Oak Park Police Chief Shatonya Johnson shared data for the department’s 2025 field stops with the village board this week, as some trustees asked for a more accessible presentation of the data in the future.
The police department provided a record of every stop that officers made last year, including a spreadsheet that contained demographic data of the people police stopped, whether the stop had been initiated by officers or done in response to a resident’s call for service and a written narrative of each incident. The police department has committed to sharing data on field stops quarterly in a move for community transparency requested by Trustee Cory Wesley, but that didn’t happen over the last year in part because of the murder of Detective Allan Reddins in November 2024, Johnson said.
“As we prepared to honor Detective Reddins throughout the year it created a delay,” she said. “So we compiled the information into a year report.”
The data shared this week again showed that the vast majority of people stopped in Oak Park are Black, particularly Black men and boys, and that most stops occurred because a resident had called the police. About 74% of people stopped by police in Oak Park last year were Black and roughly 83% of all stops were in response to a call for service, according to the data.
About 18% of Oak Park residents are Black, according to Census data. Of the 569 stops, 101 ended with an arrest, according to police.
“The thing that stands out is the racial disparities of the stops,” Trustee Jenna Leving Jacobson said. “But I don’t really know what to do with that information. I know the majority of these were calls for service, not initiated by Oak Park police officers.”
Wesley said part of why he asked for these reports to come before the board on a regular basis was to show the disparity in outcomes between police-initiated stops and instances where a resident calls in to report “suspicious” people or activity.
“The idea of this is to see this data in front of us regularly so it allows us to catch trends before they become trends, and also just allows us to have as the board a pulse on how, demographically, things are looking,” Wesley said. “We do get these things from two different, two different areas, right? And for me, it’s very helpful to know how many result from our community calling you all and you all showing up versus self-initiated stops, and then the percentage of which those things lead to arrest one group versus another. Because what I’ve found in the past is that the self-initiated stops have been a lot more accurate.”
Leving Jacobson, and Trustees Derek Eder and Chibuike Enyia all asked that the data may be presented in a way that’s more accessible to residents in the future with less police jargon and acronyms.
“If we don’t understand it, and we’re spending time really trying to digest this, I don’t see how the public can have a chance at understanding this, so I think it’s a good start, but I think we need to go further,” Eder said. “I think that the ultimate goal that I want us to arrive at here is data that is actually going to be not just helpful for internal staff and procedures and policies, but for us to make informed decisions and actions, and also for the public to have trust in and insight into what is going on in the largest department in our village.”
Johnson said producing the report already requires significant manpower and rewriting the stop narratives without internal police terminology would put a further strain on the department’s capacity.
Trustees also mentioned integrating the Citizen Police Oversight Commission, recently empowered to have more influence through a board vote last year, into helping present the reports in more digestible terms.
“Our shared goal is the transparency to the community,” Village President Vicki Scaman said. “So that should immediately bring us to the conclusion that we need the data to be digestible, not just for us, but for the community at large. And CPOC shares that goal. You share that goal, chief, we all do. So, we’re just here in partnership to get there with all parties.”
Wesley praised the data as it was presented this week and said he wasn’t interested in involving CPOC with the field stop reports.
“I don’t want to hear this data from CPOC, I want to hear from the police, because the police are the ones who are actually stopping folks,” he said. “The level of transparency here is unprecedented. Is it perfect? No. Is it good enough? Maybe, maybe not, depending on the person, but it’s definitely better than anything else I’ve seen in most other communities, right? So I just want to say, I get that we’ve got capacity concerns. I get that. But I just want to say that I like the fact that, despite the capacity concerns, this data continues to come before the board, and we continue to have open and honest and transparent and public conversations about it.”
