A federal court in Illinois has said a Black woman’s lawsuit can go forward against the city of Chicago, which she accuses of running a practice of stopping, searching and arresting Black drivers who legally carry guns. The ruling, reported Friday by Courthouse News, does not decide whether the claim is true. It means the city must now answer it.
The driver’s claim rests on more than her own arrest. According to the ruling as Courthouse News described it, she points to four similar incidents, complaints of racial profiling and statistics, and the court found that enough to make the claim plausible against the city itself rather than only the officers who stopped her. Suing a city over a practice, rather than an officer over an incident, is the harder legal path. It requires showing a pattern.
A pattern is what other cases in the same city describe. In July, U.S. District Judge Mary Rowland expanded a separate class action to cover every Black and Latino driver Chicago police stopped over the past five years, writing that the plaintiffs had “put forth a substantial amount of evidence demonstrating that CPD disproportionately stops Black and Latino drivers relative to white drivers,” as WTTW reported. Black and Latino drivers who were stopped were between two and nearly seven times as likely to be searched as white drivers between 2014 and 2024, even though those searches were less likely to turn up guns or drugs, according to the figures reported in that case.
The gun-owner arrests have their own record. CBS News Chicago documented Black drivers who showed officers a valid Firearm Owner’s Identification card and concealed carry license and were still charged with felonies. Louis McWilliams, a business owner from Tinley Park, was pulled over in April 2024 for a missing front license plate. He spent a day in jail, and the charges were dropped about three months later. Lucy Washington was stopped in December 2023 for a turn signal and arrested after the state’s system showed her renewed license as expired. Her charge was also dismissed, and she sued in December 2024.
Neither the Chicago Police Department nor the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office tracks how often this happens, CBS found. Illinois State Police guidance says officers “should not take any law enforcement actions” when they cannot verify a card in the state database. Superintendent Larry Snelling declined to be interviewed. The State’s Attorney’s Office said “initial evidence at the time supported approval” of the charges, and that they were dropped when more information became available.
Phil Smith, president of the National African American Gun Association, which says it has more than 50,000 members, told CBS what he feels when he hears of another case: “Outrage, anger, frustration, not again.”
Chicago taxpayers have already spent $3.4 million defending the class action, WTTW reported. The new ruling adds another case the city will have to defend.
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