In the wake of highly publicized allegations of racial profiling against the Highland Park Police Department, Lake County’s top police officials announced Thursday that they have unanimously endorsed a resolution condemning racial profiling and have drawn up guidelines to help prevent it.
In the 12-paragraph resolution, the Lake County Chiefs of Police Association–a self-governing body with representatives from 49 police departments–strongly recommends that each department adopt a policy against racial profiling and properly train officers in how to avoid it.
The group’s action follows similar measures adopted by police departments across the country, legal experts said.
As part of its recommendation that departments educate officers, the association is training about 400 area officers this week. From Monday through Friday, a one-day training course was scheduled at a different department around the county to make it convenient for officers to attend.
“We wanted to let the community know that we are aware of this, that we are doing something about it, and that we won’t tolerate it,” said Mundelein Police Chief Raymond Rose, co-chairman of the association.
Cleveland Jefferson, president of the Illinois chapter of the NAACP, commended the association’s action.
“Hopefully, the departments in their area will develop those policies and guidelines to prevent racial profiling,” Jefferson said.
The association strongly recommends that individual departments monitor their policies, which “may include race and ethnicity data being collected during … traffic and non-traffic interactions.”
Having policies that require officers to record the race and other data about drivers they stop is a key step to combating racial profiling, Alexander Weiss, director of the Northwestern University Center for Public Safety, told a national gathering of police officials in Chicago last fall.
“There’s a clear movement across the country among law enforcement agencies to collect this data,” Ed Yohnka, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Chicago, said Thursday.
Some Chicago area departments accused of allowing racial profiling require officers to record such information.
“You’ve got to monitor the policy in order for it to be effective,” said Lake State’s Atty. Michael Waller, another co-chairman of the police association’s racial profiling committee. “I believe a lot of police departments [in Lake County] will have some kind of monitoring policy.
But Rose emphasized that because the usefulness of tracking such information is still hotly debated by legal and law enforcement officials, it will be up to each department whether they want to require officers to record racial data.
The association included a model of a racial profiling policy, but Rose said each local agency can modify the model to suit its needs. Association leaders said they did not know how many departments in Lake County have a policy on racial profiling.
In the Highland Park Police Department, which endorsed the resolution, charges of racial profiling were investigated by former U.S. Atty. Thomas Sullivan.
In June, Sullivan issued a report that said racial profiling was not a matter of policy, but police officials did not discipline officers when individual cases arose.
Highland Park has installed cameras in police cars and plans to start a data-collection system and send officers to sensitivity and diversity training.