Last month, the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability voted on its policy stance on traffic stops. A majority of commissioners voted to support placing limits on the types of low-level traffic stops Chicago police officers can make and to restrict the power officers have to ask drivers for consent to search their cars.
Officers make on average over 800 stops a day. Although traffic stops declined in 2024 following outcries from the community, the numbers remain far too high.
Most stops are still for minor violations, and very few target dangerous driving. Black and Latino drivers are four to five times more likely to be asked to search their cars. Chicago cannot afford to continue to fund racially discriminatory tactics that don’t improve public safety.
While the commission’s vote won’t directly lead to the creation of policy, it informs ongoing negotiations between the state attorney general’s office and the city of Chicago over whether traffic stop reforms should be incorporated into the Chicago Police Department’s consent decree.
If adopted, the commission’s platform would reduce unnecessary stops that monopolize resources. But the reforms must go further to more directly confront the police department’s deep-rooted reliance on excessive and unjustified stops. This would allow redirecting public safety resources toward what Chicagoans consistently call for: emergency response, crime resolution and dangerous driving response.
The commission’s vote is a step in the right direction, but the work is far from finished.
Chicago is at an inflection point. Nationally, we see civil rights eroding, federal oversight weakened and traffic stops weaponized by immigration authorities. The same communities disproportionately targeted by discriminatory traffic enforcement are also those most vulnerable to this broader onslaught. In this climate, the attorney general and the city have both a moral and strategic obligation to lead.
Other cities are taking bold steps to curb overpolicing while improving traffic safety. Chicago must join them. By embracing transformative traffic stop reforms, we reduce racial disparities, promote safety and model local resistance to federal backsliding.
Now is the time for the attorney general and the city to double down on the fight to secure rights locally and deliver the bold, community-led change our city needs.
Brian Young Jr., organizing associate, Community Renewal Society
Ciera Bates-Chamberlain, executive director, Live Free Illinois
Message to hate-filled pair
Dear Mr. Stephen Miller and Ms. Laura Loomer,
It has been brought to my attention you were both born into the Jewish faith. As a fellow Jew, I feel the need to write this letter.
This letter is not intended as a political statement. I’m not here to espouse any particular ideology, and as a fellow Jew, I believe everyone has the right to support their own beliefs or ideas they are truly comfortable embracing.
But when these beliefs have widespread consequences, most of which are deleterious in their effect, I feel the need to speak out.
While I am reasonably certain neither of you want to be grouped with Adolf Hilter and other bigots, including our country’s Henry Ford and Britain’s Oswald Mobley, your invidious language and actions lead Americans to believe that somehow you are both very comfortable, if not proud, to be grouped with these heinous people.
How can two people so comfortably hate and persecute people, when Jews have been the most reviled and persecuted peoples in history? What sect or branch of Judaism endorses, teaches or embraces abject hatred and bigotry of any kind?
It is incomprehensible to be leaders and fomenters of abject hatred and bigotry in this sadly divided polarity that we are now surrounded by in our everyday lives.
This behavior is unacceptable and frankly goes against all tenets and principles that Jews dedicate their lives to. As hatred and bigotry are taught and passed down generationally, you are both not fully to blame for the ostensible hatred that seems to dominate your every waking moment and guides your every thought and action.
Please keep in mind just like the Jews, people of other religions and cultures will always survive, but you have created a temporary and evanescent obstacle to the people who have been hated in this country for no other reason than looking and dressing differently and praying in a different way than most Americans pray.
Your kind of bigotry and hatred will always be pervasive with people who do not understand that not all human beings in this world are filled or imbued with the same ignorant hatred you both embrace and promulgate, even as this hatred is disguised as some form of neopatriotism.
After your 15 minutes of infamy have evaporated, in a fleeting moment, look in the mirror in a quasi-introspective episode, try your best to understand the egregious consequences your espousement of this deep-seated hatred enables, and if you cannot understand, then wipe that mirror clean and try again.
Richard Levinson, Los Angeles
Relief for Illinoisans hit by heavy rains
Illinois families are facing an increasing crisis. Each time heavy rain occurs, too many households across our state are left with flooded basements, destroyed property and financial hardship. Families are spending thousands of dollars on repeated repairs; even more heartbreaking, many have lost heirlooms, photos and keepsakes that can never be replaced.
To make matters worse, insurance companies have abandoned our communities — denying claims or refusing coverage — leaving families to bear the burden alone.
This crisis is widespread. Illinois’ outdated sewer and stormwater systems, built for a different time, cannot handle the intense and frequent storms caused by climate change. Experts warn our combined sewer systems are overwhelmed, leaving families vulnerable whenever it rains.
