The suit alleges the department failed to respond in a timely way to requests for information about street encounters, including “stop and frisks”, between officers and civilians. The stops have disproportionally targeted blacks, even in white neighborhoods, the ACLU found.
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“As the men and women of the Chicago Police Department work to make our city safer and identify the small subset of individuals who torment our neighborhoods with violence, it is imperative that we use every tool and resource in a way that is not only lawful but respectful of the residents we serve”, said Chicago Police Superintendent Garry F. McCarthy.
The cards list the person’s name, race, sex, address, phone number and other personal information. The City of Chicago, Chicago Police Department, and ACLU have been negotiating for months to avoid an expensive and time-consuming lawsuit.
Under the agreement, police will track all street stops and protective pat-downs – not just those that don’t result in an arrest, as they have in the past. Judge Keys will produce public reports twice each year on investigatory stops and pat downs by Chicago police, assessing whether the CPD is complying with its legal requirements, including the Fourth Amendment requirement that there be reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct as a basis for a stop or search and that the stops do not have an impermissible racially-disparate impact prohibited by the Illinois Civil Rights Act.
“What we have done here is move past the litigation process and advanced directly to a collaborative process, to insure that stops on Chicago streets meet constitutional and legal standards”, ACLU legal director Harvey Grossman said.
Chicago police agreed to step up supervision and discipline of officers who violate department protocol and to boost training about appropriate stops. Still, his officers could “better articulate” on contact cards why they stop someone, he said.
In exchange for the Chicago Police implementing accountability measures on its controversial “stop and frisk” policy, which includes better training for officers, the ACLU of Illinois has agreed not to sue the Chicago Police Department over the findings of the first report, due to be released next year. That will allow for better monitoring of stop-and-frisk practices and their impact on minorities, according to the ACLU. “I don’t think the police department will come out and say “We were guilty of unconstitutional stops of African Americans, ‘…” Last August, the city dropped its appeals of the decision after a new mayor took over who was elected, in part, on an anti-stop-and-frisk campaign.
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And in Newark, the department was placed under a federal monitor after the U.S. Department of Justice found that during a period when McCarthy ran that department, 75 percent of pedestrian stops were made without constitutionally adequate reasons and in a city where blacks make up 54 percent of the population, they accounted for 85 percent of those stops.
