Chicago Police Made Nearly 200,000 Secret Traffic Stops Last Year

This article was produced as a collaboration between Bolts and Injustice Watch, a Chicago-based nonprofit journalism organization examining issues of equity and justice in the court system.

Chicago Police officers have secretly pulled over as many as 20,000 more drivers per month in the past year than they have reported publicly, in violation of a 2003 law requiring them to document every traffic stop, a Bolts and Injustice Watch investigation has found.

The rate of stops conducted off-the-books has increased under Superintendent Larry Snelling, even as he has positioned himself as an agent of reform who is moving the Chicago Police Department away from its longstanding strategy of using traffic stops to find illegal guns and tamp down on crime. In June, Snelling reported traffic stops were down by about 87,000 over the same time last year. But behind that reduction is a pattern of thousands of unreported police encounters, which accounted for one-third of all traffic stops over the first seven months of Snelling’s tenure.

Records obtained by Bolts and Injustice Watch show police department officials know the traffic stop data they report to state regulators are an undercount. Internally, the department tracks stops using police radio data that doesn’t rely on officers filling out the state-mandated forms.

The findings come at a time when the police department’s targeting of Black neighborhoods with thousands of traffic stops has come under increased scrutiny, following the March killing of Dexter Reed, who was shot 13 times by five plainclothes officers just seconds after being pulled over for a seatbelt violation. The officers said Reed fired at them first.

While many police departments across the country have moved away from the use of traffic stops as a crime-fighting strategy, Chicago remains a stark outlier, with more stops per capita than most major cities, according to a recent analysis by the New York Times.

Pulling over drivers for minor traffic infractions like a broken tail light, or turning without a signal has been a central part of Chicago’s policing tactics for nearly a decade. Officers have used targeted enforcement of minor traffic issues in Black and Latinx neighborhoods as a way to find and remove illegal guns from the streets. The goal, former top police officials have said, is to deter drivers from carrying guns and drugs. Critics say the practice is, at best, an ineffective waste of city resources, and, at worst, an illegal violation of people’s rights that puts drivers and officers in harm’s way.

Snelling has pledged to change course, and earlier this year launched a process to bring traffic enforcement under the oversight of the federal consent decree CPD has been under since 2019. Community groups and advocates pushed back on this effort, arguing the slow-moving consent decree process would delay real traffic stop reform. The sweeping set of court-ordered reforms was designed to address patterns of discriminatory misconduct, excessive force, and rights abuses found to be prevalent in the department, but so far the department has fully met just seven percent of its obligations under the decree. 

The significant number of undocumented traffic stops threatens to undermine any reform efforts and obscures the true impact of the police encounters from oversight groups, preventing them from fully understanding which drivers are stopped, and where in the city they are concentrated.

As Snelling moves to bring traffic stops under federal oversight, the lack of transparency also calls into question whether the department will make a good faith effort to curb the problematic police conduct, or if leaders will instead just sweep those patterns out of view from the public.

“It is quite concerning, especially if CPD is intentionally not recording traffic stops so they can claim they’re fixing the problem, when all they’re doing is hiding it behind an absence of data,” said Alexandra Block, director of the Criminal Legal System & Policing Project at the ACLU of Illinois. 

Snelling declined to be interviewed for this report. A spokesperson for Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson declined to comment.

When asked about the unreported stops, the police department’s public relations staff stood by the publicly-reported numbers.

“The Chicago Police Department is committed to implementing substantive and lasting reforms rooted in constitutional policing as we work to build trust in our communities. Superintendent Snelling is committed to ensuring traffic stops are being used effectively,” a Snelling spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.

200,000 traffic stops missing from reports to state last year

Traffic stops have grown increasingly central to the reform goals of civil rights and police accountability groups in Chicago since the department began to reel in the use of pedestrian stops nearly a decade ago. Police moved away from the controversial tactic known as stop-and-frisk after a wave of scrutiny launched by the police killing of teenager Laquan McDonald in 2014, as well as the botched investigation and coverup by police, prosecutors, and the mayor. The following year, the ACLU of Illinois released a report finding officers regularly targeted Black Chicagoans and violated their Fourth Amendment rights using stop-and-frisk; the city eventually agreed to a legal settlement to begin to reduce the practice.

But as footstops plunged, traffic enforcement in Black neighborhoods soared. Many dubbed this pattern the new stop-and-frisk; police were still initiating millions of encounters with civilians to fish for guns and evidence of other crimes, but by stopping cars rather than pedestrians.

Watchdogs were able to sound the alarm on the massive increase in traffic stops in Black neighborhoods thanks to the Illinois Traffic Stop Study, a 2003 law that requires law enforcement agencies to report the details of every traffic stop to the Illinois Department of Transportation, including a car’s make and model, the driver’s race, and the justification for the stop. With this granular level of data, the state’s racial profiling oversight board is supposed to identify troubling disparities and advise police departments to make changes.

