Another Surrender

Enabling crime every single day:

• Chicago Police Department officials agreed to revise proposed new rules and prohibit officers from searching vehicles based on the smell of raw cannabis, a coalition of reform groups told the federal judge overseeing efforts to reform the Chicago Police Department.

  The coalition of police reform groups behind the consent decree — the six-year-old federal court order requiring the CPD to change the way it trains, supervises and disciplines officers — told U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer they had dropped their request that she order CPD leaders to revise a proposed policy designed to set new limits on when Chicago police officers can stop and search Chicagoans.

  The coalition, led by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, “applauds” CPD for amending the policy in late May, calling the latest version “an improvement” that reflects an agreement reached in August 2023 that prohibits officers from “conducting an investigatory stop or search of an individual based solely on an officer smelling cannabis/marijuana without any other specific and articulable facts of criminal activity,” in a court filing made Monday.

Hooray!!! You just made cops jobs that much easier.

Of course, the Illinois Supreme Court has been a beacon of consistency, too:

• The Illinois Supreme Court ruled in December that the scent of raw cannabis is enough for a police officer to search a vehicle, even though marijuana is legal in the state. Three months before that decision, the Supreme Court found that the smell of burnt cannabis was not probable cause for a search.

So "raw" cannabis is enough for a search, but "burnt" cannabis isn't, even if the "burnt" cannabis is initially indicative of someone driving while high.

To top it all off, CPD pretty much ceased doing traffic stops for weed years ago:

• ...CPD officers rarely stop Chicagoans on suspicion of unlawfully possessing cannabis or violating the law regulating the possession or use of medical marijuana, according to CPD data.

  In the seven months between December 2024 and June 2025, just 70 traffic stops were conducted on the basis of suspected violations of laws governing the use and possession of cannabis, according to CPD data.

  In 2024, CPD officials reported officers made 295,846 traffic stops to the Illinois Department of Transportation, which is required by state law to track all stops made by police officers throughout the state.

That means that 0.0002% of traffic stops are for smelling marijuana in any form. Two-ten-thousandths. Cops saw the writing on the wall long before the ACLU got involved in de-criminalizing crime.