Chicago police stop more black drivers, but cameras are impartial

Traffic stops by Chicago police have more than doubled in the past nine years in what the American Civil Liberties Union, a civil rights group, calls the “new stop-and-frisk.”

Stop and frisk is when officers stop and search people based on “reasonable suspicion” that they are involved in criminal activity. The practice has been documented to disproportionately target black and Latino people, not only in Chicago, but also in New York and across the United States. In Chicago, it has declined sharply since the 2015 reform agreement between the ACLU and the Chicago Police Department.

Meanwhile, traffic stops have increased in Chicago, from less than 200,000 in 2016 to more than 570,000 in 2023. And, just like stops and frisks, police disproportionately stop black drivers in Chicago, according to our latest study examining racial bias in traffic enforcement.

Drivers, automated control and police stops

Our research, published in June 2024, used data on the racial makeup of drivers on all Chicago streets. Next, we compared who’s driving on the roads with who’s being greeted by the city’s speed cameras and who’s being pulled over by Chicago police.

Our findings show that when speed cameras issue tickets, the proportion of tickets issued to black and white drivers closely aligns with their respective share of road users. With human enforcement, on the other hand, police officers stop black drivers at a rate that far exceeds their presence on the road.

For example, on roads where half the drivers are black, black drivers receive about 54 percent of speed camera citations. However, they account for about 70 percent of police stops.

On roads where half the drivers are white, white drivers account for about half of the automatic citations and less than 20 percent of the police stops.

Driving while black

Our research adds to other evidence showing that racial bias is a problem in traffic enforcement, a problem sometimes summed up as “driving while black.”

The civil rights era of the 1960s was filled with incidents of law enforcement targeting black drivers. As scholar and historian Gretchen Sorin details in her 2020 book “Driving While Black,” the car simultaneously opened up new possibilities for freedom and new dangers for black people.

In the 1990s, the entire world witnessed the punishment that could await those caught driving while Black. In 1991, a black man named Rodney King was pulled over after a high-speed chase and beaten by police in Los Angeles. The violent encounter, captured on videotape and shared with local media, became national news.

The officers’ acquittal sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots, in which widespread unrest and violence killed more than 50 people, injured thousands and caused $1 billion in property damage.

In recent years, the police killings of Daunte Wright, Tire Nichols and other black drivers have shown how traffic stops can escalate quickly and sometimes lethally.

In September 2024, Miami Dolphins player Tyreek Hill was stopped by local police on his way to a game at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida. Police officers physically removed Hill from his vehicle and handcuffed him. The incident raised questions about the officers’ aggressive use of force.

Fairer enforcement and safer streets

All humans have prejudices. These prejudices can become dangerous when those humans are police officers: agents of the state who are armed and empowered to make our cities safer.

And even when there is no excessive use of force, disparate enforcement erodes trust between communities and the police.

In recent years, as national conversations around racial bias in policing have accelerated, many police departments have implemented programs such as implicit bias training to establish fairer enforcement. Although these initiatives appear to have an effect on officers’ attitudes about implicit bias, they do not appear to change the racial breakdown of who the police stop, search, or arrest.

To reduce enforcement disparities and improve the way traffic violations are handled, more fundamental reforms are likely to be needed.

What might more ambitious policy reforms look like?

Several recent potential reforms to traffic enforcement focus on decriminalization and de-escalation.

Illinois lawmakers recently proposed a bill that would ban traffic stops based solely on non-criminal, minor offenses such as improper vehicle registration, seat belt violations or lane-use errors .

Berkeley, California is considering using trained civilians for traffic enforcement to reduce the opportunity for escalation. The idea is similar to how parking enforcement is done in many cities, including Chicago, which has unarmed parking units separate from police.

The reason for many police traffic stops is safety, which should remain a priority. Between 2013 and 2022 in Chicago, crashes killed an average of 44 pedestrians, seven bicyclists and 78 vehicle occupants each year.

In contrast, the Norwegian capital of Oslo had four traffic deaths per year between 2015 and 2019. If Chicago’s streets were as safe as Oslo’s, crashes would kill 15 people each year, not 129.

Greater reliance on automated traffic enforcement could improve traffic safety and transform policing.

The cameras can detect dangerous moving violations, such as serious speeding and running red lights, without the need for immediate police involvement. Automated enforcement alone won’t guarantee safe streets, but the cameras have substantially reduced fatal crashes and serious injuries where they’ve been deployed, including in Chicago.

More than half of police stops in Chicago in 2023 were related to license plate, registration or equipment. Automating the enforcement of these stationary violations would remove a major reason for police-driver interaction, reducing the potential for bias and escalation.

This, in turn, would free up police resources to focus on non-traffic priorities.

And, as our data shows, the cameras are equal opportunity ticket sales: they’re not racially biased and don’t carry the risk of escalation.

Wenfei XuAssistant Professor, Cornell University; David Levinsontransport teacher, University of Sydney; Michael J SmartAssociate Professor and Director, Doctoral Program in Urbanism and Public Policy, Rutgers Universityi Nebiyou Yonas TilahunAssociate Professor or Urbanism and Politics, University of Illinois Chicago.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.