The study has repeatedly shown clear disparities in how often officers pulled over Black drivers. In 2020, Chicago police stopped Black drivers at seven times the rate of white drivers and searched Black drivers or their cars more than three times as often. The ACLU of Illinois sued the city in 2023 on behalf of five drivers who alleged they were racially profiled and had their rights violated in dozens of traffic stops, many of which were not reported.

But the board has never had an accurate picture of the full scope of traffic stops, because the numbers Chicago police reported to the state didn’t match their own internal records.

Our analysis of the radio dispatch data found nearly 200,000 traffic stops last year that were not properly documented or reported to the state.

Traffic stops have, in fact, been falling since early 2023, but not by as much as the state data appears to show. According to the publicly reported data, Chicago police made about 74,000 fewer stops from January through April, a 35 percent drop from the same period last year. But the police dispatch data shows the true reduction in stops was less than 59,000.

“It presents issues for effective oversight and accountability. If you don't know what's happening on the ground, it is hard to make accurate judgments about it. But the data that does exist does paint a pretty clear picture,” said Amy Thompson, an attorney for Impact for Equity who also sits on the state racial profiling oversight board.

She said the board is developing a survey to uncover why some police departments are not in compliance with the law, but it is only an advisory panel that doesn’t have the authority to make sure police are accurately reporting stops.

Data reported to the state in the first half of this year show the gap between stops of Black and white drivers narrowing to three times as many, according to an analysis by WBEZ Chicago.

But with so many stops happening off-the-books, those reports are a misleading portrayal of the purported improvements. Since the radio communications data doesn’t track details like the race of the driver and whether officers did a search, watchdogs groups can’t calculate the extent of the disparities in the off-the-books stops.

"It raises the concern that potentially the stops that are missing are ones where there are harms that are not being surfaced, or where there are particularly egregious incidents that are happening,” Thompson said.

CPD did not answer questions about why there are so many traffic stops logged in the radio system with no paper trail. But two former Chicago Police commanders said in interviews that a small amount of the discrepancy could be due to dispatchers mistakenly logging other kinds of officer activity like a footstop as a traffic stop, or by backlogs of paper traffic stop documents that are delayed from being entered into the record-keeping system or lost altogether.

Jacquez Beasley, one of the drivers suing the city over the traffic stops, suspects his experience of being searched without consent during a traffic stop is far more common for Black drivers than police report to the public.

When he and his brother were pulled over for plate violation in 2021 by a plainclothes officer in an unmarked SUV, the situation quickly spiraled out of control, Beasley said in an interview. After asking Beasley and his brother for identification, the officer called for backup, he said. Within minutes, a large group of undercover cops swarmed the car, ordered them to get out of their car, and detained them.

"The way they flooded the scene, the way they pulled up like that, it escalated so quick. They went from asking my name to putting my brother in cuffs in just minutes,” Beasley said. 

When they asked to search Beasley’s car, he felt he didn’t really have much of a choice. "There was no cause to even search the car. But I knew there wasn't any saying no. I just wanted to get it over with,” he said.

The search turned up nothing, and Beasley was never ticketed for the traffic infraction, he said. The officers still should have made a detailed account of the encounter, under the state law, but there is no record in the traffic stop data that the officers stopped and searched Beasley and his brother, according to the lawsuit. Beasley said he believes officers didn’t bother to report the traffic stop because they didn’t find any drugs or weapons to justify the unnecessary search.

“They didn't find anything. If they found something, they would’ve put the report in. But when they screw up, they want to make themselves look good,” Beasley said.

A previous investigation by Block Club Chicago and Injustice Watch found Chicago Police use traffic stops in Black neighborhoods to target illegal gun possession, though officers had to make over 150 stops for each gun found. And even when officers did make a gun arrest, they often failed to report that the arrest began with a traffic stop.

Missing Chicago police data hinders oversight efforts

In the aftermath of the murder of Laquan McDonald in 2014 and the scathing Department of Justice investigation that followed, a constellation of police oversight agencies were created in Chicago to address the department’s history of unconstitutional and discriminatory policing.

All of those bodies have been stymied by the department’s inconsistent record-keeping and lack of transparency.

The independent monitors assigned to oversee the city’s reform of stop-and-frisk under the settlement with the ACLU of Illinois noted in a series of reports the “unknown quantity” of missing stop-and-frisk documents made it difficult to assess whether officers were complying with the new standards. The monitoring team made recommendations to improve transparency, but unreported stops persisted.

An inquiry last year by Chicago Inspector General Deborah Witzburg into how long it takes for Chicago Police to respond to 911 calls for help was similarly limited by missing data in up to half of all 911 calls. This prevented any analysis of disparities in 911 response times across the city and the factors that contribute to delayed responses, according to the report. 

A separate OIG investigation into use-of-force incidents found Black Chicagoans are far more likely to be stopped, searched, and have an encounter with police escalate into a physical altercation. But the Inspector General’s findings were again limited by unreliable data marked by undocumented encounters.

In the course of investigating patterns in use-of-force incidents, Witzburg’s team examined data on the encounters where such complaints often emerge, including traffic stops. Police provided investigators with data only from traffic stops where officers filled out the required documents—but not those tracked through radio communication records.

