A Safer City
Chicago Police Oversight Board President: I’ve Been Pulled Over 5 Times in 2024 by CPD
Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability President Anthony Driver appears on “Chicago Tonight” on Dec. 11, 2023. (WTTW News)
Chicago police officers have pulled over Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability President Anthony Driver, Jr., five times in less than a year, even as he works to craft new rules that would limit the ability of officers to make certain kinds of stops.
Driver told WTTW News officers stopped him twice for having an expired license registration sticker and once on suspicion of making an unsafe lane change. Driver said officers refused to give him a reason for the other two stops. Driver was not ticketed during any of the stops, he said.
Driver said he had no doubt that he was stopped because he is a 6-foot-3-inch Black man who weighs more than 200 pounds and wears his hair in dreadlocks.
After each stop, Driver said he “felt like a child” and attempted to appear as nonthreatening as possible to avoid alarming the officers who stopped him.
“I felt really small,” Driver said, despite his position of authority over policy for the police department after being appointed by Mayor Brandon Johnson to lead the oversight board, known as the CCPSA. “I would have felt better if they had given me a ticket.”
Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling agreed five months ago to allow a federal court order requiring the Chicago Police Department to change the way it trains, supervises and disciplines officers, known as the consent decree, to expand to include traffic stops. However, no final agreement has been reached, despite dozens of meetings, sources told WTTW News.
A CPD spokesperson declined to comment “on traffic stops involving specific individuals.”
“Superintendent Snelling has made clear his commitment to ensuring traffic stops are being used effectively for public safety,” a CPD spokesperson said in a statement. “This commitment is rooted in the Chicago Police Department's overall reform efforts, which are focused on building trust in the communities we serve through lawful and constitutional policing.”
CPD officers have conducted approximately 60% fewer traffic stops in 2024 than they did in 2023, while officers have made 1,050 more felony arrests after traffic stops than they did last year, according to the CPD spokesperson That data could not be independently verified by WTTW News.
The push to expand the consent decree to include traffic stops faced immediate push back from several progressive alderpeople and police reform groups who said the city’s halting progress in complying with the consent decree would make it impossible to quickly change the way CPD handles traffic stops in the wake of the death of Dexter Reed in March.
Four officers fired 96 shots in 41 seconds at Reed on March 21, hitting him 13 times, shortly after he shot and wounded an officer, according to a preliminary investigation by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, known as COPA. Reed had been stopped on suspicion for failing to wear a seat belt.
The city is facing a class-action lawsuit that accuses CPD of targeting Black and Latino drivers with a massive campaign of traffic stops in the latest chapter of the city’s “long and sordid history” of racist discrimination.
Three of the named plaintiffs in that case have been stopped repeatedly since they filed the lawsuit in July 2023, court records show.
Chicago police made more than 537,000 traffic stops in 2023, and the majority were based on dubious evidence of minor violations that took direct aim at Black and Latino Chicagoans but spared White Chicagoans, according to a report from Impact for Equity, a nonprofit advocacy and research organization that has helped lead the push to reform the Chicago Police Department.
Since 2015, Black Chicagoans were six times more likely to be stopped by police while driving than White Chicagoans. Latino drivers were twice more likely to be stopped than White drivers, according to the report.
More than 51% of all drivers stopped by police officers in 2023 were Black, and nearly 31% of drivers pulled over by Chicago police officers were Latino. By comparison, just 13.6% of drivers stopped by Chicago police were White, according to the report.
The population of Chicago is 31.4% White, 29.9% Latino, 28.7% Black and 6.9% Asian, according to the 2020 U.S. census.
At the time of the report’s release, a spokesperson for the Chicago Police Department told WTTW News in a statement that traffic stops are “not conducted based on race or any other protected class” and all officers must undergo training designed to combat implicit bias.
“Fair and constitutional policing is the foundation of the Chicago Police Department’s efforts to strengthen public safety and trust across the city,” the CPD statement said. “Officers only conduct traffic stops when they have probable cause or reasonable articulable suspicion that a crime, including but not limited to traffic violations, has been committed, is being committed or is about to be committed.”
Approximately 73% of the traffic stops made by Chicago police officers in 2023 were prompted by improper license registration or a broken headlight, taillight or license plate light. Just 27.4% of all stops were prompted by a moving violation, including speeding and failure to stop at stop signs, according to the report.
Just 2.2% of those stops led to an arrest, and a gun was recovered in 0.5% of stops, according to the report. Approximately 4.4% of stops led to a citation, according to the report.
Impact for Equity has called for the CPD to ban stops designed to find evidence of other crimes. A similar policy is in place in Los Angeles, where the crime rate is significantly lower than in Chicago.
CPD should also prohibit officers from pulling over drivers because of improper registration issues or broken equipment, like a single nonfunctioning taillight, according to Impact for Equity. Similar bans are in place in San Francisco and Philadelphia.
In addition, Chicago police should be required to have an independent legal basis before requesting a driver’s consent to search their car, according to Impact for Equity.
Driver said he assumed that every Chicagoan got pulled over as often as he did until he mentioned it to Adam Gross, the CCPSA’s executive director. Gross is White.
“Adam said he hadn’t been pulled over in 20 years,” Driver said. “That’s what crystallized it for me. It was so disheartening.”
While the stops took place without incident, Driver said he is “still feeling” their impact.
Driver said he did not identify himself as the president of the CCPSA, but believes one or two of the officers who stopped him recognized him as a public official. Only one of the officers who stopped him was not Black, he said.
“They definitely sized me up after stopping me,” said Driver, who is also the executive director of the Service Employee International Union Illinois State Council. “It was uncomfortable.”
CPD should reduce the number of traffic stops it makes, Driver said. Chicago is the only major city where traffic stops rose after the pandemic as compared with before the pandemic, according to the New York Times.
“I think the department has over done it,” Driver said. “I’m living through what I’m trying to change.”
Any new rules governing traffic stops in Chicago should be carefully crafted to strike a balance to address a complicated issue, said Driver, who has proposed requiring officers to give drivers they stopped a preprinted “receipt” that includes their name and badge number. Then the officer can quickly fill out the date and time of the stop, along with the reason for the stop, Driver said, ensuring that there is a record of the stop even if no ticket is issued or arrest made, allowing the stops to be tracked.
“The quality of stops have to increase,” Driver said. “I want to get guns off the street.”
Traffic stops like the five he has experienced in the last 10 months make it impossible for Chicagoans to trust CPD, Driver said.
“People have a right to feel angry, feel mistreated,” Driver said. “The actual harm caused by these stops is that it makes it feel like officers are occupiers. All of those things have a real effect.”
Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]