That is why I am calling on Gov. JB Pritzker to declare a state of emergency for flooding across Illinois. This declaration will enable faster response, resource allocation and access to federal support that families urgently need.
We need significant capital investment to:
- Upgrade old pipes, drains and tunnels.
- Expand green infrastructure that captures and redirects stormwater.
- Prioritize protecting the most flood-prone and severely impacted communities.
Illinois families cannot keep suffering in silence. This is a statewide emergency that requires immediate, coordinated action from federal, state and local leaders.
If you or your family have been affected by flooding, please call the Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster assistance helpline at 800‑621‑3362. Every call records the damage and helps strengthen Illinois’ case in Washington, D.C., for federal relief and infrastructure funding.
Together, we need to urgently demand action. Our families, communities and history cannot wait any longer.
State Rep. La Shawn K. Ford, D-Chicago
Searching for the boy who saved me
Nearly 60 years have passed since that January afternoon in 1966, yet I still find myself searching again for Roy White or someone who knows him or remembers the teenager who didn’t flinch or pause to ask whether it was safe before running straight toward a child who was on fire.
Roy was maybe 14 or 15, a boy from across the street in Stone Park. I was 6 years old, walking my dog Lassie near the frozen creek, when I saw a neighbor burning trash in a barrel. I went over, picked up a stick and tossed it in. A spark leaped out. My nylon coat caught fire.
This was before fire safety laws required flame-resistant clothing for children. The synthetic fabric ignited fast, and the fire spread to my sleeve, then to the cotton underneath, then to my skin. I panicked, ran and screamed.
Roy ran toward me. He tackled me into the snow and smothered the flames with his bare hands. Then he carried me home, holding me gently so he wouldn’t touch the raw, exposed skin. I remember my mother’s scream and the smell of melted nylon filling the air. There was no ambulance — only a rushed car ride to the hospital.
I spent weeks in the intensive care unit, drifting in and out of consciousness, undergoing skin grafts and fighting infection. Roy came to visit. A local reporter snapped a photo of me handing him a savings bond. I smiled up at him through the pain, maybe because he had saved me or maybe because I already knew how to hide pain behind a smile.
In 1986, during a layover at O’Hare Airport, I flipped through a phone book until I found him. We met, had lunch and I said “thank you.” It was brief. That was the last time I saw him.
Recently, as I started writing my memoir, I decided to search for him again. I called Proviso West High School where he would have graduated in the mid-1960s. I searched for records. Nothing.
If you are Roy or know him, please reach out. He didn’t just save my life. He gave me one. I still have one more “thank you” left in me.
Ed Cohen, San Clemente, California
Bracing for big tech, data centers to drive up electricity bill
Plans for huge new computing centers — artificial intelligence, quantum experimentation, data centers — in the Chicago area are about to increase the price of electricity for everyone in northeastern Illinois, as there will be much greater demand on the same generating capability in the auctions for electric power. Effectively, all consumers of electricity in the region will be subsidizing these new businesses.
Some locations in Germany have created new data centers in conjunction with new wind power generators, so that these data centers greatly reduce the stress on local power systems and the pollution produced by their power demands.
The Illinois Legislature should quickly investigate and establish rules for new businesses that plan to consume large amounts of power, to require they generate much of the power they’ll require and do it in a way that does not create more pollution.
Rick Simkin, Ravenswood Manor
NATO membership for Ukraine
World leaders, including our president, are of the opinion there is no possible way Ukraine can become a member of NATO. Vladimir Putin has made it clear that Ukraine joining NATO would cross a red line for him.
I, for one, don’t see the reason for denying Ukraine entrance into NATO other than Putin is against it. For me, the fact that Putin is against it is the perfect reason to admit Ukraine. With the full support of NATO behind Ukraine, Putin would surely need to abandon his war, and he likely knows it. It would also set the tone for the rest of the region and curtail his future takeover of other countries in the region.
John Farrell, DeKalb
Trump veers country further from democracy
Well, that settles it. The world’s foremost authority on free and fair elections, Vladimir Putin, suggested to Donald Trump that mail-in voting is problematic, so Trump, of course, will take his sage advice and said he will sign an executive order to do just that. What’s next? Trump taking Putin’s lead and imprisoning and ultimately killing his political opponents as Putin did with Alexei Navalny?
Given the insurrection we all witnessed on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump’s subsequent pardoning of the insurrectionists and the instructions given to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and other red state governors to gerrymander their states’ districts to add more Republican members of Congress, I fear we may have seen the end of free and fair national elections in what was the world’s greatest democracy. God save and wake up, America.
George Recchia, Oak Park