking point in December 2023 while driving with friends — all of them, like Burton, Black — to an art exhibit on campus. Police pulled over his gray Jeep Compass for not coming to a complete stop and turning down a one-way street.

The Investigative Project on Race and Equity obtained body camera footage of Burton’s encounter with the police. Reporters watched the 58-minute body camera video recording from the police department. After the car’s occupants exit the vehicle carrying backpacks, Burton stands silently, cross-armed in jeans and a black hoodie, as one officer explains what he's being cited for and hands Burton four tickets. He tells Burton to show up for a court date on Dec. 20 — days after the semester was to end and the week before Christmas — or face having a warrant issued for his arrest.

“We were sitting in the car for about 30 to 40 minutes-ish, and then the f - - - ing tow truck comes up,” he said.

In the video, Burton is seen scratching his goatee as the driver hooks up the SUV and a woman standing next to Burton reaches to hug him.

“Insane,” Burton said in an interview.

A first-generation college student, he said he had relied on his car to get to school and work, where he taught music at an early-childhood center. He said he was without a car for nearly a year, spent more than $1,200 on ride shares and Voi e-scooters, as he defended himself in court. At the end of the ordeal, his car was sold before he could recover it.

In court, three of the four tickets were dismissed, leaving just one that he pled guilty to: failure to obey a stop sign.

Burton, who grew up on the West Side and graduated from Christ the King Jesuit College Prep, is among thousands of Black students from the Chicago area attending a four-year public university in Illinois. Burton said he knew the perils of driving as a Black driver. But, when he enrolled at SIU-Carbondale, he said he never expected campus police to be so harsh.

It's a phenomenon seen at public universities across the state, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis of Illinois Department of Transportation’s traffic-stop data analyzed by the Investigative Project in collaboration with WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times. The investigation found:

• Campus police have pulled over Black drivers at rates higher than Black student enrollment at those schools and at higher rates than the Black adult population of their surrounding communities, according to the analysis of 33,388 traffic stops by police officers, covering the period from 2019 to 2023, at 11 Illinois public college campus police departments. Traffic stops data include students and the general public.
• During those stops, Black drivers were more likely than white drivers to get traffic tickets, while white drivers were more likely than Black drivers to drive away with warnings. Nearly 1 in every 3 Black drivers got a ticket rather than a spoken or written warning, compared to almost 1 in every 5 white drivers, according to an analysis of the most recent five years of data available.
• Disparities have widened in recent years. Among those stopped by campus police, the share of stops involving Black drivers increased from 29% in 2019 to 34% in 2023. But Black students and Black adults account for far lower percentages of all students and adults at the universities and the communities surrounding them. And the share of white drivers stopped by campus police decreased from 54% in 2018 to 45% in 2023.

The analysis included traffic stops reported by campus police departments at 11 four-year public universities in Illinois: Eastern Illinois University, Governor’s State University, Illinois State University, Northeastern Illinois University, Northern Illinois University, Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, University of Illinois Chicago, University of Illinois Springfield, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Western Illinois University.

The analysis excluded Chicago State University, which reported no traffic stops from 2019 to 2023.

The Investigative Project and WBEZ compared the share of Black drivers among those stopped and ticketed by campus police departments with the share of Black students among all students enrolled at the universities in the fall of 2022. The analysis also compared the percentage of traffic stops involving Black drivers with the share of Black adults among all adults in the communities surrounding the campuses.

The findings are, “unfortunately, not surprising,” said Ed Yohnka, director of communications and public policy for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinoi, who described them as “consistent with the kinds of reports we see from other communities across the state.”

Yohnka said he worked with then-state Sen. Barack Obama in 2003 to get the data-collection law passed after decades of conversations around the country “about driving while Black and brown.”

The bill required police departments statewide to submit data on all traffic stops to the Illinois Department of Transportation, detailing driver demographics and whether the stop led to a citation or warning.

“Folks on the advocacy side had always hoped that there would be a moment every year when this data came out where city councils, county boards and boards of trustees would be able to look at this data and … ask questions of the police officials about why certain things occurred,” Yohnka said, and “why there were disparities.”

‘Even when you’re right . . . you’re still wrong’

When Billy Evans Jr., 24, decided to go to Northern Illinois University in the fall of 2018, he had big dreams. He wanted to open a building that has a barbershop in the front and a speakeasy in the back with live music, dinner and fine wine. He said he has about two semesters left.

But during his time there, Evans, who is Black, has had five interactions with the campus police — three times when he contacted them for help — and two in which he was stopped and issued warnings.

Black drivers made up just over half of all traffic stops by NIU campus police in the most recent five years of data available, though Black students made up 18% of student enrollment in the fall of 2022. In DeKalb, where NIU is located, about 13% of all adults are Black, according to 2023 five-year estimates from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

NIU interim police Chief Jason John declined an interview request. in a written statement, he said: “It’s difficult to disentangle disparities that can arise in traffic stop data, which can be impacted by a variety of factors, such as geographic areas patrolled.

“Officers are trained to make decisions on traffic stops based on traffic violations, not the race, ethnicity or any other demographics of drivers.”

The widest disparity between traffic stops and enrollment by race was at UIC, where Black drivers make up nearly 50% of traffic stops by campus police, while Black students make up 8% of enrollment. In the Near West Side community area where UIC is located, 23% of adults are Black. But at least 75% of all adults are Black in the East Garfield Park, North Lawndale and West Garfield Park communities just west of campus.

Sherri McGinnis Gonzalez, UIC's associate vice chancellor for university communications, said the campus police department is “committed to equitable policing practices” and that "most traffic stops conducted by UIC Police are on city streets surrounding the campus and largely involve individuals who are not affiliated with the university."

At Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, Black drivers were involved in 49% of traffic stops by campus police. Black drivers received 50% of traffic tickets issued by campus police. Black student enrollment in the fall of 2022 was 15% of the university total. In Carbondale, Black adults account for 25% of all adults.

Former SIU-Carbondale student Clare Killman, 29, who serves on the Carbondale City Council, said the analysis “seems to indicate that there's a very clear racial bias on campus against Black people.”

SIU-Carbondale spokesperson Kim Rendfeld said in a written statement in response to questions: “Our sole motivation for traffic stops is public safety, regardless of the driver’s race or other characteristics.”

The racial disparities are pervasive across the state’s public universities.

At Illinois State University, 26% of the 3,916 traffic stops between 2019 and 2023 were of Black drivers, while 11% of its enrollment is composed of Black students. In Normal, surrounding ISU, 10% of all adults are Black.

Illinois State University police Chief Aaron Woodruff, who has led the department for 14 years, said “a lot of this could be related to implicit bias, which is why you try to educate officers on that to begin with.”

Woodruf said “there is no easy solution” to the “complexity” of how and why traffic stops happen but that “using race as a basis for a traffic stop undermines the principle of equal protection under the law.

“While disparities in traffic-stop data may raise concerns, it is important to recognize that simple comparisons between stop rates and general population demographics does not provide an accurate assessment of policing practices,” Woodruff said. “Just as every individual carries their own story, every police traffic stop unfolds its own narrative — each one distinct and shaped by its circumstances.”

Woodruff said his department has improved its training manual, requested money for body cameras and worked to educate its officers on implicit bias by bringing in Stanford University Professor Jennifer Eberhardt, who has written on the topic.

Some students, like Evans at NIU, turn to family members for advice on how to interact with police.

“I pretty much look to my dad for answers,” he said. “He understands how things are, especially as Black men. Even when you’re right, in a sense, you’re still wrong.”

Tickets versus warnings

Black drivers stopped by Illinois’ public campus police officers were more likely than white drivers to get traffic tickets instead of a warning, according to the analysis.

Among the campus police departments analyzed, the widest ticketing disparity between the rates of white and Black drivers getting warnings was at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where Black drivers were nearly twice as likely as white drivers to receive a ticket.

In response to public records requests for complaints to the university regarding traffic stops from 2004 to 2023, the department released four complaints. The only one from the last five years involved an e-bike.

In a complaint in 2017, a person driving a yellow Camaro with the windows tinted “just to resemble the car from ‘Transformers’ ’ Bumblebee” was pulled over by campus police for turning incorrectly down a one-way street. The complaint said the vehicle was then surrounded by multiple squad cars, campus officers, a sheriff and her canine. It had the “look of a major drug bust,” the complainant said. The race of the driver could not be determined from the complaint, which was partially redacted.

After the vehicle was searched for drugs, guns and other weapons, the driver, whose name was redacted, received a ticket, according to the complaint. It was the driver's second in days, after a university police stop earlier that week for driving on a suspended license, which the driver said was the result of a “DMV” mistake.

“I just don’t honestly don’t feel safe driving on campus anymore. I feel targeted by university police,” the driver said in the complaint. “I was harassed, my Fourth Amendment rights weren’t protected, and profiling played a part in this incident.

“My character was shattered as people took pictures and videos and uploaded them to social media,” the complainant said. “I am now dealing with issues at work from this incident.”

Matt Ballinger, the police chief for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, declined to be interviewed. In a written statement, Ballinger said campus officers conduct traffic stops on and off campus, including a large off-campus portion.

"The traffic-stop data reported to the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) includes hundreds of these interactions and are not limited to U. of I. students,” Ballinger said. “Moreover, the six Illinois public universities included in this study may have different community demographics and departmental policies."

Abbigail Kepp, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign spokesperson, said in a written statement that campus officers attend several training sessions. Their officers “exceed the minimum standards and attend various other trainings required by the University of Illinois and the Division of Public Safety."

During the time of the written complaint, the campus became a flashpoint on university policing when students, part of the #DefundUIPD movement, issued a letter to university leaders urging them to reevaluate the school’s relationship with the campus police and the city of Champaign police department. The letter also said over-ticketing of Black drivers in Champaign and Urbana was a major concern. The #DefundUIPD account on X, formerly known as Twitter, has been inactive since May 2022.

The pandemic left many college campuses bare, which meant fewer drivers on the road and fewer people being pulled over by campus police. But Black drivers were still disproportionately stopped. The share of campus police stops involving Black drivers increased by five percentage points from 2019 to 2023. During that period, the share of stops involving white drivers dropped by nine percentage points, compounding an already-wide disparity.

Campus police at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign stopped 1,093 Black women — the most of any of the 11 campus police departments in the analysis — from 2019 through 2023. While the department reported issuing more than 65,000 written warnings in the past two decades, it did not report issuing any oral warnings, according to records it files annually with the state.

Davarian Baldwin, a historian and American studies professor at Trinity College in Connecticut, said the data findings are a clear indication of racial profiling that's consistent with the history of policing in America. He said the impacts of viral police killings like George Floyd's have led to people pointing out that, when police stops end with tickets, it's better than the alternative but that that's not the only issue.

"You were stopped by the police, you were searched by the police, you were given a citation by the police,” Baldwin said. “All these things produce trauma on their own."

Contributing: Isabelle Senechal and Jonathan Torres of the Investigative Project on Race and Equity; Matt Kiefer, Northwestern University Medill School; Jordan Butler, Courtney Dillon and Molly Hughes, CU-CitizenAccess; Alden Loury and Amy Qin, WBEZ