Fewer Chicago police traffic stops this year, but racial disparities remain
The number of traffic stops made by Chicago police officers is down more than 40% in the first half of this year, a WBEZ analysis finds, after a surge in recent years.
Chicago cops made about 130,000 fewer traffic stops from January through July 15 than during the same period last year, the analysis of Chicago Police Department data shows.
The decline largely has come since Mayor Brandon Johnson brought in police Supt. Larry Snelling. Traffic stops have decreased nearly every month since the beginning of Snelling's tenure late last September.
“There’s already been a reduction in traffic stops since I’ve taken over because the focus is different," Snelling said in December at a meeting of the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability. "My focus is violent crimes and traffic safety."
But tens of thousands of drivers — disproportionately Black and Latino — are still being pulled over by the police in Chicago, the analysis found.
The police department didn't respond to requests for comment.
It has faced criticism for making stops for minor traffic infractions that critics say disproportionately target minority groups and are a pretext for cops to look for evidence of criminal activity even though, based on police department data, these stops rarely lead to the recovery of any contraband.
“Any reduction in the total number of traffic stops in Chicago is good, but it’s not the end of the transformation that CPD needs to make,” says Alexandra Block, director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois' criminal legal system and policing project.
Block also questions whether the Chicago Police Department is reporting every traffic stop to the Illinois Department of Transportation, as state law requires.
“CPD officers significantly under-report the number of traffic stops that they make compared to the number of times they radio into [the Office of Emergency Management and Communications] to say that they are completing a traffic stop,” Block says. “In years past, those numbers have been as different as about 100,000 stops per year that CPD has not recorded in its own data.”
Racial disparities persist
The Chicago police has made about 186,000 stops this year through July 15. Though that's a sharp drop from recent years, it's twice the number of stops made in all of 2015,. That was the year before the number of traffic stops skyrocketed as a result of what critics have said was a switch from a strategy of mass pedestrian stops, or stop-and-frisk — in favor of instead making hundreds of thousands of traffic stops.
As the number of stops generally grew from 2015 to 2023, the share of drivers pulled over for non-moving violations — for infractions such as licensing and equipment issues — grew, and so did the share of drivers being stopped who are Black, according to state data.
Amy Thompson, staff counsel for the organization Impact for Equity’s Criminal Legal Systems, says that's evidence the police were pulling drivers over as a pretext to find evidence of crimes.
Thompson says minor traffic offenses that don’t lead to a ticket “are the types of offenses that aren’t presenting a significant traffic safety danger and can indicate that the motivation is something other than traffic safety.”
About 129,000 of the stops this year — about 70% of all stops — were for non-moving violations that didn’t result in a ticket, WBEZ found.
About 23% of stops were for moving offenses, like failing to heed stop signs or use turn signals.
And 7% of stops resulted in a ticket — which is a higher ticketing rate than in the first half of 2022 and 2023, when it was fewer than 4%.
For years, Black and Latino drivers have been far more likely to be stopped by Chicago cops. The numbers of Black, white and Latino adults are within a few percentage points of each other, but the gaps in who gets pulled over for traffic stops is much wider. In the first half of this year, three times as many Black drivers were stopped as white drivers. Two times as many Latino drivers were stopped as white drivers.
But Black drivers made up a smaller share of drivers who have been pulled over this year, about 45%, compared to the same period last year. If that holds for the remainder of the year, it would be the first time since 2015 that the share of Black drivers stopped would be under half of all drivers stopped.
Latino drivers made up a greater share of all stops this year — 34% — than during the same period last year. The share of Latino drivers stopped has never been that high in any year since 2004.
Where drivers get pulled over most
In the police department's 7th district, which covers Englewood and West Englewood, there were more than 15,000 traffic stops made this year through July 15 — the most of any district.
Next was the 25th district, which includes Hermosa and Belmont Cragin, with about 14,900 stops, followed by the 14th district, which covers Logan Square and parts of Avondale and West Town, with about 13,300 stops.
Several smaller areas known as police beats in districts with historically high volumes of traffic stops, such as the 10th district and 11th district on the West Side, have seen significant declines in the first half of the year compared to the same period in 2023.
