Malicious Compliance: End Of Stop And Frisk Just Led To Chicago Cops Hassling More Drivers

Legal Issues

from the severing-the-public-trust dept

The gracious leeway of the Terry stop — as set down by the Supreme Court’s 1968 decision — gave a lot a law enforcement agencies a permission slip for suspicionless stops of pedestrians. Random people got braced, patted down, aggressively questioned, and otherwise hassled.

Very few arrests followed. Very little contraband was discovered. But it was still a win for law enforcement. Anyone subjected to one of these stops knew where they stood: at the constant mercy of the sadists and bullies that are often attracted to law enforcement’s unique blend of power and lack of accountability.

The Supreme Court decision said there must be reasonable suspicion of criminal activity for a stop and any subsequent search, no matter how cursory. But these stops still happen thousands of times a day around the nation, very often without the required reasonable suspicion.

Most of those searches were never documented. What little documentation was created demonstrated clearly that most stops were prompted by officers’ biases, rather than any justifiable law enforcement purpose. A vast majority of stops involved minorities or people living in low-income neighborhoods.

The constant abuses enabled by the Terry decision has led to court orders and DOJ consent decrees limiting suspicionless stops. In two of the nation’s largest cities — Chicago and New York — it has led to the termination of stop-and-frisk programs as they had been historically deployed. Cops are still free to perform pedestrian stops, but they’re now required to document these interactions, hand over copies of documentation to those stopped, and provide demographic details about those they’ve stopped.

Rather than play by the rules and turn stop-and-frisk programs into something other than another form of oppression, cops have simply decided to move on to the next set of victims — people not explicitly protected by new pedestrian stop guidelines. The hassle remains. The only thing that’s changed is the venue.

Most motorists know the feeling: blue lights in the rear-view mirror as they are pulled over by police. Some drivers end up handcuffed while their vehicle is searched, especially if they are Black and driving in Chicago.

That is what the data shows, according to an analysis of traffic stops by the ABC 7 I-Team.

And there is more behind the stats: the Chicago Police Department may have made a “search switch,” replacing controversial pedestrian pat-downs with new, and sometimes aggressive, vehicle searches.

The I-team’s investigation confirms what was already suspected to be happening. Last summer, the ACLU sued the Chicago PD over its traffic stops of minorities, pointing out the replacement of one illegal search with another. According to the data obtained by the ACLU, pedestrian stops had fallen from a high of 710,000 in 2014 to just a little over 100,000 following its 2016 settlement with the ACLU after being sued for stop-and-frisk-related rights violations.

Instead of addressing the underlying problems (biased policing, bigoted cops), the Chicago PD opted to move the goalposts so it could continue targeting minorities without violating its agreement with the ACLU.

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.

[…]

[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 that this slightly altered form of biased policing was any more effective than stop-and-frisk. The PD’s data showed zero appreciable decline in crime rates. On top of that, contraband was only recovered in 0.3% of traffic stops. As for the city’s stated claim it was focusing on gun crime, the CPD did even worse even while escalating the number of traffic stops to replace the stops it “lost” when it agreed to be less racist during pedestrian stops.

[CPD officers] recover weapons even less frequently: only 0.05% of traffic stops between 2016 and 2022 resulted in the discovery of a weapon.

But this hot swap is the CPD’s preferred method for dealing with the underlying rot it consistently refuses to address. The CPD read the settlement with the ACLU and decided the only thing that mattered was the word “pedestrian.” It apparently decided it was still free to engage in suspicionless stops predominately targeting minorities as long as those minorities happened to be driving.

Vehicle stops by Chicago police have surged since 2016, according to an analysis of traffic stop data that the city is required to report to state officials.

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.

An internal memo obtained by the I-Team contains one possible justification for this tactical alteration, albeit one that doesn’t stand up to even the most cursory amount of scrutiny.

 “The higher the traffic stops creates the less likely for shootings using firearms.”

Maybe that’s just wishful thinking, delivered in place of any verifiable information. As the ACLU pointed out, less than one-half of one percent of traffic stops result in the recovery of a weapon. City crime stats certainly don’t show any appreciable drop in gun violence despite this massive increase in traffic stops. Two million stops in less than a half-decade have done nearly nothing to change things for Chicagoans other than where they’re likely to be located when their rights are violated.

Of course, the Chicago PD continues to insist it hasn’t just exchanged one form of harassment for another. It claims its stops are backed by reasonable suspicion or probable cause, despite 996 out of every 1,000 stops ending without anything illegal being discovered on drivers or in their cars. While it may be true the CPD is now home to some of the best traffic cops ever to wear a badge, the program has been justified for its supposed effect on violent crime, not for its deterrent effect on minor moving violations.

The CPD knows it has just relocated its racism. The problem for those paying CPD salaries is that it will never admit it. And when the next lawsuit forces the PD to change the way it does business, chances are it will just find a new way to keep doing the same old stuff.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, chicago, stop and frisk, terry stop, traffic stops