Good for Oak Park village trustees Cory Wesley and Chibuike Enyia in raising questions about the latest batch of racially disproportionate pedestrian stops made by Oak Park police this past spring.
In that time frame, local officers stopped 66 pedestrians. The vast majority of those stops were of Black people and mostly Black men. Five arrests resulted from those 66 stops. Two were for shoplifting, one an active warrant, one an “assist to another agency,” and one for criminal trespass.
“We’re taking on a lot more stops that seem to be on a bad trajectory for Black and brown individuals in Oak Park. I’m trying to figure out what is contributing to this,” Enyia challenged Police Chief Shatonya Johnson. She noted that 59 of the 66 stops resulted from a citizen making a call to police. Her officers, she said, respond to every call received. That leaves just 7 pedestrian stops initiated by officers.
A worthy question about why so many citizen calls specifically reference Black men: What bias and fear lead a citizen to report a “suspicious person” who is almost always Black? We need some collective self-assessment to answer that question.