Chicago police traffic stops plummeted last year, but the drop varied wildly across the city, and sharp racial disparities persisted, a WBEZ analysis of Illinois Department of Transportation data found.
Compared to the previous year, 2024 vehicle stops by the Chicago Police Department fell 45% citywide, with declines in all 22 police districts, according to the analysis. Yet while seven districts reduced their traffic stops by more than 60%, four others cut them by less than 20%.
For the first time in nearly a decade, Black drivers accounted for less than half of stops citywide in 2024, amid shock waves and promises of reform after the fatal shooting of Dexter Reed during a traffic stop. But IDOT mileage rate ratios for last year show the police department was still four times more likely to pull over Black and Latino drivers than white ones.
“The great disparity in reduction raises questions as to what actually is happening behind the scenes at CPD to result in that decrease and how effective it will be long term,” said Amy Thompson, an attorney with the Chicago nonprofit Impact for Equity.
Thompson’s group is part of a coalition that says cops are still pulling over too many Black and Latino people for minor issues, such as expired plates or broken taillights, as a pretext to fish for evidence of serious crimes. The number of Black and Latino stops for nonmoving violations accounted for nearly 57% of all police department traffic stops in 2024.
In April, the police department proposed a traffic stop policy that endorses pretextual stops. A police oversight panel, the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, detailed “significant and consequential” objections to the proposal and said stops for vehicle equipment and license violations “do more harm than good and should therefore be prohibited, with some exceptions.”
A public comment period on the policy ended Monday.
A department statement to WBEZ says Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling is committed to developing and implementing a policy that is “rooted in constitutional policing” and that “aims to build trust in our communities by providing clear guidelines on traffic stops.”
The department said it’s negotiating with Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s office and a federal court-appointed monitoring team to add traffic stop provisions to a police reform agreement known as the consent decree.
“As this process continues, we are continuously reviewing our use of traffic stops and providing 4th Amendment training to all officers,” the department statement said, referring to constitutional protection from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government.
An investigation by the Chicago Sun-Times and the Investigative Project on Race and Equity found that, although the police department reduced its traffic stops last year, a far greater number of stops ended in violence.
Traffic stops became one of the police department’s main strategies for seizing illegal guns and drugs after cops curtailed pedestrian stops in late 2015. The shift away from stop-and-frisk policing followed the court-ordered release of video showing a Chicago officer fatally shooting teenager Laquan McDonald. The shooting and an alleged cover-up for the officer sparked a public outcry and a federal investigation of the department that led to the consent decree.
Another factor in the police department’s shift from pedestrian to traffic stops was an agreement with the ACLU of Illinois that took effect at the beginning of 2016 and lengthened the documentation required of officers for a pedestrian stop.
But the traffic stops led to more controversy. A 2023 federal class-action lawsuit brought by the ACLU called the new strategy part of the police department’s “long and sordid history of employing mass-stop policing tactics that discriminate on the basis of race and national origin.”
In a court filing last fall, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration denied that allegation. The suit remains pending.
The Reed killing took place March 21, 2024. Police officials initially said the traffic stop stemmed from a seat belt violation. Johnson’s administration argued later that Reed was pulled over for illegally tinted windows.
Chip Mitchell reports for WBEZ Chicago on policing, public safety and public health. Follow him at Bluesky and X. Contact him at cmitchell@wbez.org.