Twisting data

Sheriff Keith Nygren said it himself. He is quoted in a Daily Herald article, after reporting that there is no racial profiling done in his department: “We need to come up with a better way with being accurate with how we send this information to the state and have it be meaningful.”

And there you have it.

How do you send data to the State of Illinois (IDOT Traffic Safety Division) and have it mean what you want it to mean?

You don't. IDOT sets the system for collecting data. The job of the sheriff's department is to enter the data accurately, and then IDOT will make it meaningful! The "better way" already exists; just accurately and honestly answer the questions on the tickets!

You'd better believe that Sheriff Nygren doesn't want to find racial profiling in his department. And so they didn't. How in the world can you believe an "internal investigation" by a department that doesn't even have an Internal Affairs Department? This whole mess sounds to me like the fox is counting the chickens in the henhouse. (Hint: the fox is!)

Go back to July 13, 2008. A large event outside Richmond, Ill., in unincorporated McHenry County. The Sheriff's Department apparently knew alcohol was being served/sold without a license, yet deputies did nothing to halt liquor sales. Well, they didn't exactly do nothing. They waited for drivers who were leaving. They waited for drivers with brown skin to leave. I was told that deputies would watch a car with a Hispanic-appearing driver to pass, then run the license plate through the in-car computer.

If no driver's license was associated with the registered owner of the car, then they'd stop that car. Is that racial profiling? Of course, they didn't know that the owner of the car was driving it at the time, only that the registered owner didn't have a license.

One driver arrested (Hispanic surname) was seated, arrested, in the back of a patrol car, when the deputy made an illegal u-turn off the shoulder and struck the side of a car passing by. Guess who got the ticket?

No one. Not the woman who was driving by. Not the deputy who pulled illegally off the shoulder and struck her car. Was the crash independently investigated? No. Not by the State Police. Not by a local law enforcement agency. Rather, by the deputy's supervisor. And then the crash report was falsely prepared, showing the woman driver as the at-fault driver, resulting in a denial of her claim for $5,000+ damage to her car! And no Witness Statement was taken from an eye-witness, the arrested passenger in the patrol car, as it should have been in accordance with Department policy.