Two years after Mt. Prospect was rocked by allegations of racial profiling, village officials said they have initiated reforms but refuse to make public the information they said shows police are not harassing Hispanic motorists.
And while some community activists said the general atmosphere has improved and complaints have declined, several specific reforms have failed to get off the ground.
Mt. Prospect drew praise from even its harshest critics in March 2000, when officials announced six initiatives they said would assure that police do not target Hispanics, as several lawsuits had alleged.
Officials said they are faithfully implementing the reforms, which included recording the race of all drivers stopped by police. The village has provided that information to the U.S. Department of Justice, but officials have repeatedly refused to release the information to reporters, citing the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation.
“We made a commitment and we’re following through on it,” Village Manager Michael Janonis said. “I think we are succeeding.”
As part of the reform effort, the village established a commission to investigate discrimination complaints. It has yet to appoint any members to the commission.
Mt. Prospect police also agreed to step up minority recruitment, but officials said none of the 10 police officers hired in the past two years is Hispanic or African-American.
The village has put all 320 village employees through diversity training and created a written policy barring selective enforcement of the law. It also eliminated the individual ticket quotas that critics said pressured officers to write tickets and fueled profiling.
Some Hispanic leaders said they see signs of improvement but are quicker to credit heightened awareness of the issue than any reform.
Complaints about profiling appear to have died down in the Hispanic community, eclipsed by concerns about the weak economy and lost jobs, said Mila Laschkewitsch, who chairs the Hispanic Community Advisory Council. The group includes 30 organizations that provide services to Hispanics in the northwest suburbs.
“Two or three years ago, this was something constant,” Laschkewitsch said. “People would come in and say, `They stopped me for this. They stopped me for that.’ And it was always somebody who looked very Mexican–who could be picked out of the crowd. … Just the fact that [the lawsuits] brought it to light has made a great difference.”
Since Police Chief Richard Eddington took over in July, police have had two formal meetings with Hispanic residents to hear their concerns, said Rev. Sonny de Rivera of St. Cecilia’s Catholic Church in Mt. Prospect. “There is a sense of interest from [police] leadership to really reach out to our community,” de Rivera said.
The village announced its anti-profiling initiatives two months after a federal jury awarded $1.2 million to a former Mt. Prospect officer, Javier Martinez, who claimed supervisors had discriminated against him and encouraged officers to target Hispanic drivers.
U.S. District Judge Ruben Castillo described the evidence as “compelling” and urged the Justice Department to investigate. A Justice spokesman said Monday the inquiry is open but would not comment further.
Village officials disputed the profiling allegations, but in March 2000 Mt. Prospect agreed to pay $900,000 to settle Martinez’s suit and two others filed by officers with similar claims.
A fourth suit, filed by three Hispanic motorists who said they were stopped unjustly, is pending, with a hearing set for Thursday.
Under a new policy, police officers fill out a form on every traffic stop, noting the race of the driver, whether a ticket is written or not. “At this point, we haven’t seen [any data] that concerns us,” Janonis said.
He said the village won’t make the traffic stop data public because it’s being prepared for potential use if the Justice Department takes legal action against the village and in the remaining civil lawsuit.
Under the state Freedom of Information Act, government bodies can keep secret material prepared in anticipation of a legal proceeding.
If the data aren’t public, the data aren’t serving their full purpose, Ed Yohnka, spokesman for the ACLU, said.
Eddington said, “When I’m out from under [Justice Department scrutiny], our attitude about sharing it is going to be quite different.”
Low turnover in the Police Department, competition from other municipalities and a tight labor market have made it difficult to recruit Hispanic and African-American police officers, Janonis said.
The profiling controversy and lack of specific ticket goals has had a “chilling effect” on how officers write traffic tickets, he said.
The police collected $178,000 from tickets in 2000–the year the initiatives were put forth, Janonis said. That’s down 30 percent from ’99, 31 percent from ’98 and 15 percent from ’97.
