Chicago police made street stops at a far higher rate last summer than New York City cops did at the height of their controversial stop-and-frisk policy, a newly released analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois found.
The analysis of the department’s own data shows that Chicago police stopped African-Americans at a disproportionately higher rate than Hispanics and whites, especially in predominantly white neighborhoods.
In all, more than a quarter of a million stops took place from last May through August, according to the ACLU, which called the numbers “shocking” and “a troubling sign” of an illegal policy on the department’s part. None of those people stopped was arrested.
“For young men of color, it becomes just basically everyday street harassment that they learn to live with,” said Harvey Grossman, the ACLU’s longtime director. “Young black and brown men are so used to getting stopped in the city, they really don’t complain about it with the intensity that you would think. It’s become pretty commonplace on the South and West sides of our city.”
By comparison, New York City police made about 192,500 stops without arrests during the same four-month period in 2011, the year it recorded its highest number of stop-and-frisks, a policy ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge at one point. On a per-capita basis, the rate of stops in Chicago averaged 93.6 per 1,000 people, more than four times New York’s highest rate of 22.9 per 1,000 people, the report said.
Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy’s spokesman, Marty Maloney, said the department flatly prohibits racial profiling and other race-based policing. Over the past three years, he said, the department has improved training to ensure officers abide by those restrictions.
Maloney also stressed the department has led a return to community policing to foster stronger relationships between officers and the city’s communities, calling it “the foundation of our policing philosophy.”
But the ACLU’s report appears to call that commitment into question. In fact, Grossman called on the department to rely more on community policing than what he called “incredibly intrusive stops.”
“The abuse of stop-and-frisk is a violation of individual rights, but it also poisons police and community relations,” the report said.
African-Americans were most often singled out for stops — typically of individuals walking or standing on street corners, according to the report. Over the same four months last year — the hottest part of the year when violence spikes in Chicago’s most impoverished, gang-ridden neighborhoods — police stopped 182,048 African-Americans, 72 percent of all street stops. Yet African-Americans made up about 32 percent of the city’s population.
Latinos, who make up 29 percent of the population, were stopped 42,865 times, 17 percent of the stops, while whites, making up about 32 percent of the population, were stopped 23,471 times, 9 percent of the stops, the report said.
What’s more, the ACLU found that Chicago police stopped African-Americans at even higher rates in police districts where the majority of residents were white. For instance, in the Jefferson Park police district on the Northwest Side, police stopped African-Americans 15 percent of the time even though they made up only 1 percent of the population.
Maloney said officers don’t make these stops at random. And data from the last two years show that the racial breakdown of those who were stopped closely matches the race of suspects reported by residents and witnesses, justifying the high percentage of stops of African-Americans, he said.
Under the Terry v. Ohio decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1968, police can make stops when they have a reasonable suspicion that a person has committed or will commit a crime. The officer must be able to articulate specific facts to justify the intrusion, according to the ACLU. Citizens can then be patted down if officers have a reasonable suspicion they are dangerous or armed with a weapon.
If Chicago police officers stop a person on the street but don’t make an arrest, they are required to fill out “contact cards” with the age, address, race, time and location, any distinguishable marks or tattoos, and the reason for the stop.
But an ACLU analysis of 250 stops from 2012 and 2013 found that in about half, officers either gave an unlawful reason for the stop or failed to provide enough information to justify the stop. Furthermore, the department does not keep track of how often officers then frisk the individual, the ACLU said. It also doesn’t record stops that lead to arrests or tickets, according to the report.
The ACLU report recommended that both officers and supervisors be given additional training on the legal justification necessary to make a stop. The ACLU also called on the department to record and justify frisks as well as stops that lead to arrests, all necessary steps to determine if officers engage in biased policing, it said. The department is increasingly out of step with other major cities on making such data publicly available online, according to the report.
Veteran police supervisors interviewed by the Tribune for this story said McCarthy continues to put pressure through the ranks for officers to make these street stops as a crime prevention measure.
In November 2013, the Tribune highlighted how the department’s increasing use of contact cards — the forms filled out by officers when they make street stops — had raised concerns of civil libertarians. The numbers had soared from 379,000 in 2011, the year Mayor Rahm Emanuel appointed McCarthy superintendent, to more than 600,000 through the first 10 months of 2013.
The use of contact cards dropped last year. But still, said sources who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized by the department to speak, district commanders feel the pressure to have their officers make street stops — and fill the cards out.
“You’ve got a large number of people being stopped simply to meet a requirement at CompStat,” said one veteran supervisor, referring to McCarthy’s data-driven approach to measure crime in each district.
“They are valuable, but is the cost detrimental to the relations we are suffering (with) the community?” asked another veteran supervisor.
Sources also explained that bosses use the contact cards to help determine which officers are working hard. The ones who make more street stops can sometimes be regarded as more dedicated. But that can become problematic for officers who question the validity of the stops.
“There are a lot of police officers I know who refuse to write (contact cards) anymore for fear of being sued for unlawful stops,” said one rank-and-file cop who works on the South Side.
For decades the department has used contact cards to gather intelligence, keep track of gang members and solve crimes.
Homicide detectives who spoke to the Tribune said they often rely on contact cards for leads for their investigations. One detective said he’s spent days at a time searching through contact cards to compile information on victims and witnesses and to conduct research on potential suspects and their associates.
Detectives investigating the January 2013 fatal shooting of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton at a park not far from President Barack Obama’s Chicago home combed through months of contact cards and learned that a white Nissan matching the description of the getaway car used in her slaying had been pulled over several times previously near the park. The cards showed Micheail Ward and Kenneth Williams were inside the Nissan during one of those stops. Both were charged in the slaying.
Several veteran police officers and supervisors took issue with the ACLU’s criticism of police for stopping African-Americans at a disproportionately higher rate than Hispanics and whites, especially in predominantly white neighborhoods. They blamed much of that on police making street stops based on crime patterns in certain neighborhoods. If a suspect in a particular crime in a white-majority neighborhood was black, then officers would likely be stopping African-Americans, they said.
In addition, they said, African-Americans are stopped more because most of the department’s 12,000 officers are deployed to high-crime areas on the South and West sides, where much of the black population is concentrated.
“Deployment of officers is dictated by where the murders and violent crimes take place,” one source said. “It doesn’t seem to me to be indicative of racial profiling or anything of the sort as much as it’s a product of where officers are deployed.”
Nonetheless, the U.S. Justice Department has overseen police reforms in numerous cities across America in part because of the disproportionately high number of street stops of African-Americans.
The Newark Police Department, formerly led by McCarthy, remains under a federal monitor after the Justice Department found a host of civil rights problems, including that 80 percent of Newark’s street stops from January 2009 through June 2012 were of African-Americans even though the city’s population was 54 percent black. McCarthy served as the city’s police director from 2006 to mid-2011, when he became Chicago’s superintendent.
Twitter @JeremyGorner
