Pedestrian stops by Chicago police officers plummeted in number beginning in 2016 after a new state law and an agreement between the ACLU and the Police Department required officers to more thoroughly document and justify the encounters to ease concerns about racial profiling and constitutional violations.
Some even believe the impact contributed to homicides hitting levels in 2016 that had been unseen in two decades.
But a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois says that at the same time pedestrian stops fell so sharply, Chicago police dramatically increased how often they pulled over motorists.
The number of traffic stops more than tripled, rising from 85,965 in 2015 to 187,133 in 2016, then jumping to 285,067 in 2017, the ACLU said.
The latest report also found that Chicago police stopped African-American motorists at a disproportionately higher rate than whites, Hispanics and Asians.
The findings have raised alarms for civil libertarians at a time when the Police Department is attempting to improve trust with minority communities as it nears a federal court agreement meant to ensure widespread reforms are carried out.
“The problem has been consistent, but now it’s, yet again, a point of data that shows how desperately we need holistic reform of the Police Department,” said Karen Sheley, director of the police practices project for the ACLU of Illinois.
Sheley could only speculate on the sudden increase in traffic stops at the same time that pedestrian stops dropped so precipitously.
“It could be a policy shift from stopping people as pedestrians to stopping people in cars, and that’s something that the city should be accountable for and tell the public,” she said.
Multiple Chicago police officers who talked to the Tribune on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly said they believe many officers now prefer to pull drivers over rather than stop pedestrians. The documentation they must fill out for traffic stops is much simpler than the lengthy, detailed reports required for pedestrian stops as a result of the department’s agreement with the ACLU, they said.
Police have the authority to pull over drivers who commit traffic violations, but even if a ticket isn’t issued, officers are still required to document the motorist’s race and other identifiers. These so-called blue cards, though, take far less time to fill out than the reports for pedestrian stops, the officers said.
Without directly addressing the jump in traffic stops, Chicago police officials criticized the 17-page report, “Racism in the Rear View Mirror,” saying the ACLU didn’t take into account crime statistics and calls for service in the largely African-American areas in which the highest number of traffic stops took place.
“CPD deploys the highest number of officers to high-crime districts, which results in greater enforcement activity in those areas,” said Anthony Guglielmi, the Police Department’s chief spokesman.
According to data provided by the ACLU, a majority of the 10 Chicago police beats with the most traffic stops over the three-year period were in heavily African-American neighborhoods on the South and West sides where much of the city’s violence is concentrated.
While making up about 31 percent of the city’s 2.7 million population, African-Americans accounted for 49 percent of the traffic stops in 2015, the study shows. That percentage rose to 60 to 61 percent as traffic stops soared the following two years.
By comparison, whites are 32 percent of the population but made up 23 percent of the traffic stops in 2015, falling to 15 to 16 percent the following two years, according to the study.
In 2017, a highly critical U.S. Department of Justice report on Chicago police practices noted how officers working in high-crime areas had been instructed to make a lot of car stops because of drive-by shootings.
“There was no discussion about, or apparent consideration of, whether such a tactic was an effective use of police resources to identify possible shooters, or of the negative impact it could have on police-community relations,” the report stated.
For police to be pulling over African-American motorists at such high rates as shown in the ACLU report brings a host of negative effects on the black community and its attitude toward law enforcement, said University of Kansas professor Charles Epp.
“They feel that they are subject to surveillance, that they’re not treated as equal citizens, that the police are not there to protect them but are there to hunt them down,” said Epp, who examines racial disparities in law enforcement practices. “It has all kinds of harmful consequences for trust in the police, for legitimacy (of) the police, for people’s willingness to cooperate with the police in investigations.”
The high number of traffic stops came at the same time that officers sharply dropped how often they stopped pedestrians. Those street stops plummeted to just over 107,000 for both 2016 and 2017, down from about 600,000 in 2015, official Police Department statistics show.
With the new law and ACLU agreement, officers went from documenting their stops on so-called contact cards — about the size of small notecards — to a 1½-page document that includes dozens of boxes to check and space to give a detailed justification for the stop. At the time of the change in early 2016, the Chicago Tribune reported that officers complained about how much longer the paperwork took to fill out, keeping them from their street duties. All the questions on the new forms also increased their anxiety about being second-guessed on whom they stopped and whether the stops were legally justified. As a result, the number of street stops plummeted.
Chicago ended 2016 with more than 4,300 people shot and in excess of 760 killed, the worst violence the city had seen in two decades. In interviews that year with the Tribune, some officers blamed the changes in the pedestrian stops in part for the rise in violence, saying they prevented cops from policing the streets more aggressively.
But crime experts have dismissed that explanation for the spike in violence, while the ACLU has contended that the drastic drop in pedestrian stops likely indicates that the closer review is succeeding in officers making fewer unconstitutional stops.
The ACLU’s Sheley also pointed to the spike in traffic stops from 2015 through 2017 as proof that officers were not lying down on the job as some police had suggested.
The ACLU report references traffic data kept by the Illinois Department of Transportation not only from Chicago but also police departments across Illinois.
The law originally called for a four-year statewide study of traffic stops to identify racial profiling but has since been extended into 2019 and now includes a survey of pedestrian street stops. But with the study set to expire July 1, the ACLU is calling for the state legislature and Gov.-elect J.B. Pritzker to make permanent the study and its required data collection.
For the traffic study, police departments across the state generally report, among other things, motorists’ races, genders, the reason for the stops, the types of traffic violations, the results of the stops and whether police were given consent for vehicles to be searched.
The ACLU’s report also noted that police across Illinois asked African-Americans for consent to search their vehicles about twice as often as white drivers. But black and Hispanic motorists were found with contraband at a lower rate than white drivers, the report said.
The report also touched on searches by police dogs, showing that many police departments in Illinois apparently don’t rely on the tactic. But when they do, contraband is found only about 50 to 60 percent of the time, far less than the 90 percent accuracy rate the state requires for police dogs to be certified, the report said.
