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Chicago's 'Stop and Frisk' Policy Needs Overhaul, Alderman Says

By Ted Cox | July 28, 2015 3:31pm
 Ald. Joe Moreno says he expects the added transparency to actually benefit the Police Department.
Ald. Joe Moreno says he expects the added transparency to actually benefit the Police Department.
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DNAinfo/Ted Cox

CITY HALL — The Chicago Police Department's "stop and frisk" policy faces a complete overhaul if a new ordinance clears the City Council.

Ald. Joe Moreno (1st) is expected to submit the ordinance at Wednesday's City Council meeting. Drawing on a study released earlier this year by the American Civil Liberties Union, it will call on the Police Department to gather and share data on all police stops, and also require officers to issue receipts to those stopped and not arrested.

Moreno said Tuesday it's meant to address the "lack of collection and transparency" in Chicago police data, and only then to dictate possible policy changes to minimize any bias in the way officers do their work.

"That's where we want to go with this," Moreno said. On police, he added, "It's to help them, too. I don't want to give more work to our overworked police force. But we have to find a way where we're also transparent."

Moreno tweeted Tuesday that he'll hold a news conference ahead of Wednesday's meeting on the ACLU paper and his proposals.

ACLU of Illinois issued "Stop and Frisk in Chicago" in March. It found that the practice "is disproportionately concentrated in the black community," with African-Americans making up 72 percent of those stopped, while just 32 percent of the general population.

It also called the prevalence of the practice in Chicago "shocking," with more than 250,000 people stopped last year and not arrested. Adjusted for population, the ACLU reported, Chicagoans are four times more likely than New Yorkers to be stopped by police.

"Chicago has failed to train, supervise and monitor law enforcement in minority communities for decades, resulting in a failure to ensure that officers’ use of stop and frisk is lawful," the report charged. "This report contains troubling signs that the Chicago Police Department has a current practice of unlawfully using stop and frisk."

Moreno insisted he was not after some sort of "Big Brother" data collection, but instead hoped to gather demographic information on those stopped, as done in Los Angeles, to guard against police biases both real and imagined.

Moreno said his proposal had received a "lukewarm" response from fellow aldermen and Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration in initial talks on the subject, but that the ACLU and the People's Law Office are backing it. Moreno cited the People's Law Office support for his police-torture reparations ordinance, which recently passed the City Council after a long battle that took years.

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