"There's a reason that CPD members are required to collect that data on every traffic stop. It is so that oversight entities and the department itself and community stakeholders can get a complete view of the department's traffic stop activity. That only works if they are, in fact, collecting all the data,” Witzburg told Bolts and Injustice Watch.

Although this investigation confirms CPD leadership internally tracks undocumented traffic stops using radio communications data, the Inspector General’s report notes that the police department “was not able to provide OIG with any empirical estimate of rates of unreported or improperly reported stops or uses of force.”

Of the various oversight bodies meant to check CPD’s authority, only the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) can investigate misconduct allegations and punish individual officers. It, too, has dealt with incomplete data in completing its investigations.

The most common complaints the office receives involve claims an officer stopped or searched someone in violation of their rights. During the course of those investigations, the agency regularly disciplines officers for failing to report the stop that resulted in the complaint, COPA Chief Administrator Andrea Kersten said in an interview. In those situations, COPA must use other means, such as GPS and bodycam footage, to gather details about the misconduct incident.

"We're not necessarily limited in our ability to hold officers accountable and find information and evidence about those traffic stops. But we are limited by who complains about them,” Kersten said. “If there is no documentation about these stops, or we don't receive a citizen complaint, then we are not going to have any knowledge that it happened.”

Since 2022, COPA has expanded its capacity to follow patterns across misconduct incidents that point to an underlying issue in police procedures that the agency can advise to fix, Kersten said. The agency's Policy Research and Analysis Division is currently laying the groundwork for a study of the trends around the undocumented stops that COPA's investigators regularly flag, Kersten said. 

"The fatal shooting of Dexter Reed, and the nature of that stop, it shines an unfortunate light on the fact that we as a city need to better understand why this is a police tool that is being used, and what harms it may be causing,” Kersten said. "We are looking at trends across districts. We are looking at trends across different types of officers, to identify if there are unique patterns.”

Community advocates push for new traffic stop policies

Even before the police killing of Dexter Reed, a large coalition of community groups and advocates have called for police to adopt a formal policy to conduct fewer traffic stops. 

In April, Snelling asked U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer, who oversees the federal consent decree, to bring traffic stops under the court’s supervision. 

Many advocates would prefer that traffic stops come under the purview of the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, an oversight body created in 2021 which has the power to set police policy and call for the removal of a superintendent. The commission has asked Pallmeyer to avoid overtaking the community oversight’s role in monitoring traffic stops, since the panel has no authority to set policy on issues under federal supervision.

Advocacy groups have presented the commission with a policy agenda that has three main components: banning officers from using traffic enforcement to fish for unrelated crime, limiting traffic stops for non-safety violations, and restricting officers from asking drivers for consent to search them without suspicion of criminal activity. The commission will have a public hearing on Aug. 27 to gather input on how communities want the commission to intervene, and what a policy would look like. 

A number of U.S. cities have begun to phase out some traffic stops as a primary crime deterrent strategy, saying the risk for racially-biased harm outweighs potential public safety benefits. Philadelphia was the first major city to ban low-level traffic stops as a way to prevent racial profiling in 2021, and since then, a wave of cities including San Francisco, Ann Arbor, and Minneapolis have implemented similar policies.

“A number of cities have policies that refocus police away from making minor stops to prioritize activities that actually affect traffic safety, like dangerous driving,” said Daniella Gilbert, director of the Redefining Public Safety initiative at the Vera Institute of Justice, a national policy group. 

Some jurisdictions that have limited officers from making non-safety traffic stops have been able to focus resources on moving violations and drunk driving, resulting in safer roads and lower racial disparities, studies show.

“There are benefits to road safety itself, in addition to mitigating the erosion of trust and disparate impact that these kinds of stops result in,” Gilbert said. 

Prosecutors in Ramsey County, Minnesota, home to St. Paul, said in 2021 that they would stop charging arrests stemming solely from non-public-safety traffic stops, five years after a police officer in a nearby suburb killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop for a broken taillight. Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx recently said her office would follow suit, but with just a few months left in office, it’s unclear if Foxx’s proposal will be implemented or maintained by her successor.

In the meantime, advocates are continuing to press for a stronger CPD policy to reduce the number of unnecessary stops, but any such efforts will be hampered as long as CPD continues to underreport traffic stops.

As the federal court mulls bringing traffic stops under the consent decree, there’s skepticism among residents and civil rights groups that anything will change soon. They’re disillusioned by Chicago Police’s already extremely low compliance with the consent decree reforms and the department’s track record of misleading oversight agencies to avoid accountability, said C.M.D. Chiimeh, an organizer for Southsiders Organized for Unity and Liberation, at the consent decree hearing.

“It is evident the current approach is ineffective and inefficient. The issues surrounding pretextual traffic stops need to be addressed now. And it has been proven the consent decree is incapable of doing that," Chiimeh said. "Putting this issue in the consent decree … would only continue to perpetuate overpolicing, degrade community trust, perpetuate racial disparities, and squander valuable resources associated with CPD's handling of traffic stops.”