Chicago PD Sued Over Mass Traffic Stops Of Minorities That Do Almost Nothing To Stop Crime

The Chicago Police Department is extremely problematic, even by the extremely lax standards of US law enforcement. It has been home to a domestic black-site operation. It has been hit with reform mandates from federal courts. It has shown no interest in rooting out the worst of its officers. And it has engaged in a panoply of rights violations pretty much since its inception.

Roughly a decade ago, it agreed to a settlement with the ACLU and the multiple city residents it represented in a lawsuit against the city over illegal “stop and frisk” interactions. That settlement showed immediate results. But not every result was welcome.

The number of traffic stops in Chicago surged after the settlement with ACLU Illinois over stop-and-frisk pedestrian stops, while pedestrian stops fell from a high of 710,000 in 2014 to just 107,000 in 2016.

So, the PD stopped doing the illegal thing at the center of that lawsuit (stop and frisk), but it replaced it with something not specifically targeted in the litigation. The problem was illegal stops. The Chicago PD chose to believe the problem was only illegal stops of people, rather than vehicles.

Vehicles are driven by people. Just because they’re no longer on foot doesn’t make this sort of thing more legal. That’s the point being made by the ACLU’s latest lawsuit [PDF] against the Chicago PD. The same biased policing has moved from harassing pedestrians to harassing drivers. Those most frequently harassed are the usual suspects: non-whites.

Black drivers in Chicago are four to seven times more likely to be pulled over by police than whites, while Latino drivers are stopped twice as often, according to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois claiming a racially biased pattern in how Chicago police enforce traffic laws.

Traffic stops on the city’s predominantly Black and Latino South and West sides, the lawsuit says, are typically for minor violations— or for no reason at all— and are a tool for officers to search and detain minority residents on the city’s West and South sides.

As the lawsuit points out, the Chicago PD isn’t actually interested in doing better, more constitutional police work. Instead, it treats every settlement as an occasion to move the goalposts and treat the next string of successive rights violations as right and good and fair until the next lawsuit is filed.

“Defendants’ mass traffic stop program is simply the newest chapter in their long and sordid history of employing mass-stop policing tactics that discriminate on the basis of race and national origin, touted as a campaign to supposedly fight crime in Chicago,” the lawsuit states, citing previous police department practices that have led to ACLU-backed lawsuits, from waves of “disorderly conduct” arrests in the 1980s, “gang loitering” offenses in the 1990s, and “stop-and-frisk” in the early 2000s.

Even if you’re the sort of person who believes the ends justify the means, you can’t condone this form of selective enforcement. Even if you’re the sort of person who firmly believes minorities (especially black men) commit more crime, you can’t use the facts to buttress your biases. From the ACLU’s lawsuit:

In 2022, CPD officers made some 600,000 traffic stops, the vast majority of which were of Black and Latino drivers—similar to the number and demographics of pedestrian stops by CPD at the height of its discriminatory stop-and-frisk practice in 2014.

[…]

In a survey published on May 30, 2023, nearly half of young Black men (ages 18-25) reported having experienced traffic stops in Chicago within the past year. Among Black survey respondents of all ages, 27% reported being stopped by CPD officers while driving or riding in a car within the prior year. In comparison, 11% of Latino respondents and only 7% of white respondents reported being stopped while driving or riding in a car within the prior year.

The survey responses are consistent with CPD’s own data, which shows that the number of traffic stops of Black drivers in Chicago each year is equivalent to nearly one-half of the Black driving population, and the number of traffic stops of Latino drivers is equivalent to about one-fifth of the Latino driving population. Stops of white drivers are equivalent to only about one-tenth of the white driving population, per CPD’s data.

So, what is this? Is this just “going where the crime is?” Is this predictive policing doing its magical AI work to ensure officers are making the most of their limited time and resources? Or is it what everyone (other than Thin Blue Liners) knows it is: a pattern and practice of unconstitutional harassment of minorities by Chicago police officers?

All available evidence suggests the latter:

Analysis of public data for the period 2016-2022 shows that increases in traffic stops—both citywide and in the Police Districts with the highest reported traffic stop rates—were not associated with any decreases in the most serious crimes known as index crimes. Analysis of public data further shows that CPD officers recover contraband in only a minuscule portion (0.3% between 2016 and 2022) of the traffic stops they conduct, and they recover weapons even less frequently: only 0.05% of traffic stops between 2016 and 2022 resulted in the discovery of a weapon.

If you want to insist (as the CPD clearly does) that the ends justify the means, you need to have some ends in hand. The CPD’s own data shows endless harassment of minorities does nothing to reduce crime. This suggests the harassment of minorities is its own end: the unstated goal of officers given a long leash and almost zero accountability. If the ends are to destroy trust in the PD and respect for the law, mission accomplished.

The lawsuit’s narrative is filled with personal accounts of repeated pretextual stops by Chicago police officers. In some cases, litigants had been stopped multiple times in a single week. It also contains information gleaned from public records requests which show certain supervisors instituted stop quotas (although always under a different name) to encourage officers to stop as many people as possible. Nothing in the lawsuit shows this had any effect on crime rates or even acted as a perverse form of deterrent.

It’s unlikely the Chicago PD will be able to successfully defend itself against this suit. But that hardly matters to the PD. After all, it doesn’t spend its own money defending itself against these claims. And officers don’t spend their own money when lawsuits are settled or, in rare cases, they’re denied immunity.

And history shows the PD will abide by any court-ordered remedies… but only because it has the creativity to find other ways to violate residents’ rights. While this lawsuit is obviously necessary, the PD has proven it’s incredibly resilient. And until the city is willing to force the PD to engage in true accountability, the CPD will continue to destroy whatever goodwill it has left.