Elgin officials will focus on police reform during next six weeks

Elgin officials will continue a deep dive into the stats that show disparities in how the city's police treat people of different races - and they'll do it with the help of a returning outside consultant supported by the slimmest of majorities on the city council.

The Center for Policing Equity provided a free study to the city last year showing Black people are subjected to the use of police force 11.5 times more often than white people.

Black and Latino drivers were up to four times as likely to be searched though police were not four times as likely to find anything illegal during those searches.

Those findings raised eyebrows on the city council, but putting together that study fomented an increasingly fractured relationship between the nonprofit and the police department.

Further complicating the situation was another, which city police officials paid $10,000 for, that appeared to cast some doubt on the center's findings.

But it neither studied the same data nor put the same weight on factors the center deemed to be most important.

To resolve that issue, the city council voted 5-4 this week to bring back the Center for Police Equity for a more thorough presentation, including the second part of the study that was supposed to provide more insight into what might be happening, or happened in the past, that caused the racial disparities in the data.

"We've made the acknowledgment there is disparities in policing," said council member Dustin Good in voting to bring the center back. "The police department's been very active in pursuing programs to address those issues. The department is trending in a direction I think we see as favorable. We need to continue pushing forward. We need to continue having discussions with the community about want kind of society they want to live in."

Council members voting against the plan, including Rose Martinez, are not convinced the center's work can provide meaningful insight into why racial disparities are showing up in the policing data.

"I'm not saying the Elgin Police Department is perfect, but we don't have those extreme issues as what's happening nationally. This is important, but I think we have to go on."

Along with the vote to bring the center back, the council will next tackle possibly the two most controversial police reform suggestions that arose from a residents task force on policing: Forming a civilian review board to give input on police misconduct accusations and banning traffic stops for minor infractions.

The city council will discuss these two topics when it meets as a committee of the whole on March 22.