Think stop-and-frisk is bad in New York? It's way worse in Chicago

"For young men of color, it becomes... everyday street harassment that they learn to live with"

Published March 24, 2015 1:35PM (EDT)

Chicago police officers during an Occupy Chicago march last October.         (AP/Paul Beaty)
Chicago police officers during an Occupy Chicago march last October. (AP/Paul Beaty)

A new report from the American Civil Liberties Union in Chicago has found that Chicago cops employed stop-and-frisk more than four times more frequently than New York cops at the height of its practice in 2011. From May to August of 2014, 72 percent of those stopped by Chicago PD were black, even though only 32 percent of Chicago's residents are black.

Per capita, 93.6 per 1,000 people were stopped in Chicago during a four month period in 2011 while only 22.9 per 1,00 were stopped in New York.

The Guardian's Tom McCarthy reports:

Cases of stop-and-frisk surged in Chicago with the arrival of police superintendent Garry McCarthy in 2011, ACLU found. McCarthy spent most of his career in New York City, where a policy of widespread stop-and-frisk was pioneered under Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s...

Chicago tallied more than 250,000 stops that did not lead to an arrest in the summer of 2014, the ACLU report found. In nearly half of the cases reviewed, police officers “either gave an unlawful reason for the stop or failed to provide enough information to justify the stop”, the report said.

"For young men of color, it becomes just basically everyday street harassment that they learn to live with," said Harvey Grossman, director of the ACLU in an interview with the Chicago Tribune. "Young black and brown men are so used to getting stopped in the city, they really don't complain about it with the intensity that you would think. It's become pretty commonplace on the South and West sides of our city."


By Joanna Rothkopf

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Aclu Chicago New York Nypd Police Race Stop-and-frisk