Federal Monitor Expands Consent Decree To Cover PD’s Stop-And-Frisk Shift To Traffic Stops

After the ACLU obtained a settlement from the city of Chicago over the PD’s unconstitutional “stop and frisk” program, the Chicago PD decided to take the show on the road. Literally.

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.

By 2022, CPD officers were making more than 600,000 traffic stops a year, a majority of which targeted Black and Latino drivers. The PD claimed these traffic stops weren’t the result of biased policing, insisting they were the organic result of patrolling “high crime” areas. But if there was more crime in the areas the PD chose to flood with officers, the officers were having an extremely difficult time finding any evidence of increased criminal activity.

 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.

Those numbers undercut the assertion officers are their busiest where most criminal activity is taking place. And this data, compiled from public records by (um) The Record, undercuts any claims officers may make about traffic stops being unbiased because they don’t know the race of the driver until the car is pulled over.

Our research, published in June 2024, used data on the racial composition of drivers on every street in Chicago. We then compared who is driving on roads with who is being ticketed by the city’s speed cameras and who is being stopped by the Chicago police.

Our findings show that when speed cameras are doing the ticketing, the proportion of tickets issued to Black and white drivers aligns closely with their respective share of roadway users. With human enforcement, in contrast, police officers stop Black drivers at a rate that far outstrips their presence on the road.

For instance, on roads where half of drivers are Black, Black drivers receive approximately 54% of automated camera citations. However, they make up about 70% of police stops.

On roadways where half of the drivers are white, white drivers account for around half of automated citations – and less than 20% of police stops.

It’s still the same old biased policing, but with a bit more plausible deniability built in. That this deniability has been undercut by the PD’s own numbers probably won’t change anything. The PD will continue to insist it’s more interested in stopping cars than pedestrians for purely organic reasons, rather than for the actual reasons, which involve dodging oversight and limiting public exposure of its biased policing tactics.

This shift from pedestrians to cars was deliberate. To avoid limitations placed on pedestrian stops, the Chicago PD engaged in malicious compliance — increasing the number of traffic stops since those weren’t subject to the same restrictions or the federal monitoring established by a consent decree.

On top of dodging compliance with a settlement and consent decree, officers also eluded the reporting mandates governing traffic stop, hiding more than 20,000 traffic stops in 2023 alone from its oversight by simply refusing to document these interactions.

Finally, after years of the PD ducking oversight and accountability by moving the goalposts, the government is stepping back in to, hopefully, force a little more accountability and constitutionality back into the system.

A federal court order requiring the Chicago Police Department to change the way it trains, supervises and disciplines officers should be expanded to include traffic stops, but the city’s new police oversight board should be given some power over the hot-button issue, according to a new recommendation released Friday by the team overseeing the reform push.

This proposal followed a shooting two months ago, during which Chicago PD officers fired 96 bullets in 41 seconds during a traffic stop, killing the driver, 26-year-old Dexter Reed. Officers claimed Reed fired first, something the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) has backed in its official report.

Unfortunately, this isn’t likely to change anything either. The proposed expansion is meeting opposition because, in its original form, there’s no option for community accountability groups to provide input and/or assist in ensuring compliance with the expanded order.

[T]he proposal to expand the consent decree for the fourth time ran into a brick wall of opposition from of progressive alderpeople and a coalition of police reform groups that sued the city over CPD’s use of traffic stops in June 2023, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.

A spokesperson for the Chicago Police Department declined to endorse the recommendation from the monitoring team, which was contained in a new report released Friday.

The previously mentioned COPA isn’t part of the equation at the moment. Not that it would matter. COPA has no legal power to enforce its misconduct rulings, which means recommended punishments for officers are routinely reduced if not rejected completely by the PD’s internal oversight. There are other outside accountability groups — ones far more independent than COPA — but they’re not being asked to assist in the monitoring most likely because they have no legal authority to do so.

For now, the CPD has at least established an alliance of sorts with another oversight group, one that appears to be still on the outside of any proposed expansion of the DOJ’s consent decree.

Anthony Driver, Jr., the president of the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, known as the CCPSA, said the police oversight board should be “an equal partner” with the monitoring team, judge and the office of Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul.

“We don’t want to chip away at the power of the CCPSA by expanding the consent decree,” Driver said.

While it would make sense to expand the decree to cover the stops officers are performing far more frequently than those targeted in the original order (pedestrian stops), the past several years has shown the Chicago PD is not only capable of eluding oversight by focusing on tactics not enumerated in the original order, but also completely willing to sandbag and stonewall any reform mandates handed down by the DOJ.

CPD has fully complied with just 6% of the court order known as the consent decree designed to require the police department to change the way it trains, supervises and disciplines officers.

That’s less than 1% compliance per year. The consent decree was issued in 2017, but the CPD seems determined to outlast any reforms foisted upon it by outside agencies. And it sure as hell isn’t interested in fixing the problems from the inside. A drastic change is needed — one that starts at the top and doesn’t stop until it’s rooted out every last bad apple. But no city in America has ever been willing to do this, no matter how out of control its law enforcement officers are. And a city with a long history of police abuse and government corruption is about the last place we should expect this sort of miracle to take place.