(The Center Square) – American Civil Liberties Union Policy Director Ed Yohnka views news of Chicago police underreporting the number of traffic stops in 2024 as a dereliction of duty.
Senior CPD officials now admit that the 295,846 stops reported by officers as required by law last year only tell half the story, as Illinois Department of Transportation data shows an additional 210,622 stops were never documented, making it impossible to know if the constitutional rights of any of those motorists were violated. This comes at a time when lawmakers are working on crafting legislation aimed at limiting officers’ ability to even make certain kinds of stops.
“The reason that Illinois began collecting and reporting data publicly about traffic stops was in order to create a mechanism for transparency so that the public could see the way in which law enforcement was engaged in traffic stops,” Yohnka told The Center Square. “By failing to report thousands of stops, CPD has really denied residents the opportunity to engage in that assessment. We can infer that these were just thousands of stops that did nothing more but sort of harass and delay people from going about their day in the city of Chicago.”
The 295,846 documented encounters alone continue a trend that has seen the number of traffic stops conducted by CPD steadily rise over the last decade, including in 2023 when officers made 202 stops for every 1,000 residents, equating to the most across the nation and more than four times the rate in Los Angeles.
That same year, ACLU of Illinois sued the city alleging the stops represent the latest chapter in the city’s “long and sordid history” of racist discrimination. Since 2015, Black Chicagoans have been six times more likely to be stopped by police while driving than white Chicagoans, while Latino drivers are twice as likely.
In the minds of many, Yohnka said such discrepancies have almost come to be expected.
“Among our clients and among other people that we talked to in the community, the fact that they were underreporting stops was not really a mystery or was not really unknown,” he said. “In many communities, it suggests that they don’t matter, that they don’t count, that police feel like they can stop them and harass them without any kind of consequence.”
In 2023, nearly three out of every four traffic stops made by CPD were prompted by improper license registration or a broken taillight or license plate light, compared to just 27.4% stemming from a moving violation. In addition, only 2.2% of those stops ended in an arrest and just a shade over of 4% of them led to a citation being issued.
