Police stop more Black drivers, while speed cameras issue unbiased tickets − new study from Chicago

Traffic stops by Chicago police have more than doubled over the past nine years in what the American Civil Liberties Union, a civil rights group, is calling 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 a 2015 reform agreement between the ACLU and the Chicago Police Department. Meanwhile, traffic stops have surged in Chicago, rising from less than 200,000 in 2016 to over 570,000 in 2023. And much like stop and frisk, police disproportionately stop Black drivers in Chicago, according to our latest study examining racial bias in traffic enforcement. Our research, published in June 2024, used data on the racial composition of drivers on every street in Chicago. We then compared who is driving on roads with who is being ticketed by the city’s speed cameras and who is being stopped by the Chicago police. Our findings show that when speed cameras are doing the ticketing, the proportion of...