Pretextual Vehicle Stops—A Pipeline to Police Testilying

Collaboration for Justice , , , ,

Our January 2023 police perjury report convincingly demonstrates that the Chicago Police Department (CPD) has a culture that condones dishonesty, prevalent lying in court (“testilying”) and, false report-writing by police officers. Along with recommendations to improve transparency (some of which have been implemented by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office) and enforce consequences for lying, which could trigger a cultural shift, we suggest limiting the opportunities for CPD officers to lie or operate unethically with impunity. Prohibiting pretextual traffic stops would be one significant improvement. 

Pretextual traffic stops occur when an officer pulls over a driver for an alleged minor infraction – an expired registration tag, say, or a burned out taillight. But then the officer uses the stop as an excuse to fish for evidence of a crime unrelated to the original reason for the stop. Most commonly in Chicago, officers ask drivers if they hold a Firearm Owner Identification (FOID) card or if they have a gun in the car. The stops are pretextual because officers are not making them to enforce traffic laws—they are making them in an attempt to find illegal guns or other contraband. Pretextual stops are lawful under the Fourth Amendment, but officers must have probable cause to initiate a search of a vehicle. Oftentimes, though, these searches are conducted in an unlawful and discriminatory way.

As alleged in a proposed class action lawsuit filed in June by five Black and Latino motorists, Wilkins v. City of Chicago: “Traffic stops on the city’s predominantly Black and Latino South and West [S]ides…are typically for minor violations— or for no reason at all— and are a tool for officers to search and detain minority residents.” 

Traffic stops in Chicago have dramatically increased since 2016. The number of traffic stops conducted by CPD increased from 86,000 in 2015 to nearly 600,000 in 2019. After a dip during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, CPD made nearly 500,000 traffic stops in 2022. One of the reasons for the dramatic increase appears to be quotas enforced by CPD. The Wilkins lawsuit cites emails from CPD commanders telling officers to increase their number of traffic stops. We discuss in the police perjury report that, despite the fact that traffic ticket quotas are illegal in Illinois, a 2021 lawsuit against CPD and the City brought to light that Deputy Chief Michael Barz essentially enforced quotas requiring more citations. (Quotas on the number of traffic stops, verbal warnings, and arrest quotas remain legal). After [a lieutenant] complained, he was reassigned to a midnight shift in a likely form of retaliation.” Institutional pressures brought on by quotas, whether official or not, can manifest in pressures for police to produce results, which may lead police to cut corners or shade the truth to ensure convictions. 

Pretextual vehicle stops are unethical, often racist, and have a damaging effect on individual drivers and the community at large:

  • Black Chicagoans make up about 31% of the population, but over 60% of the drivers subjected to traffic stops in Chicago between 2016 and 2022 were Black; about 32% of the Chicago population is White, but White people account for just 12% of traffic stops over the same period. 
  • According to the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT), in 2022 alone, Black drivers in Chicago were 3.84 times more likely to be subjected to traffic stops than White drivers. 

Drivers who are subject to pretextual vehicle stops often feel profiled, targeted, and harassed based on their perceived race and regularly fear for their lives when they have to interact with the police in this manner, due to the widely known fact that traffic stops often have deadly endings for many Black people in the United States. (Around 10% of the approximately 1,100 people killed each year by the police in the U.S. involve traffic stops; from 2017 to 2022, 26% of the people killed during traffic stops were Black). For example, in 2020, ABC-7 Chicago reported on a Black Chicagoan named Edward Ward who had been pulled over by the police seven times in his first year of car ownership. He stated: “There is not a moment that goes by when police are riding behind me where I don’t fear being pulled over.” Not only do individuals subject to these stops begin to distrust and fear police officers, but pretextual vehicle stops erode community trust in law enforcement and the criminal legal system as a whole. 

Pretextual vehicle stops can lead to “testilying” and falsifying paperwork. As police officers are trained to look for traffic violations, no matter how minor, with the ulterior motive of searching drivers for contraband, they can feel encouraged to lie about their initial reason for the stop or completely fabricate a traffic violation. Despite the overwhelming evidence of its uselessness, officers were encouraged to conduct pretextual vehicle stops and utilize them as a tool to target “suspicious” drivers as recently as 2013: In an Illinois State Police training, officers were encouraged to conduct “high volumes of traffic stops for ALL violations of the Illinois Vehicle Code” on the basis that aggressive traffic enforcement and “proactive” policing would increase officer’s opportunities to find “criminals.”

This is simply false. Pretextual vehicle stops have been proven to be an ineffective use of public resources more often than not. Rarely do traffic stops produce any evidence of criminality or contraband, such as guns and drugs. In fact, guns are found in less than 0.11% of all vehicle stops in Chicago. Fewer than 1% of CPD’s 600,000 annual traffic stops in 2022 resulted in any arrest or the discovery of any type of contraband at all, such as illegal drugs or weapons. Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts recommended limiting opportunities for cops to lie. Prohibiting pretextual traffic stops would be an important step forward. Limiting traffic stops to those genuinely intended to make our streets safer is one way to reduce opportunities for officers to make false statements as well as to deter police from making excessive stops. We hope that these changes and others will get us closer to ending traumatizing interactions with police acting under dubious pretexts.

This post was co-written by Maya Simkin and Eric Wagner. Maya (they/them) is a recent graduate of Chicago-Kent College of Law and an Appleseed Network Collaboration for Justice Fellow. They have a background in farming and permaculture, love studying Jewish liturgy and other radical texts, and are committed to abolition and is interested in learning how efforts in public interest law can contribute to liberation. Eric (he/him) is a former Chicago Appleseed intern and recent graduate of Northwestern University who studied Political Science and History. Eric is passionated about understanding and tackling problems related to criminal justice reform and the protection of civil liberties.