CHICAGO — Black and Latino drivers continue to be “disproportionately” targeted by police in traffic stops, especially on the West Side, according to a report published Thursday.
The new report by the advocacy group Impact for Equity and the Free2Move Coalition analyzed police data of more than 537,000 traffic stops made by Chicago police in 2023. In about 80 percent of these stops, the driver was Black or Latino, the report showed.
About 22 percent of all traffic stops made last year were concentrated on the city’s West Side in the Ogden (10th) and Harrison (11th) police districts, which span Garfield Park, Humboldt Park, Little Village and North Lawndale, the report found.
Stopping hundreds of thousands of drivers — mostly Black and Latino — has “little to no public or traffic safety benefits,” the coalition said. Less than 1 percent of stops resulted in police recovering a gun and an even smaller fraction of cases helped them find drugs, the report showed.
The findings in the 12-page report come after years of Block Club’s reporting on the issue. Traffic stops are often used as a pretext to “fish for evidence of a crime,” even if police have no evidence to suggest a crime was committed, according to the report.
In more than 376,000 traffic stops made last year, police stopped drivers over claims of minor traffic violations, like an expired registration or a broken headlight, the report showed.
Despite Supt. Larry Snelling’s pledge to “narrow” the department’s approach to traffic stops to focus on dangerous or criminal activity, police continued to disproportionately stop hundreds of thousands of Black and Latino drivers for minor violations during his first three months as the city’s top cop, the report found.
Data showed only about two in every 100 stops resulted in an arrest last year. Of those arrested, the overwhelming majority were Black or Latino — though the numbers could be higher. A 2022 analysis by Block Club Chicago and Injustice Watch found that police did not report thousands of stops that ended in gun possession arrests.
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Traffic stops continued to be concentrated on the West Side, similar to 2022 trends. During Snelling’s first three months in office, the number of stops in the Ogden (10th) and Harrison (11th) Police Districts slightly increased, according to the report.
Chicago police conducted the second-highest number of traffic stops over the last 20 years in 2023, according to the report. Since 2015, Chicago police have drastically increased the number of traffic stops, several reports show. This trend continued in 2023 though at a slower pace, with police making 5 percent more traffic stops than last year, when traffic stops increased by 35 percent.
Time spent on traffic stops “takes away from police’s time to respond to pressing safety issues like 911 calls,” the report said, citing a Block Club report on ignored 911 calls from neighbors on the city’s South and West sides. It also contributes to “a crisis of trust” between overpoliced communities and law enforcement, according to the report.
From October to December last year, following Snelling’s appointment, police made over 118,000 traffic stops — more than all the traffic stops made in 2015, according to the report. Around 81 percent of the stops targeted Black and Latino drivers, while 13 percent of stopped drivers were white.
The report also raised concerns about the way police report the number of guns seized in traffic stops after finding discrepancies in 2022 data. These findings “underscore the serious and urgent criticisms of CPD’s continued reliance on this harmful practice,” the report stated.
Chicago Police did not respond to a request for comment about data discrepancies in guns seized during traffic stops.
In a statement Friday, the department said officers “only conduct traffic stops when they have probable cause or reasonable articulable suspicion that a crime, including but not limited to traffic violations, has been committed, is being committed or is about to be committed.”
“These stops are not conducted based on race or any other protected class. Additionally, as part of our ongoing reform and consent decree compliance efforts, CPD mandates implicit bias training for all Chicago Police officers,” the statement said.
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