Traffic stops by Chicago police have more than doubled over the past nine years in what the American Civil Liberties Union, a civil rights group, is calling the “new stop-and-frisk,” The Conversation reports. Stop and frisk is defined as officers' stopping and searching people based on “reasonable suspicion” that they are involved in criminal activity. The practice has been documented to disproportionately target Black and Latino people across the United States. In Chicago, it has declined sharply since a 2015 reform agreement between the ACLU and the Chicago Police Department. Meanwhile, traffic stops have surged in Chicago, rising from less than 200,000 in 2016 to over 570,000 in 2023. Much like stop and frisk, police disproportionately stop Black drivers in Chicago, according to our latest study examining racial bias in traffic enforcement.
Research published in June used data on the racial composition of drivers on every street in Chicago. It compared who is driving on roads with who is being ticketed by the city’s speed cameras and who is being stopped by the Chicago police. Findings show that when speed cameras are doing the ticketing, the proportion of tickets issued to Black and white drivers aligns closely with their respective share of roadway users. With human enforcement, police officers stop Black drivers at a rate that far outstrips their presence on the road. For instance, on roads where half of drivers are Black, Black drivers receive approximately 54 percent of automated camera citations. However, they make up about 70 percent of police stops. On roadways where half of the drivers are white, white drivers account for around half of automated citations – and under 20 percent of police stops. The civil rights era of the 1960s was rife with law enforcement incidents that targeted Black drivers. As the scholar and historian Gretchen Sorin details in her 2020 book “Driving While Black,” the car simultaneously opened new possibilities of freedom as well as new hazards for Black people.
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