CHICAGO — A group of Black and Latino Chicago residents will allowed to continue with their class action lawsuit against the city of Chicago over claims Chicago police officers illegally detained them under the Chicago Police Department’s since abandoned stop-and-frisk policies.
U.S. District Judge Andrea Wood issued her opinion Aug. 31, in a win for the plaintiffs who alleged Chicago cops violated their Fourth and 14th Amendment rights. In addition to the city, the plaintiffs are also suing former CPD Superintendent Garry McCarthy and several individual officers.
According to Wood, the plaintiffs’ sixth amended complaint represented a second attempt at certification. In 2019 she refused to certify six proposed classes, saying that version of the complaint failed to show commonality, “such as whether any given person was stopped and whether the officer who stopped the person lacked reasonable suspicion.” She also rejected the “attempt to identify a common CPD policy that caused class members’ unconstitutional stops.”
Rather than frame their allegations on the existence of quotas and police contact cards to demonstrate a pattern of allegedly unconstitutional activity, the plaintiffs instead alleged CPD didn’t have proper “training, supervision or accountability measures to address a known problem of the stops violating individuals’ rights,” Wood wrote.
According to Wood, CPD used contact cards to document both voluntary interactions and investigatory stops starting in September 2011. But in April 2014 the department narrowed their used, before deploying a new Investigatory Stop Report form in 2016. She also said city records show how “during McCarthy’s tenure, Chicago police officers stopped dramatically more people — hundreds of thousands more — and after his departure, stops plummeted.”
The complaint also detailed McCarthy’s career past, such as his use of stop-and-frisk in places like New York City and Newark, New Jersey, and how that resulted in a paper trail that “should have led the CPD to grapple with the constitutionality of its own stop and frisk program.” Yet, as plaintiffs’ alleged, similar scrutiny followed McCarthy to Chicago.
Wood wrote that “the reasons presented on contact cards or ISRs provide insight into the existence and extent of Fourth Amendment violations for purposes of class certification, particularly where CPD’s policies have required officers to provide the reasons justifying reasonable articulable suspicion.”
She further cited a Department of Justice report finding CPD supervisors didn’t ensure “constitutional policing and that the department’s emphasis on contact cards didn’t coincide with training to make sure “officers observed constitutional limits,” a position backed with evidence from the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.
Ultimately, the plaintiffs won the commonality argument by asserting not that use of quotas caused unconstitutional stops, but by a alleging a centralized practice of “suspicionless stops and frisks” and systemic flaws contributing to that practice, and that continued, deliberate indifference to Fourth Amendment rights creates the risk of future legal harm.
“Plaintiffs’ evidence that the CPD implemented an ISR review system that facilitated the coverup of facially unconstitutional stops, coinciding with an increased rate of facially unconstitutional stops over a two-year period, more than adequately establishes a common issue,” Wood wrote.
Common questions for the alleged 14th Amendment violations were less successful. Wood said the plaintiffs referenced a CPD “racial profiling” order that in actuality prohibited use of race as a sole factor to justify police action. A second question, concerning “whether the CPD’s practice of ‘stopping the right people’ had a discriminatory effect and was motivated by a discriminatory intent or purpose,” Wood wrote, was sufficient only to survive a motion to dismiss, not to support certification of a subclass because there isn’t enough evidence to show a policy as a centralized element of CPD’s stop and frisk efforts.
Finally, the plaintiffs sought a subclass regarding alleged Fourth Amendment violations specifically connected to enforcement of the city’s Gang and Narcotics-Related Loitering Ordinances. Wood said this version of the complaint satisfies commonality requirements because it asks, in part, if “officers were instructed to make unconstitutional stops as a matter of policy and whether those instructions were developed and implemented by CPD leadership.”
Wood used similar reasoning to find the class definitions met typicality and adequacy requirements. She certified the Fourth Amendment class and a Fourth Amendment loitering subclass, but did not certify proposed Rule 23 classes or the 14th Amendment subclass.
Plaintiffs are represented in the action by attorney Martin D. Gould and others with the firm of Romanucci & Blandin, of Chicago.
The city is represented by attorney Allan T. Slagel and others with the firm of Taft Stettinius & Hollister, fo Chicago.