ACLU and CPD reach agreement to changes on street stops

In a landmark agreement between the Chicago Police Department ( CPD ), the City of Chicago, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois ( ACLU ), there will be an independent evaluation of the practices and procedures, and increased transparency and public disclosure regarding Chicago police investigatory stops.

“The people of Boston deserve to know, and the law says that they are entitled to know, what is happening between civilians and Boston Police Department officers”, ACLU Legal Director Matthew Segal told the Herald.

The lawsuit comes after the release of a report that found racial disparities in the frequency with which Boston police officers searched and frisked minorities.

The ACLU of Massachusetts and the national ACLU filed the lawsuit Thursday in Suffolk Superior Court.

In announcing the settlement, Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said the department is committed to practices driven by crime data and community intelligence.

At a information convention on the O’Hare Hilton, the place he’s attending a gathering of police chiefs from across the nation, McCarthy defended the constitutionality of the tons of of hundreds of road stops his officers make.

The only concern McCarthy said he had is that the extra paperwork might take officers off the streets for too long.

The report also found that stops were so common in certain communities as to be banal.in just four months in summer 2014, the Chicago police recorded a whopping 250,000 stops that did not result in arrest.

The agreement goes into effect immediately.

The agreement incorporated the bulk of the recommendations in the ACLU report, according to a statement by the department and group.

The police department still faces a federal class-action lawsuit with 53 African-American plaintiffs claiming the street stops have led to constitutional abuses, including unlawful searches and seizures as well as excessive force.

The police department also agreed to bolster training of officers to ensure that officers don’t use race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation when deciding to “stop and frisk”, and to conduct pat-downs only when reasonably suspicious that a person is armed and risky.

“In Jefferson Park, African Americans make up approximately 1% of the population, but we see that they are stopped at 15 times their presence”, Grossman said.

McCarthy has been a proponent of stop-and-frisk and, in fact, he worked at two police departments that came under fire for their use of the tactic – the New York City Police Department, where McCarthy was once a high-ranking member and Newark, New Jersey, which he headed before coming to Chicago. “I certainly think that it does add a lot of credibility to the lawsuit”, said Antonio Romanucci. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced changes to his city’s stop-and-frisk policy previous year.

And the Newark department was placed under a federal monitor after the U.S. Department of Justice found that when McCarthy ran it, 75 percent of pedestrian stops were made without constitutionally adequate reasons.