In a big city awash in illegal firearms, the last thing law enforcement authorities should be doing is taking a step that potentially makes it easier for weapons to keep flowing onto our streets.
Unfortunately, that’s the end result we’re afraid of, should Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx follow through on her proposal to stop prosecuting drug and gun cases that stem from certain minor traffic stops by police.
When Chicago police seize thousands of illegal firearms every year — 12,452 weapons were recovered in 2023 — that strikes us as the wrong approach.
Not every gun seizure is the result of a traffic stop, of course. And Foxx’s end goal, to curb “pretextual” traffic stops that too often target Black and Brown drivers, is one we support.
But illegal guns — our biggest concern, given the city’s gun violence problem — and drugs are a serious and deadly problem, especially in communities of color. If a driver has either in his or her car, the right thing to do is to hold them accountable.
Last year, Foxx herself conceded, about 1,500 gun cases stemmed from traffic stops. That’s not a huge number, but who’s to say if the weapons seized in those cases would still, somehow, have been taken off the streets if Foxx’s proposal had been standard policy then?
Makes it hard to believe that the policy represents a “public safety enhancement effort,” as Foxx put it.
Foxx says felony cases brought to her office that involve obvious public safety traffic violations, like running a red light, would not be affected by the proposed policy, as the Sun-Times’ Matthew Hendrickson reported Tuesday. But under the plan, prosecutors would no longer file drug or gun charges in cases that are solely the product of a “non-public-safety traffic stop,” defined as one of four possible violations: an expired registration; a missing front license plate; a license plate not lit properly; or a single nonworking headlight, tail light or signal light.
“I don’t see how you can have a prosecutor who’s elected to enforce the law say that for traffic stops, they’re just going to give someone a pass for serious drug and gun violations,” as Richard Kling, a professor at Chicago Kent College of Law, told us. “Bottom line, if you find a gun with a switch (a mechanism that converts handguns into high-capacity automatic weapons) or whatever, how do you give a guy a pass?”
Prosecutors already have broad discretion to decide whether or not a case warrants felony charges. If guns or drugs are found in a traffic stop, prosecutors should file charges and let judges make the call — that’s part of their job — on whether the stop was justified.
Strategies to end racial bias in traffic stops
None of this is meant to downplay the problem of racial discrimination in traffic stops. Statistics have proven that pretextual stops, made solely to look for evidence of other crimes, disproportionately target drivers of color, especially Black drivers. In Chicago, Black drivers are six times more likely to be stopped by police than white drivers, while Latino drivers are twice as likely as whites to be stopped. Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois sued the Chicago Police Department over racial bias in traffic stops, and the lawsuit cites departmental emails showing top CPD officials demanding more stops as a crime-fighting strategy. In 2020, under the administration of then-Supt. David Brown, some emails told commanders that traffic stop tallies in some of the city’s high-crime police districts were “not sufficient” and urged commanders to increase the numbers.
Clearly, then, there’s work to be done. It’s encouraging that the city’s current top cop, Supt. Larry Snelling, has agreed to have CPD traffic stops monitored in the city’s federal consent decree on policing reform.
Kling suggests that CPD merely end the practice of making traffic stops for minor violations altogether. Instead, those drivers could be sent warning letters detailing the violation and informing them that they would be stopped if the violation occurred a second time.
In Philadelphia, the Driving Equality Act led to a 54% decline in Black men being pulled over for minor traffic violations. That idea is worth exploring, though some Philadelphians have complained that reckless driving has increased since the act went into effect.
There’s no easy solution to the problem of driving while Black. But real change must come from police, not from prosecutors who choose to ignore crime.
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