ACLU lawsuit: Chicago police target minorities for traffic stops

Jose Manuel Almanza Jr. is a 35-year-old Little Village community activist who is one of five minority Chicagoans listed as named plaintiffs in an ACLU lawsuit. According to the suit, Almanza has been stopped in his car a dozen times just since 2021. “They almost never say a reason, or maybe it’s something small, like a cracked tail light, and all they want to see is your driver’s license,” Almanza said. “It’s always this sense that we’re in the wrong because of where we live, we’re in the wrong because of what we look like.” (Owen Ziliak/Sun-Times)

Black drivers in Chicago are four to seven times more likely to be pulled over by police than whites, while Latino drivers are stopped twice as often, according to a lawsuit filed this week by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois claiming a racially biased pattern in how Chicago police enforce traffic laws.

Traffic stops on the city’s predominantly Black and Latino South and West sides, the lawsuit says, are typically for minor violations— or for no reason at all— and are a tool for officers to search and detain minority residents on the city’s West and South sides. The lawsuit comes less than a decade after CPD reached a settlement with the ACLU in a lawsuit over similarly disproportionate stops of minority pedestrians.