94% of Minors Stopped By Oak Park Police Are Black
Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Freedom to Thrive Oak Park obtained a list of field interrogations from the Oak Park Police Department. According to their records, Oak Park police reported a total of 967 field interrogations between January 2015 and June 2020. These records include the age and race for each person stopped by the department’s police officers. Freedom to Thrive Oak Park was interested in knowing what percentage of these stops involved minors. Of all 967 stops, 102 stops involved people younger than 18. Of the minor stops by Oak Park police;
96 were Black and 91 of these were Black males,
2 were Latinx,
2 stops did not include information for race,
1 was Indian,
1 was white.
To state these findings another way, 94% of minor stops by Oak Park police were Black. In the same five and a half years that Oak Park Police had 96 stops of Black young people, only 1 white young man was stopped. These reports reflect the stories told by ROYAL leaders and other Black young people in our community. These numbers do not reflect Oak Park’s demographics. Black residents comprise only 18% of Oak Park’s population, whereas white residents represent 69% of the village’s population.
What is a field stop/interrogation?
Oak Park Village Manager, Cara Pavlicek, provided the following definition of a field stop:
“A field stop can be described best as a fact finding process. It occurs when a police officer has stopped a person, in a public place, to ask general questions when the individual is not in custody. Questions directed to the individual are about a crime – such as questions to determine if the individual has witnessed a crime – or alternatively under Illinois Statute (725 ILCS 5/107-14) [link provided by FTT team], which states:
A peace officer, after having identified himself as a peace officer, may stop any person in a public place for a reasonable period of time when the officer reasonably infers from the circumstances that the person is committing, is about to commit or has committed an offense as defined in Section 102-15 of this Code, and may demand the name and address of the person and an explanation of his actions. Such detention and temporary questioning will be conducted in the vicinity of where the person was stopped.
Upon completion of any stop under subsection (a) involving a frisk or search, and unless impractical, impossible, or under exigent circumstances, the officer shall provide the person with a stop receipt which provides the reason for the stop and contains the officer's name and badge number.”
Additional reading and data sources
A more comprehensive view on racial disparities in field interrogations by Oak Park police.
Freedom to Thrive Oak Park’s process to obtain public records from Oak Park Police Department.
Spreadsheet with all field interrogation/contact reports from January 2015 - June 2020.
Oak Park demographics are from the 2018 American Community Survey 5 year estimates.
