Zerrell Davis was first stopped by police when he was about 12.
Cops would pull up and order him to “grab some hood,” and he would spread his hands over the front of a squad car. Cops would pat down his pockets, sometimes make him drop his pants. Other times they even looked inside his mouth. If he wasn’t stopped on a given day, he would see other young Black men leaning on the hoods of police vehicles.
“That was a regular, everyday thing in Chicago,” Davis said. “They would pretty much degrade us in front of the neighborhood.”
Now in his 30s, Davis doesn’t think things are better in the city’s poor neighborhoods, even though a class-action lawsuit forced the Chicago Police Department to make reforms to its stop-and-frisk policy in 2015. Now, he says, police just stop people in their cars for petty traffic violations and order them out onto the street to be searched.
“I have not seen any change in the community, at least when it comes to stop and frisk,” Davis said, referring to the colloquial name for what CPD calls an “investigative stop.”
A 2015 lawsuit settlement put CPD’s policies and practices around stops under court supervision, but civil rights groups say the department has not improved its practices much in the last eight years.
The city and state attorney general’s office negotiated an agreement to shift oversight of stops to the court-appointed monitor that is supervising the sweeping reforms mandated by a separate consent decree that puts nearly every aspect of policing in the city under court oversight.
That agreement was reached after a 2016 U.S. Justice Department investigation determined a pattern of racial bias. The probe was launched after video was released showing a CPD officer shooting and killing 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.
On Wednesday, Davis was one of a dozen witnesses who joined an online hearing before U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer, chief judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, who must approve the proposal to merge the stop-and-frisk settlement with the consent decree.
Among the dozen community activists who testified was Dr. Waltrina Middleton, a minister who was recently stopped in an Uber on her way to a funeral and watched as her driver, who she says was stopped for minor traffic violations, was searched and verbally abused by police. She had been talking with the driver, who had just dropped his son off at school. After the stop, which ended soon after Middleton began recording it on her cellphone, the driver was shaken.
“He said, ‘What if my boy was with me?’” Middleton recalled. “He told me I was his first and last ride of the day.”
The proposed language for the merged settlement and consent decree leaves holes that will limit the impact of reforms, said Michelle Garcia, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, one of the litigants in the stop-and-frisk suit.
Although pedestrian stops have plummeted since the stop-and-frisk lawsuit was settled, the number of traffic stops increased significantly and show a similar pattern of targeting poor neighborhoods, Garcia said. Black people, who comprise around a third of Chicago residents, accounted for more than 70% of the 600,000 traffic stops in the city last year, she said. Black people in Chicago are nine times more likely to be stopped by police than white people, and Latinos are three times more likely, Garcia said.
Garcia called on the judge to order the city and attorney general to bring community groups and civil rights organizations to the table to negotiate new terms for the merged cases. Among the improvements she suggested is language that would require CPD to perform an analysis of how useful the stops are, explicitly eliminate race as a potential basis for a stop, and include the stop-and-frisk case’s stronger protections and training requirements related to probable cause for searches.
There is no evidence that the practice reduces crime, and just a tiny fraction of stops turn up guns, Garcia said. Gun possession cases make up 25% of the workload for the Cook County public defender’s office, said Patricia Jjemba, director of public policy and legislative affairs for the office. The cases often have minor traffic violations as the cause for the stop, she said.
“CPD officers are in some cases sitting around in poor neighborhoods waiting for Black and Brown people, watching for minor traffic violations — and in other instances outright fabricating violations — to pull these drivers over,” she said.
