Chicago cops pulled over fewer drivers last year as the fatal shooting of Dexter Reed sent shockwaves through the city and led to promises of reform.
But far more of the traffic stops ended in violence, an investigation by the Chicago Sun-Times and the Investigative Project on Race and Equity has found.
Officers reported using force 787 times during traffic stops — the most since 2018, which was the first full year cops were subjected to tougher reporting requirements.
Meanwhile, more than 200,000 stops apparently went unreported to state officials last year despite a 2003 law that was spearheaded by then-state Sen. Barack Obama.
Chicago Police Department leaders have pushed officers to boost their numbers in recent years, leading to stops that put both cops and community members in danger.
A dozen current department members used force in more than 10 traffic stops between 2018 and 2024 without facing discipline, police records show. Seven of them worked in the Harrison District on the West Side, where Reed died in a gunfight that erupted during a traffic stop on March 21, 2024.
Despite protests, lawsuits and police Supt. Larry Snelling’s commitment to overhaul his department’s approach to traffic stops, little has changed since that fateful encounter.
Reed, 26, who was Black, was driving on a residential street in Humboldt Park when police tactical officers pulled him over and surrounded his sport-utility vehicle.
His family has said the stop was “pretextual,” that the officers curbed him for a minor traffic offense to probe for an unrelated crime.
Officials have said Reed fired first, wounding an officer before four other cops fired 96 rounds, striking him 13 times.
The daytime shootout put a spotlight on how quickly a traffic stop can escalate into violence.
To get a better grasp of the factors that make some stops so volatile, the Sun-Times and the Investigative Project on Race and Equity analyzed use-of-force data, conducted interviews and reviewed court records and police disciplinary files.
Here are some key findings:
- Drivers regularly have their cars searched after Chicago police officers pull them over for a minor infraction and then find evidence of other crimes, such as the smell of marijuana or an open alcohol container.
- Drivers who are stopped often defy orders to provide identification or step out of their vehicles.
- Efforts to flee often result in “emergency takedown” arrests.
- Between 2018 and 2024, officers reported using force an average of 616 times each year during traffic stops, according to police data.
- Nearly 85% of those use-of-force incidents during traffic stops were concentrated in majority Black and Latino communities on the South Side and the West Side.
Alexandra Block, an attorney with the ACLU of Illinois, sees officers’ aggressive tactics as being linked to quotas that police leaders have imposed for traffic stops.
“It destroys the public’s confidence in the police and can lead to these really aggressive, violent behaviors by police officers,” Block says. “Because they know that all their supervisors care about is numbers. You know, how many people did you stop? How many guns did you get?”
Police officials declined interview requests.
A police spokesperson provided a previously issued written statement that said the department is pushing to reform traffic stops through the consent decree, a federal court order mandating sweeping changes to the department’s policies and practices. The statement said the department is “continuously reviewing our use of traffic stops and providing Fourth Amendment Training to all officers.”
“Traffic stops are only conducted when there is reasonable articulable suspicion that a person is committing, is about to commit, or has committed a criminal offense,” according to the police statement.
‘Today could be the day that I get killed’
Traffic stops skyrocketed after the police department dramatically scaled back pedestrian stops as part of a 2015 settlement in response to a scathing report by the ACLU of Illinois.
After making about 86,000 stops in 2015, the department has since reported an average of more than 400,000 each year by counting the state-mandated “blue cards” that officers fill out to record each encounter.
The stops have disproportionately targeted people of color and have rarely led to the recovery of drugs or guns, according to state data. Also, as Bolts Magazine and Injustice Watch have reported, the number has been undercounted.
Last year, the department reported to state officials that officers made 295,846 traffic stops, down 45% from 2023, according to police data and the Illinois Department of Transportation.
But a police spokesperson says officers actually reported 506,468 stops to dispatchers, which would amount to a more modest 31% drop in radio calls.
In 2023, the ACLU filed a lawsuit that aims to end what it said is a discriminatory “mass traffic stop program.” Eric Wilkins, one of the five plaintiffs in that case, says he’s been pulled over more times than he can remember but rarely ended up being ticketed.
“Any time the police get behind me, I cringe, you know, from the past trauma,” says Wilkins, 54, who is Black. “You don’t know what’s going to happen. Today could be that day that I get killed.”
