How a well-intentioned civil rights doctrine morphed into a numbers game that handcuffs Chicago Police and undermines public safety
The Civil Rights Movement accomplished many great and necessary things in this country. It dismantled legal segregation. It opened doors that had been nailed shut. It made discrimination not just immoral, but illegal.
However, like many revolutions — even righteous ones — it left behind a doctrine that has metastasized far beyond its original purpose.
Those two words are "disparate impact."
And if you want to see how they are distorting public policy in real time, look no further than the latest “study” on Chicago Police Department traffic enforcement.
The latest indictment by arithmetic
A coalition of advocacy groups recently released an analysis claiming black and Hispanic drivers receive a “disproportionate” share of traffic tickets across Chicago — including in majority-white districts like the 18th District, which includes Lincoln Park, the Gold Coast, and Streeterville.
The headline numbers are designed to shock:
- Black drivers received 45 percent of tickets.
- Hispanic drivers received 36 percent.
- White drivers received only 14 percent, despite being 36 percent of the city’s population.
Therefore — the conclusion goes — CPD is engaging in racially skewed enforcement, possibly through “pretextual stops,” which reformers compare to stop-and-frisk.
It sounds damning.
But here’s the problem.
Population share is not the same thing as driver share.
And arithmetic is not proof of discrimination.
What “disparate impact” actually did
The concept traces back to the Supreme Court’s 1971 decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., which held employment policies which are neutral on their face could still violate civil rights law if they disproportionately excluded minority applicants and were not job-related.
Later, in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, the Court upheld the availability of disparate-impact claims in housing — but with a very important warning: statistical disparities alone are not enough. Plaintiffs must identify a specific policy causing the imbalance.
That warning is routinely ignored.
In Chicago, we have moved from using disparities as a diagnostic tool to using them as a verdict.
The wrong denominator
Let’s consider the 18th District, which reform advocates highlight as especially egregious. It is roughly 70 percent white by residential population, yet black and Hispanic drivers reportedly receive over 70 percent of tickets there.
Sounds scandalous — until you ask a very basic question:
Who is actually driving in that district?
The 18th includes:
- Downtown nightlife corridors
- Tourist zones
- Major commercial routes
- Employment centers
- Entertainment districts
Residents are heavily white.
Drivers passing through are not necessarily so.
If someone commutes from the West Side or South Side to work in Streeterville, they are not counted in the residential census denominator used to calculate “expected” ticket distribution.
If someone drives into Lincoln Park for recreation — what we might politely call “nightlife activity” — they are not magically counted as part of the neighborhood’s racial composition.
Using residential census data as the baseline for traffic enforcement analysis is a methodological sleight of hand.
But once you label the result “disparate impact,” the numbers take on moral weight.
The reality of law enforcement in Chicago
Those of us who actually live here know something else.
Traffic enforcement has collapsed over the past decade.
CPD traffic stops have fallen dramatically in recent years — from well over 700,000 annually to under 500,000. Meanwhile, a long-awaited staffing study confirmed what anyone with eyes can see: the department is severely understaffed.
Officers are stretched thin.
Districts are understaffed.
And proactive policing has been systematically discouraged — not just by manpower shortages, but by the constant threat that any statistical imbalance will be treated as evidence of racism.
This is the chilling effect of disparate impact.
If every enforcement decision is later run through a demographic spreadsheet, officers will naturally hesitate.
That hesitation costs public safety.
Pretextual stops and the law
Reform advocates argue that traffic stops are often used to search for more serious crimes, especially gun possession.
They are correct.
That is not illegal.
In Whren v. United States, the Supreme Court unanimously held as long as there is an objective traffic violation, an officer’s subjective motive is irrelevant under the Fourth Amendment.
In other words: The law is the law.
If your registration has expired, if you run a stop sign, or if your plates are invalid, you can be stopped.
The Constitution does not require proportionality by race.
It requires objective legal justification.
The fatal assumption
The disparate-impact mindset rests on one deeply flawed premise: If outcomes are unequal, the system must be unjust.
But crimes are not evenly distributed by race.
Driving behavior is not evenly distributed by race.
Vehicle ownership rates are not evenly distributed by race.
Registration compliance is not evenly distributed by race.
Nor are recreational patterns, commuting flows, or late-night driving patterns.
To assume equal outcomes are the natural baseline is to assume equal behavior.
That is an ideological assumption, not an empirical one.
The real danger
The danger of disparate impact is not that it identifies patterns.
Patterns can be useful.
The danger is when disparity itself becomes proof.
When statistical imbalance equals discrimination, then law enforcement becomes hostage to optics.
Police are no longer evaluated on whether they enforce the law, but on whether their enforcement satisfies demographic symmetry.
That is not justice.
That is social engineering.
The civil rights legacy — and its distortion
The Civil Rights Movement fought to eliminate discriminatory intent.
It did not fight to mandate statistical equality in every outcome.
There is a profound difference between:
- Prohibiting intentional discrimination
- Requiring proportional results
The first is a moral imperative.
The second is a mathematical illusion.
Let the police do their jobs
Chicago has serious public safety challenges.
Carjackings.
Illegal firearms.
Reckless driving.
Hit-and-runs.
The answer is not to bind the police department with spreadsheet litigation and advocacy-group studies.
The answer is to enforce the law consistently and constitutionally.
If there is evidence of actual bias — prove it.
If there are rogue officers — discipline them.
But do not hamstring an entire department because ticket distribution does not mirror census tables.
The law is the law.
Traffic violations are traffic violations.
And crimes are not necessarily equally distributed by race — especially in areas that attract recreational and commercial activity from across the city.
We should not bind our police department by ideological metrics masquerading as science.
We should let them do their jobs.
Because that — not statistical parity — is how you achieve public safety in Chicago.
