‘Walking while black’ gives way to a different crime — ‘driving while black’

For years, Chicago police stopped young African American men on the sidewalk and frisked them, pretty much for nothing. Their crime was walking while black.

Officers dramatically reduced the use of “stop and frisk” policing in the face of a public outcry, but a new study says they may have just shifted to stopping black people in cars instead.

Traffic stops jumped a whopping 70% from 2017 to 2018, and minority drivers — especially African Americans — disproportionately were stopped.

Now their crime is driving while black.

A part of the story

It would be easy to lean on these new statistics to condemn this policing practice entirely, making the argument that since African Americans comprise only about a third of the population of Chicago only a third of police stops should involve African Americans.

But the police make a credible argument, having to do with the most effective use of the department’s resources, that explains a part of this startling jump in traffic stops involving black drivers.

The department assigns higher numbers of officers to those West and South side neighborhoods where violent crime rates are highest. Residents want and have demanded that greater police presence. But the more officers there are working these predominantly African American neighborhoods, the more police stops will be made.

The Chicago Police also point out that last year’s big jump in traffic stops coincided with a 28% increase in the number of weapons seized — primarily illegal guns — and double-digit percentage decreases in shootings and homicides. Many of the 10,000 illegal guns seized by the police so far this year, a spokesman said, were confiscated during traffic stops.

Other part of the story

For all of that, the sheer number of traffic stops, as well as a long history of police violations of the civil liberties of black Chicagoans, lead us to feel sure there’s still a huge degree of racial bias at work.

Black drivers are asked to consent to searches more often, according to the new study by the American Civil Liberties Union, but less contraband — illegal guns, drugs and the like — is found than with white drivers. If the cops are stopping black drivers more often out of some instinct about who’s up to no good, their radar is out of whack.

Of the roughly 490,000 traffic stops made by the Chicago Police last year, 86% (421,000) involved motorists of color. Sixty-one percent of all the traffic stops involved African Americans, which was twice their percentage of the city’s population.

In 2017 and 2016, 60% of all traffic stops also involved black motorists.

We’re also skeptical because we’ve seen this before.

For 16 years, the ACLU has made a similar annual count of how often Illinois state troopers stop motorists and has found a similar pattern — minority drivers are stopped much more often though they are less likely to have contraband. This would seem to reinforce the argument that racial bias is behind too many police stops in general. Our state highways are not racially segregated.

Lightfoot should know

If anybody should know how real the problem is — how African Americans, especially young black men, have been treated by the police like second-class citizens — it would be Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

In 2016, Lightfoot headed a task force that concluded that exactly this sort of bias explained why so many black Chicagoans distrusted the police. It was in large part because of the Lightfoot task force report, and a subsequent federal study of CPD, that the police abandoned the routine practice of stop and frisk.

“The community’s lack of trust in CPD is justified,” Lightfoot’s 2016 report stated. “There is substantial evidence that people of color — particularly African Americans — have had disproportionately negative experiences with the police over an extended period of time.”

The Chicago Police Department, under the direction of acting Supt. Charlie Beck, is taking a non-defensive approach to the ACLU’s new report.

A spokesman told reporters that CPD “shares the concerns” of the ACLU and continues to seek new ways — in hiring practices, officer training and supervision — to treat all residents of Chicago equally.

Justice demands nothing less, nor does the pursuit of more effective policing.

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