Chicago police officers create a wall with their bodies at West Harrison Street during a protest over the fatal shooting of Dexter Reed, Tuesday, April 9, 2024.
Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times
The five Chicago police officers involved in the fatal shooting of Dexter Reed after his SUV was pulled over have been investigated a combined 41 times since 2019, many of the complaints stemming from traffic stops.
The officers, members of a plainclothes tactical team operating on the West Side, stopped Reed last month as he drove through Humboldt Park because he allegedly was not wearing a seatbelt.
Videos released this week show Reed refused to lower his window or get out of his GMC Terrain as officers shouted at him while drawing their guns.
Reed shot an officer standing on the passenger side and the other officers then fired some 96 rounds over 41 seconds, including three after Reed fell to the street, according to the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, which released the video from the officers’ body cameras.
COPA Chief Administrator Andrea Kersten has said she has concerns about the “veracity” of the officers’ account of why they stopped Reed, noting that the windows were tinted and it would have been hard to see if he was wearing a seatbelt.
In a letter to Police Supt. Larry Snelling, she noted that her agency was investigating the same five officers for a complaint stemming from a traffic stop a few weeks before the Reed shooting that also involved a seatbelt violation.
No other details of that incident in February have been released. In the records released Friday, COPA redacted the brief summary about the complaint.
The records, provided in response to a records request by the Sun-Times, show the officers have been named in 41 complaints over the last five years. In three of the complaints, the officers were cleared of wrongdoing. The other cases remain open.
The officer who fired at least 50 rounds at Reed, three after Reed collapsed, has been on the force for two years and has at least seven complaints on file with COPA, including two for alleged excessive force complaints and five claiming improper stops or searches, according to the agency.
In seven of the 24 complaint summaries provided by COPA, one or more of the officers involved in the Reed stop were accused of stopping motorists or pedestrians for no reason.
Four other complaints involve allegations of excessive force. In another report on a “preventable traffic accident,” a man alleged that officers purposely hit him with their vehicle as he ran from traffic stop. It notes that a gun in a bag was found near him.
In one complaint, which was not sustained by COPA, a man who uses a wheelchair said officers approached him aggressively in June of 2022 as he waited for a Lyft driver in front of his house. One officer reached for a gun as other officers searched him, he said.
The man was unable to give investigators an exact date for the incident and they were unable to document the incident, according to the reports. The man also claimed that a few weeks later, four police vehicles pulled up to his girlfriend’s car and demanded their identification as part of a “traffic stop,” though the vehicle was parked.
COPA investigators said body-worn camera footage showed the couple, who were seated in a parked car with headlights on, were not wearing seatbelts, providing officers with justification for the stop. They noted the officers did not issue a ticket because they said they did not have a ticket book handy.
Last August, a man filed a complaint against three officers who stopped his car, with the officers driving at his car on the wrong side of West Congress Parkway in West Garfield Park with just the spotlight on.
Officers told the driver he was being stopped because they saw his passenger had no seatbelt, though the driver told COPA investigators he thought it would have been difficult to see into his vehicle from a block away. Police asked for his license and insurance, and left without issuing a ticket.
For cases that have not been closed, COPA provided “face sheets” describing the initial complaints. The agency said it withheld sheets on 18 other complaints involving the officers dating back to 2020 because the police department objected, saying the officers had not been served with notice of the complaints.
None of the officers involved in the Reed shooting have served on the force for longer than five years.
When they stopped Reed, they were assigned to a tactical unit in the Harrison District, a West Side precinct that historically has seen more gun violence than any of the city’s 22 police districts — and, according to data compiled by advocacy groups, the most traffic stops as well.
The American Civil Liberties Union last year filed a lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department claiming that officers make a disproportionate number of traffic stops in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods.
It noted that traffic stops skyrocketed after a previous ACLU lawsuit resulted in the city reducing the number of times officers stopped and searched pedestrians in the same areas.