Beat 1112 in Humboldt Park — where Dexter Reed was shot to death by police during a traffic stop in March — went from 5,700 stops in the first half of 2023 to 1,600 stops in the same period this year — a 72% decline, the largest decrease among all police beats.
The 11th district saw the steepest drop citywide, going from 31,000 stops in the first half of 2023 to 11,200 stops in the first half of this year — a drop of more than 60%.
But there have been more traffic stops in dozens of other beats, many in the 25th district and the 14th district. Beat 1413 in Logan Square saw the biggest increase in stops the first half of this year over last year.
Though the number of drivers pulled over in the 25th district and 14th district is up, the figures have declined each month since January, similar to what's been seen in other districts.
“The No. 1 priority in our community that people want police to be doing is responding to 911 calls,” says David Orlikoff, community engagement chair of the 14th District Council, an elected civilian police oversight body. “Conducting traffic stops is the least important priority that people have. However, the perception is that conducting traffic stops is what the police are currently spending most of their time and resources doing.”
Stops as a crime-fighting tool
But police records show traffic stops still are a key part of the police department’s crime-fighting strategy. That's what the department's 2024 District Strategic Plans show. These are drafted by officers and approved by the chief of patrol, outlining how each district will address its priorities. Many cite “traffic missions” as a response to crimes ranging from motor-vehicle thefts to shootings. Several of the plans include “traffic stops.”
In response to an increase in the number of armed robberies in the area, the 10th District Strategic Plan for 2024 says the response should include “missions geared to combat crime and also focused on conducting [investigatory stops], traffic stops that can lead to an arrest.”
As a public hearing last December, Snelling said traffic stops' purpose “should be to change the behavior of a driver who’s driving poorly or dangerously.”
But the police superintendent also has pointed to a need for using traffic stops to address crime.
“To completely remove traffic stops would be a non-starter in this city,” Snelling said at the hearing. “Robberies would increase, carjackings would increase, shootings would increase.”
Thompson disagrees.
“Traffic stops are not an effective crime-fighting strategy, and I think the data on that is pretty clear,” the official with the advocacy group Impact for Equity says.
Less than one in 100 stops led to any contraband recovered. In the first half of this year, 0.7% of traffic stops resulted in officers finding contraband. The figure for the same period last year was 0.5%.
“So far this year, compared to the same time-frame last year, traffic stops are down approximately 106,500 year to date,” police spokesperson Maggie Huynh told WBEZ in early July. "Felony arrests have increased by approximately 620 year to date."
But the department didn't respond to questions about the traffic-stop arrest data that it released in response to a public records request.
Impact for Equity found that 2% of all traffic stops in 2023 resulted in an arrest.
“CPD really needs to recognize that this pattern of excessive and discriminatory traffic stops is really just one example of the policing philosophy that the way to keep the city safer is through suppression," Thompson says. " It’s through force. It’s through over-policing. And that approach fails to address the true roots of crime. And it only results in harm and harassment of Black and brown Chicagoans."
‘A useless tactic’
Darrell Dacres, who is Black and is a member of the 20th District Council, says that he has lost track of how many times he’s been pulled over for a traffic stop. He says he fears for his life each time.
“Right now, we’re living in an outdated police system where they think that, if you pull over enough Black and brown people, you can effectively stop crime,” he says. “It’s a very useless tactic, and it’s demeaning.”
Dacres is one of 36 district councilors who recently signed on to support a proposal to end "pretextual traffic stops" drafted by Free2Move, a group of advocacy organizations that is pushing for a more racially equitable system of traffic safety.
The group got more than 2,400 signatures on its proposal, and the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability is now planning a public hearing Aug. 27 on traffic stops.
Snelling has been pushing to add traffic stops to a 2019 federal consent decree aimed at reforming the police department. But opponents say they worry the federal process would slow the pace of reform.
“I want to see policy change, and I want to see implementation into something that’s going to be, you know, retroactive and long, long term, not short term, because the numbers go down this cycle, next cycle, they could double,” Dacres says.
Contributing: Mian Li