SPRINGFIELD — Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration recently agreed to pay nearly $1 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Chicago police Lt. Franklin Paz, who alleged he was dumped from a citywide unit after refusing to pressure subordinate officers to meet traffic stop and arrest quotas set by department higher-ups.

Eric Wilkins knows the other side of that equation. By the time Chicago was settling with Paz, Wilkins was two years into an ongoing federal lawsuit accusing Chicago police of conducting racially discriminatory traffic stops primarily on Chicago’s South and West sides, where most Black and Latino residents reside, compounding that harm by requiring officers to satisfy quotas. It’s a process that he says people in the neighborhood call “fishing.”

“It’s like certain streets you know not to be on at certain times, said Wilkins, a Black resident of Chicago’s Roseland neighborhood on the Far South Side. “In my earlier years, my dad always taught me ‘just say yes, Sir, no, Sir. Let them take care of their business so you can go about your business.’”

Now, Illinois lawmakers are entering the fray over traffic stop and arrest quotas with legislation they say will address the root cause of the problem.

A bill that passed the House 107-0 on Wednesday would prohibit municipal police departments across the state from evaluating officers based on “any quantifiable contact” they have with individuals during their shifts, including traffic stops, arrests and written warnings. The legislation now heads to the Senate.

Current state law signed in 2014 by then-Gov. Pat Quinn bans police departments from assigning citation quotas or evaluating officers by how many tickets they write. Chicago was exempt until 2019. But sponsors of the new bill say the existing law contains a significant loophole: it does nothing to prevent police supervisors from using broader “points of contact” — stops, arrests, warnings and similar interactions that stop short of citations — as performance metrics. Critics say the result is a de facto quota system operating under a different name.

“When officers are evaluated on how many contacts they generate, it introduces institutional pressure to create suspicion rather than to respond to it,” the bill’s main sponsor, Republican state Rep. Patrick Sheehan of Lockport, himself a Plainfield police officer, testified before the House Police and Fire Committee last month. “Performance should be measured on the legality judgment, problem solving, community outcomes and case quality, not how many people an officer stops or detains.”

“More stops do not automatically mean better policing. They simply may mean more low-value contacts,” he said. “If Illinois still allows officers to be graded by stop counts, then Illinois has not really ended the quota system. It has just renamed it.”

The bill’s passage in the House reflects an unusual coalition in the Democratic-controlled General Assembly. Two other House Republicans joined roughly 20 House Democrats as co-sponsors, including some of the more progressive House members. The Chicago Police Department’s largest union and other law enforcement labor groups also back the measure.

Similar proposals in recent years went nowhere. A 2024 bill by Democratic state Rep. Bob Morgan of Deerfield would have prohibited municipalities from comparing officers’ stop and arrest counts against their peers but it garnered no co-sponsors. Morgan is backing the latest initiative.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, which represents Wilkins in his lawsuit and has spent years documenting racial disparities in traffic stops, has not taken a position on the new bill. Wilkins’ lawyer, Alexandra Block, said the legislation doesn’t go far enough to close the quota loophole.

“It’s a good first step to get rid of the loophole,” said Block, director of criminal legal systems and policing project for the ACLU of Illinois. “But just eliminating that language doesn’t actually prohibit the practice.”

She noted the bill contains no explicit prohibition on using points of contact as an evaluation metric for officers, and that different types of police departments, such as those under the state’s purview, are not covered by its language.

Sheehan said his bill is geared toward municipal police departments because they have a higher level of engagement with the community than other law enforcement agencies. But he said he’d consider tightening the bill’s language if there are concerns that the prohibition in the measure isn’t sufficiently explicit.

“I’m always interested in engaging and trying to seal up any loopholes that we have,” he said Thursday, the day after the bill passed in the House. “So if (there’s) any stakeholders that want to come to the table and talk about adding extra language as this moves on to the Senate, I can talk to the Senate sponsor and bring it back on concurrence in the House.”

The legislation faces opposition from police chiefs and command-level officials across the state, who argue it would strip departments of a legitimate management mechanism.

Former state Sen. John Millner, director of government relations for the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police, noted that traffic safety issues are among the biggest complaints in some communities. As a former Elmhurst police chief, he explained how his department would make traffic stops and issue warnings to try to reduce the number of traffic crashes.

“Taking this tool away from your police departments is going to be a big mistake,” Millner said during the March 20 police and fire committee hearing on the bill. “Everybody’s going to be pointing a finger when something happens the next (time) when they find out the person wasn’t evaluated properly.”

The opponents also said there are still ways officers can make their points of contact without feeling pressured and without violating anyone’s rights.

In an interview, Lincolnshire Police Chief Joe Leonas, who also serves as president of the chiefs of police association, agreed that he doesn’t want rank-and-file officers to adhere to quotas but argued that officers’ points of contact often reflect legitimate community-driven priorities — hotel and school checks, neighborhood patrols, appearances at events like National Night Out.

