Chicago police OK independent stop-and-frisk evaluations

A key part of the agreement is the engagement of former U.S. Magistrate Judge Arlander Keys to evaluate the City’s practices and procedures regarding investigatory stops and to oversee the agreements implementation.

Now contact cards will also say whether the person was frisked, whether contraband like a gun was found, and whether there was an arrest, warning or citation. The cards will include the name and badge number of the officer, the race and gender of the person stopped, the reasons for the stop, and the reason for a pat down. “The policy provides for a high level of training and, more importantly, with it supervision to actually see that it is being done on the ground”, McCarthy said.

Under the settlement, the police department will expand the information on “contact cards” that officers have been required to fill out when they stop someone on the street for questioning.

The ACLU report identified more than 250,000 Chicago stop-and-frisk encounters in which there were no arrests from May through August 2014. The stops have disproportionally targeted blacks, even in white neighborhoods, the ACLU found. “If we’re not articulating our reasonable suspicion, we’ve got a problem”, McCarthy said.

The agreement comes after months of negotiations between the city, the department and the ACLU that aimed to avoid expensive and time-consuming litigation, the parties said in a news release.

“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”, said ACLU Legal Director Harvey Grossman in a statement Friday. “The words stop-and-frisk have taken on a meaning that go far beyond Terry V. Ohio”, McCarthy said. You’ll find his comments about “Stop and Frisk” starting at 13:55. “These are investigative stops and officers will perform protective pat-downs when necessary”.

“We believe policing in Chicago must be strictly based on crime data, patterns, statistics and community intelligence, and this unprecedented agreement with the ACLU is a demonstration of CPD’s commitment to fairness, respect, transparency, and underscores our willingness to work side by side with everyone as we work toward our shared goal of keeping our neighborhoods safe”. That will allow for better monitoring of stop-and-frisk practices and their impact on minorities, according to the ACLU.

The city and police department still face a lawsuit on the issue. It will have to contend with an April 2015 federal suit filed by six African American men alleging that their constitutional rights were violated due to stop and frisk.

“I don’t think the police department will come out and say ‘We were guilty of unconstitutional stops of African Americans, ‘…”