The Chicago Police Department continues to give the city, its residents, and its oversight the finger. Officers just want to do what they want to do, without having to respect rules, regulations, state laws, or civil rights.
Much like the NYPD, the Chicago PD got itself in Constitutional hot water by indiscriminately stopping pedestrians. Its stop-and-frisk program never quite gained the notoriety that New York City’s did, but it still led to reforms and court orders requiring officers to document these stops to ensure they complied with new mandates and, you know, the US Constitution.
Faced with this new way of doing things, the Chicago PD decided to go in another direction. It stopped stopping pedestrians and began stopping more drivers. Since the directives targeted pedestrian stops, officers figured they could still engage in the same number of rights violations by shifting the venue. Traffic stops became the new stop-and-frisk, with pedestrian patdowns being replaced by intrusive vehicle searches.
In the same year that CPD agreed to limit its use of stop-and-frisk, CPD made 187,000 traffic stops citywide.
Three years later, in 2019, those numbers had soared to 600,000 stops.
And after a dip in traffic stops citywide during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, the most recent figures from 2022 show CPD made more than a 500,000 stops.
The underlying problem with this shift in stops is that traffic stops have always required documentation. While pedestrian stops were long considered paperwork-optional, traffic stops tend to generate, at the very least, some narrative describing the encounter along with any citations or warnings issued.
But it was clear this increase in traffic stops was doing nothing but shifting the bias and harassment to drivers. Nothing changed about how officers handled stops. The 600,000 traffic stops documented in 2022 showed an alarming focus on minorities.
[The] PD’s own data […] 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.
Not only is that an ugly stat, but the uglier one is how useless these stops are. Contraband was only discovered in 0.3% of stops. Discovery of weapons was even lower: 0.05%. So almost zero public safety gain, but plenty of noticeable losses in the “civil rights respected” column.
With that data exposed and the Chicago PD facing new lawsuits over its unofficial stop-and-frisk replacement program, officers have decided the best way to tackle their bias problem is to… stop reporting traffic stops. Documents and data compiled by Bolt Magazine and Injustice Watch show the PD is lying to everyone about how often it stops people and, by extension, how many of those stops target minorities.
Chicago Police officers have secretly pulled over as many as 20,000 more drivers per month in the past year than they have reported publicly, in violation of a 2003 law requiring them to document every traffic stop, a Bolts and Injustice Watch investigation has found.
The rate of stops conducted off-the-books has increased under Superintendent Larry Snelling, even as he has positioned himself as an agent of reform who is moving the Chicago Police Department away from its longstanding strategy of using traffic stops to find illegal guns and tamp down on crime. In June, Snelling reported traffic stops were down by about 87,000 over the same time last year. But behind that reduction is a pattern of thousands of unreported police encounters, which accounted for one-third of all traffic stops over the first seven months of Snelling’s tenure.
The missing stops were discovered by analysis of radio dispatch data. Presumably, cops will now start using private channels to call for backup or alert other officers of ongoing traffic stops. CPD officers clearly don’t want to change anything about their habits and the so-called reformer heading the department has been completely ineffective since his promotion to superintendent. Under Superintendent Snelling, unreported traffic stops have increased steadily, with 41% of stops going unreported in April 2024 alone.
By cherry-picking which stops to report, the Chicago PD has been able to congratulate itself for closing the racial disparity gap in traffic stops. It also overstates the effectiveness of these stops, because officers are far more likely to report a vehicle search that results in the discovery of contraband. But any assertions the CPD might make about racial disparity or effective policing is obviously false because it relies solely on what cops are willing to report, rather than truly reflective of what they’re actually doing.
So, what can be done about this? Well, the obvious answer is actual accountability, starting with the police department itself. Officers should be disciplined to the point of termination if they refuse to follow the requirements of a law passed more than two decades ago.
But since that won’t be happening, it’s left to the city’s Inspector General to make these facts public and push city leaders to start removing PD officials for refusing to punish these officers.
And since that won’t be happening, it’s up to outside entities like the civilian oversight board. Unfortunately, that entity only goes into motion when residents file complaints against officers. Most people never do, even when they’ve had their rights violated. The reason people don’t complain more often is all the above: the systemic unwillingness to hold law enforcement officers accountable — something that’s not just a problem in Chicago.
But every exposure of widespread wrongdoing is another area to which pressure can be applied. And it’s going to make it more difficult for the CPD to escape lawsuits over traffic stops, as this makes it crystal clear the problem goes all the way to the top and proceeds with the implicit approval of city leaders.
It’s not like I enjoy being cynical, but the same pattern of facts can be applied to the NYPD. Nothing much has changed there despite dozens of lawsuits, multiple court orders, and federal oversight of its stop-and-frisk program. If cops don’t want to change, they simply won’t. It’s a failure of leadership on multiple levels. And, unfortunately, it’s as American as apple pie. In a country that venerates police officers simply for showing up for work, it’s almost impossible to truly reform the stagnant swamp that is US policing.
