Chicago police traffic stops have left 230 people injured and hospitalized in recent years

A Chicago police officer from the Rogers Park District gives a ticket to a driver with expired license plates during a traffic stop on North Western Avenue near West Pratt Boulevard in Rogers Park on the North Side on Tuesday. Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times

By  Sophie Sherry, Wendy Wei, Kade Heather, Jonathan Torres and Tom Schuba

Byron Lamb still has nightmares about the day he was hospitalized after being pulled over by the Chicago police.

It was September 2018, and he was taking his two young children to his mother’s house when officers pulled him over in West Pullman for allegedly running a stop sign.

They ordered Lamb out. He refused. One of them then got inside his Buick sedan and shocked him with a Taser.

“I was in my work uniform, I had a blue-collar shirt on,” Lamb says. “Just coming from work. A father coming to get his kids from school. They did all that in front of them babies.”

Lamb, 34, was hospitalized, his car was impounded, and he was charged with resisting arrest. Two months later, prosecutors dropped the case.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people are pulled over by the Chicago Police Department. Between 2018 and 2024, what started as a stop for a traffic violation ended up sending civilians to the hospital with injuries suffered at the hands of police in 230 cases, an investigation by the Chicago Sun-Times and the Investigative Project on Race and Equity found.

Most of the time, the drivers or passengers who were hospitalized were unarmed, according to police use-of-force data and court records. In some cases, they weren’t charged with any crime, or the cases against them were dropped.

Like Lamb, an overwhelming majority of them — 81% — were Black.