SPOTLITE Illinois
Data Dashboards
SPOTLITE Illinois
The SPOTLITE Illinois page highlights enhanced data features and more expansive incident records than are currently available for the nationwide dataset. SPOTLITE includes any incident where police use firearms—including those with non-fatal outcomes—as well as pursuits or any other uses of force that result in a civilian death.
SPOTLITE is a project of the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois. SPOTLITE is nonpartisan and nonadvocacy. It is designed to supply high-quality data that can drive productive conversations about policing in the United States.
Use of Lethal Force Incident Details
This dashboard highlights a few of the additional incident details for SPOTLITE events that are now available for incidents in the state of Illinois that occurred between 2014 and 2024. These additional details include the specific location of the incident, the type of officer force used in each incident, the names of involved agencies, whether civilians were killed or injured, whether officers were killed or injured, the type the interaction (e.g. crime in progress, request for service, traffic stop, pedestrian stop), the reason for the interaction (e.g. mental health situation, domestic, drug, violent crime, non-violent crime), if any civilian weapon was reported in news accounts to have been recovered at the scene, and if news accounts report that the officer perceived that the civilian was armed. A total of 93 enhanced incident features are available in the downloadable version of the SPOTLITE Illinois dataset, which can be immediately accessed by going to the data download page.
The SPOTLITE team wants to bring this level of incident detail to the entire country. Our pace of bringing these planned enhancements to the public is set by available funding to support the SPOTLITE program. If you or your organization is interested in learning more about how to financially support the SPOTLITE effort, please email the Cline Center at spotlite@illinois.edu or click here to donate.
Race Breakdown for Involved Civilians
SPOTLITE assesses a person’s ascribed racial and ethnic characteristics based on the person’s image and name alone. SPOTLITE provides ascribed racial and ethnic characteristics generated from the perceptions of third-party observers using only name and image information because this is likely to be the kind of information available to law enforcement personnel encountering a civilian on the street. Currently, these data are available for the state of Illinois from 2014 to 2023 (see also the Race and Sex dashboard for data from 2022 and 2023), but the SPOTLITE team is already working on a new incident details and data types for Illinois and will update this page as soon as those data are available.
- SPOTLITE reports only those incident details that can be confirmed with credible information from news reports or administrative records that have been produced by law enforcement agencies.
- SPOTLITE relies primarily on news reporting to describe details of police use of lethal force incidents, and analysts attempt to extract incident details from multiple news reports of the same incident whenever possible.
- Because news reports of SPOTLITE incidents may fail to mention or accurately describe particular incident details, SPOTLITE records may omit or be contradicted by incident details that might be mentioned in administrative records for the same incident.
- When administrative records of police uses of lethal force are available for analysis, SPOTLITE will prioritize incident details extracted from administrative records over those extracted from news reports.
- Numbers will change as we develop new information.
- SPOTLITE relies on a limited number of standard categories for classifying racial and ethnic characteristics that reflect Office of Management and Budget guidelines used by the US Census Bureau and other federal agencies.
- To improve comparability, our approach follows a common practice among law enforcement agencies of combining ethnicity with race into a single set of categories. SPOTLITE uses a five-category racial/ethnic typology (Native American, White, Black, Asian or Asian Pacific Islander, and Hispanic or Latino) and a three-category typology (White, Black, and Other).
- The SPOTLITE registry documents ascribed racial and ethnic characteristics rather than self-identified racial or ethnic characteristics. By “ascribed” we mean externally-perceived characteristics that can be assessed by third-party observers. Racial disparities can be challenging to measure in lethal force incidents involving police, and this difficulty is a major reason why such data are not already widely available. Race is also a multidimensional construct that encompasses a person’s own subjective racial or ethnic identities as well as how other persons perceive that person’s identities. Because civilians often die in lethal force events, collecting data on subjective identities with high levels of validity becomes impossible. In contrast, ascribed racial and ethnic characteristics can be assessed more consistently based on image and name information alone.
- SPOTLITE likely underrepresents the number of Hispanics and Latinos in the data, largely due to miscategorizing people as White or Black who may identify as Hispanic or Latino.
- SPOTLITE likely underrepresents the number of Native Americans and Alaska Natives in the data, largely due to underreporting in news coverage and the potential miscategorization of Native Americans or Alaska Natives into other categories.
- SPOTLITE only records one racial/ethnic category per individual.
- Many individuals cannot be reliably classified using ascribed characteristics alone.
- Numbers will change as we develop new information.
For more details on how the data were constructed, see the SPOTLITE Data section of this website. For a detailed listing of variables included in the SPOTLITE Illinois Incident Details dataset, please refer to this document.