CHICAGO — As police oversight officials in Chicago are working to determine if changes should be made to CPD’s traffic stop policies and practices, one of our city’s cops says he was the target of an unlawful traffic stop in Arizona last summer. Many of the complaints CPD Officer Jalen Woods aired during interviews with a Phoenix TV reporter echo concerns people have raised about police practices here in Chicago.
The officer, Jalen Woods, first spoke with KNXV in October, just a few weeks after a Tempe Police Department bicycle team stopped him for allegedly squealing the tires of his loud and showy Dodge Challenger Hellcat Redeye rental car while making a turn in a local nightlife district.
Tempe cops claimed they heard Woods’ tires “chirp” and smelled burning rubber, prompting them to make the stop. But the Woods says he did not squeal his tires and claims the Tempe cops quickly went from writing a ticket to going on a fishing expedition for bigger problems.
“They asked multiple times about guns and drugs in the vehicle, if I had any. I told them ‘no,’ over and over and over and over, there’s no guns and there’s no drugs,” Woods told KNXV. “They also asked for jewelry, if there was any jewelry in the vehicle, which was very confusing to me, like, what does jewelry have to do with anything?”
Woods says he told the cops he was also a police officer, but “I feel like that made matters even worse, like it made them want to escalate the situation even more, because they didn’t believe me.”
The cops asked Woods to step out of his car and immediately handcuffed him. Tempe police told KNXV’s reporter that their officers arrested Woods because he did not meet the agency’s “cite and release” policy for traffic violations. However, the news outlet found that the claim appears to be false.
Tempe PD policy calls for physical arrests during traffic stops only for DUI, if a felony has been committed with the vehicle, if someone tries to flee police, or if the subject refuses to sign a misdemeanor traffic citation, KNXV reported. Woods did not fall under any of those categories, yet he was arrested anyway. The cops also impounded his car, a move they may have made so they could conduct an “inventory search” of the vehicle in the hopes of finding contraband.
Tempe police told KNXV’s reporter last year that it would not provide the bodycam videos related to Woods’ traffic stop and arrest for 14 months. “If I was trying to cover up something, I would make you wait a long time, too,” Woods told the news outlet.
Since his first interview with KNXV, Woods secured the bodycam videos on his own and turned them over to the TV station, which aired portions in a follow-up report last week.
The footage shows Woods making the left-hand turn, during which he allegedly squealed his tires, sending the smell of burnt rubber into the air. While that portion of the video does not have sound, Woods appears to be driving at a slow speed, and no smoke can be seen coming from his tires.
A prosecutor who read the police report to Woods shortly after his arrest said the officers claimed he “did some sort of fishtail, as if I lost control of the vehicle,” Woods recalled. But the video aired by KNXV does not show anything of the sort.
Tempe prosecutors dismissed the case against Woods on September 11, saying the likelihood of conviction was low.
According to KNXV, he has filed complaints with Tempe PD and the U.S. Department of Justice and is considering a lawsuit.
“I feel like I was targeted and discriminated against because of my skin color,” Woods told the Phoenix station. “They didn’t believe that I could be a police officer.”
“I felt targeted. I felt dehumanized.”
KNXV said last year that Woods had been “temporarily removed” from his position at CPD, but subsequently returned to the job. A CPD spokesperson said last week that Woods is an active CPD member assigned to the South Chicago (4th) District, but currently works in the Training and Support Group.
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