Activists and advocates have called for an immediate ban on stops that are used to fish for other crimes.
But Snelling wants traffic stops addressed through the federal court order spurred by the police killing of Laquan McDonald that has been in effect since 2019.
Maggie Hickey, a former federal prosecutor brought in to monitor the police department’s compliance with that consent decree, has indicated her support for Snelling’s plan.
1 cop, 2 shootings in 8 months
Police officers at the lowest rung of the department’s hierarchy are largely the ones who make traffic stops, sometimes involving drivers and passengers who are combative and possibly armed.
Some of the cops who have used force most during stops have histories of aggressive behavior on and off the job. Collectively, they’ve faced more than 200 complaints and have been targeted in lawsuits that have cost the city at least $340,000, with more cases pending.
Fernando Ruiz was involved in two on-duty shootings over eight months that left one man dead and another paralyzed.
Ruiz is assigned to the Harrison District but is now detailed to the Alternate Response Section, a unit staffed by cops with disciplinary issues and those not medically cleared for full duty.
That’s as Ruiz faces dismissal in the fatal shooting of Reginald Clay Jr., whom, records show, Ruiz chased into a gangway in Garfield Park on April 15, 2023. Body-camera footage shows Clay, 24, got trapped and turned toward Ruiz while gripping a gun, then appeared to try to place it on a porch just as he was shot in the chest.
Months earlier, on Aug. 12, 2022, Ruiz shot Raymond Comer on the Near West Side. Comer, 40, who was sitting in a car, had reached for a gun, according to Cook County court records. Left paralyzed from the waist down, Comer pleaded guilty to a gun charge and was sentenced to five years in prison.
Comer and Clay’s family have since sued Ruiz.
The officer previously was at the center of another lawsuit, stemming from a violent encounter on June 12, 2020, when he was caught on video punching a man who was handcuffed on the ground. That case, filed in federal court by Sterling Boston, was settled for $95,000, records show. Boston, 32, had faced charges including felonies for allegedly possessing heroin and kicking Ruiz while he was on his back, but the charges were dropped.
In another case involving Ruiz, the city of Chicago paid $5,000 last year to Marquis Jones, who said in a federal lawsuit that he was shocked with a Taser during a “pretextual” traffic stop Ruiz and another cop made on Sept. 22, 2019.
Jones, 32, faced felony drug charges that ended up being dismissed.
In his lawsuit, he said the stop was “part of a pattern and practice of racial profiling by Chicago police on Black drivers and vehicle occupants.”
A jarring encounter
On the morning of Aug. 14, 2023, Dorothy Johnson was roused from her sleep by a man shouting profanities — “bitches, whores, n——,” she says.
Johnson, 70, soon learned the man bellowing outside was her neighbor, a cop named Brandon McDonald, who was upset about being awakened by the barking of her dog. Both Johnson and McDonald are Black.
“I couldn’t believe, for him to be an officer of the law, that you would disrespect me,” Johnson says. “You see me go to church every Sunday, and you sit there and talk to me like that. It was just disrespectful, totally disrespectful.”
She says she waited a week to report the outburst to the city’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability because she feared McDonald might retaliate, possibly by pulling her over for a petty traffic offense. COPA decided that the tirade violated department policies and recommended McDonald be given a five-day suspension.
McDonald — who faced 22 complaints and two lawsuits, one that was dismissed and one that resulted in a $25,000 settlement — reported using force during 16 traffic stops. That was more than any other Chicago cop.
On Sept. 28, 2022, McDonald and another officer were wearing plainclothes and traveling in an unmarked police vehicle when they curbed a driver with an expired registration in Morgan Park.
They reported that, after smelling marijuana and spotting what appeared to be a blunt, they ordered Elliot Cummings out of the vehicle. According to a police report, Cummings, 43, then grabbed his waistband and ran away, setting off a brief chase on foot before he was taken into custody.
Cummings suffered a broken wrist and was hospitalized.
He was wanted on a handful of warrants and was arrested for obstructing the officers, though court records show new charges weren’t filed.
McDonald also has been honored for heroism. The department awarded him a Blue Star and the Superintendent’s Award of Valor after he was grazed in the face by a bullet while pursuing a carjacking suspect in 2016.
He recently was promoted to sergeant and now oversees officers in the Morgan Park district.