“Taxpayers pay for the officer’s salary. They want them to do these crime prevention measures, extra patrols, residential patrols,” Leonas said. “And for us to be stripped of that authority makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.”

But “if you have people stopped for no probable cause, that should be investigated,” he said, “and the community needs to come forward and work with the police chief and police leadership to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

The Chicago Police Department and Johnson’s office declined to comment on the legislation.

The debate is playing out amid a history of accusations that Chicago cops have engaged in quota-driven policing.

In Wilkins’ lawsuit, an expert witness’s report found that Chicago police from 2016 to at least August of last year made the use of “activity” targets or quotas a signature component of their traffic stop strategy.

“Specifically, CPD has required continuous reporting and monitoring of each officer’s and each unit’s traffic stop ‘activity’ and rewarded those with higher numbers of stops and punished (by demotion) those reporting lower numbers of traffic stops,” the witness, former Salt Lake City Police Chief Chris Burbank, reported.

Paz’s lawsuit includes records showing that around 2021, then-Chicago police Superintendent David Brown purportedly told one of his deputy chiefs he believed that 10,000 traffic stops a week would reduce violence.

Paz alleged he was removed from the Community Safety Team, reassigned to the overnight shift of a South Side patrol district and informed that his days off were changed for refusing to mandate the points of contact for officers in his command. The situation, according to his lawsuit, caused him to suffer “extreme humiliation, embarrassment, anxiety and stress.”

“This was my life, and so everything, it was just devastating for me,” Paz, who is now on medical leave, said in an interview. “It’s inevitable that if you’re mandating those officers or pressuring them to do quotas or adhere to specific activity mandates per tour, or per shift, it’s inevitable that the potential for violating people’s rights is there. And historically, the Chicago Police Department has proven that right.”

Paz said traffic stops are an integral part of an officer’s job to address traffic safety and even violent crime if police know vehicles are being used in furtherance of crimes. But he supports the new legislation, noting that it’s a bad look for the police department to impose mandates on these types of stops at a time when the department remains under a federal consent decree to improve the city’s policing practices.

“In the end, it costs the officer, it costs the taxpayers once the cases are litigated and it costs the city and the residents because you lose that community trust, and the department has tried to forge and rebuild the trust that they’ve lost along the way,” said Paz, whose lawsuit against the city settled in October for about $950,000.

As part of Wilkins’ lawsuit, Block noted that after the number of pedestrian stops conducted by Chicago police officers plummeted in 2016 — following a new state law and an agreement between the ACLU and the police department requiring officers to more thoroughly document and justify such stops — traffic stops surged dramatically in their place.

The lawsuit cited data showing the department made 900 traffic stops per hour in 2016, then skyrocketed to 1,243 per hour in 2020, and dropped to 1,055 per hour in 2022. These are often pretextual traffic stops, which occur when an officer observes a traffic violation — usually a minor infraction such as a burned-out headlight or an expired vehicle registration sticker — to investigate alleged unrelated criminal activity, according to the suit. The ACLU of Illinois noted that Chicago police officers end up finding weapons in only a small fraction of these stops.

Wilkins, a community organizer who was paralyzed from the waist down since being shot more than 25 years ago, said he joined the lawsuit because he has two children, ages 9 and 14, and does not want them to grow up expecting to be pulled over by police. Despite the shortcomings Block raised with the Springfield legislation, Wilkins said he still supports it.

“I’m trying to bridge the gap between the relationships between the citizens and the police officers, and I’m the one being pulled over and I’m the one being handcuffed,” he said. “That makes the other people look at me, like, ‘man, if they’re doing it to you, they’re going to do it to us.’”

Democratic state Rep. Jawaharial Williams of Chicago, whose district encompasses some of the city’s highest-crime areas on the West Side, said during the March 20 committee hearing that stop counts alone are a poor proxy for effective policing.

“Coming into the work, patrolling and doing your duty, that’s still doing your job,” Williams said. “Even in an event where if you’re just around a school and cars are slowing down because of your presence, you’re working.”

State Rep. Katie Stuart, a Democrat from Edwardsville, said the current framework risks recreating the very problem the 2014 law was meant to solve.

“There doesn’t have to be a mandatory number and ‘Oh, geez, it’s the 13th of the month, and I have to meet this by the 15th, so I’m going to pull that car over,’” she said at the hearing. “Or, ‘I’m going to go ahead and this guy looks suspicious so I’m going to question him when I otherwise would not have.’ And that’s problematic.”

Leonas acknowledged that Chicago’s circumstances differ sharply from those of Lincolnshire, a northern suburb where fewer than 1% of residents are Black. But he said weakening departments’ ability to set activity expectations would carry unintended consequences regardless of jurisdiction.

“My community is very vocal and tells me all the time what they’re looking for, and we have great leadership that are out there in the neighborhoods with the officers and constantly communicating what the needs of (the) community are,” Leonas said. “But I do understand that the community may not feel that way in every town, but this (legislation) doesn’t fix that.”