McDonald and Ruiz didn’t respond to requests for comment. The 10 other officers who used the most force during traffic stops didn’t respond to inquiries, declined to comment or couldn’t be reached.
Putting a stop to quotas?
A looming civil trial is expected to lay bare accusations that department leaders pushed quotas for traffic stops at the behest of former Supt. David Brown, who, according to pretrial testimony in the case, called for 10,000 such stops each week and insisted the practice would build trust.
Lt. Franklin Paz filed that lawsuit in January 2021. In it, Paz says he was dumped from the citywide Community Safety Team after he pushed back on “illegal” quotas that then-Deputy Chief Michael Barz set for traffic stops, arrests and other forms of police “activity.”
Tragedy struck the specialized unit months later, when Officer Ella French was fatally shot and her partner Carlos Yanez was seriously wounded while making a traffic stop in Englewood on Aug. 7, 2021.
According to the lawsuit, Barz told Paz that each officer he was supervising was expected to generate at least 10 “blue cards” every day, referring to the state-mandated documentation used to gather demographic information about people who are stopped.
A sergeant who gave sworn pretrial testimony during a deposition in the case said he and a lieutenant drew Barz’s ire when they tried to tout their gun recovery numbers as they were being dressed down for not generating enough traffic stops.
“F— those guns,” the sergeant said he recalled Barz saying. “I want blue cards.”
In his own deposition, Barz denied key claims the sergeant made under oath. Barz said the sergeant’s recollection about the conversation about “blue cards” was “a complete falsehood.”
Paz’s case is expected to go to trial on April 14 at the Daley Center.
The ACLU’s pending lawsuit also claims that police supervisors have set quotas for traffic stops.
That practice could be upended through a proposed settlement that Dexter Reed’s family reached after suing the city over his death.
In addition to sending $1.25 million to Reed’s loved ones, the proposal would “address and ideally eliminate quotas related to traffic stops,” according to Andrew M. Stroth, the family’s attorney.
But the proposed settlement has faced opposition from police supporters in the Chicago City Council and has stalled in the finance committee.
If it passes the committee and is approved by the full council, Stroth says, “The elimination of quotas would be advanced in the broader context of the federal consent decree.”
Sparring over a path forward
At a hearing last June at Chicago’s federal courthouse, Snelling said placing traffic stops under the consent decree would offer “long-term oversight.”
“I am 100% dedicated in making sure that we get to the bottom of this,” the superintendent said. “If we’re going to rebuild our relationship with community, we have to acknowledge some of the things that we have problems with, and we have to take corrective action.”
But, over the course of two hearings that day before U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer, who’s presiding over the court case governing the consent decree, others endorsed different options.
The ACLU’s Block said Snelling’s plan “feels like damage control, not a genuine interest in fixing the problem.” She said the Black and Latino plaintiffs in the ACLU’s lawsuit were leery of the “self-serving offer” being made as their case proceeded.
Community organizer Keron Blair said the pressing issue shouldn’t be tethered to the “glacially moving” consent decree. Like others, Blair endorsed a plan that aims to end pretextual stops, limit stops related to low-level offenses and require cops to have some degree of suspicion to conduct a search.
Hickey, the official appointed to monitor the department’s consent-decree compliance, recommended in October that the court order “should be modified to include all traffic stops.”
A spokeswoman says Hickey can’t comment “due to restrictions of the consent decree.”
In her filing, Hickey said her team “has long been concerned about the CPD’s use of traffic stops and how they affect trust between the CPD and Chicago’s communities.”
Sources say city officials and the Illinois attorney general’s office are negotiating how traffic stops should be reformed under the consent decree, which was put in place after the attorney general’s office sued the city over civil rights abuses. The Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, a civilian-led oversight panel, wants to get involved in the process and assert its policymaking powers.
Jasmine Smith, an activist with the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, says she and other community members view the lack of swift action as “a smack in our face.”
Her organization is calling for a ban on pretextual traffic stops and the disbanding of tactical teams, which are specialized units of plainclothes officers who ride in unmarked vehicles, like the team involved in the deadly stop of Reed.
Smith says placing traffic stops under the consent decree is a way to scuttle the issue, saying officials would listen to residents and “act immediately” if they truly want change.
“Our lives don’t matter, our rights don’t matter,” she says. “That’s the message that’s been out.”
Contributing: Mohammad Samra