Killing of Dexter Reed raises questions about Chicago police reform. ‘The message is, go in guns blazing.’

Nearly a decade after a grainy dashboard camera captured a Chicago cop shooting Laquan McDonald 16 times, reform efforts spurred by the killing face renewed scrutiny after newly released footage showed another African American dying in a hail of bullets fired by police.

Alexandra Block, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, said the police department’s approach to a federal consent decree has amounted to “a box-checking exercise” — and the promises of overhauling the culture haven’t been kept.

“The message that officers informally get is, go in guns blazing. … And that’s the way they’re actually operating in the culture that they are seeing every day,” Block said. “So the consent decree process is being completely divorced from the actual on the ground experience of community members who are stopped by these officers.”

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Dexter Reed Shooting

Watchdog chief questions whether Chicago cops lied about why they stopped Dexter Reed before killing him in exchange of gunfire

COPA Chief Administrator Andrea Kersten raised “grave concerns” about the officers in a letter to Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling last week.

By Tom Schuba, Frank Main, and 3 more

 

Andrea Kersten, chief administrator of the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, has already raised serious questions about the March 21 traffic stop that escalated into a troubling gunfight and briefly turned a residential street in Humboldt Park into a war zone.

COPA said five tactical officers stopped 26-year-old Dexter Reed in the 3800 block of West Ferdinand Street for an alleged seat belt violation, surrounding his car before he shot one of the officers in the hand. In return, the other cops fired nearly 100 rounds in 41 seconds, including three shots that Kersten said were fired after Reed was “motionless on the ground.”

Reed fired 11 rounds and his gun was empty when it was recovered inside his GMC Terrain, which had heavily tinted windows, according to a high-ranking law enforcement source.

In a letter to Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling seeking to bench the four officers, Kersten questioned whether police lied about the reason for the stop and raised “grave concerns about the officers’ ability to assess what is a necessary, reasonable, and proportional use of deadly force.”

The five officers from the Harrison District are also under investigation for another traffic stop involving an alleged seat belt violation on Feb. 26, according to the letter and COPA records.

The push for reform

The consent decree went into effect in March 2019 following a scathing report issued by the U.S. Department of Justice in the wake of McDonald’s killing, for which Officer Jason Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder.

But the department has struggled to make progress and was granted three additional years to come into compliance in March 2022, meaning the department could be under the court order for a decade. What’s more, the department’s two past reform leaders departed under controversial circumstances, further complicating the push for change.

Reed’s death, and the gripping videos depicting it, have now brought the police department back under the microscope of the national media. It also brings into sharp focus the department’s increasing reliance on traffic stops as a crime-fighting tactic.

The ACLU of Illinois sued the police department last June over what the organization describes as a pattern of stops that disproportionately target Black and Latino drivers for searches and rarely turn up guns or drugs. The ACLU previously sued over the department’s so-called stop-and-frisk practices, leading to a settlement that contributed to a significant drop-off in the number of street stops in recent years.

There were, however, unintended consequences. “What the CPD did was shift from pedestrian stops to mass traffic stops to basically get around both the stop-and-frisk settlement and the consent decree,” Block said.

She noted that specialized units, like tactical teams, remain heavily staffed — even as community members continue to call for more police resources to respond to 911 calls and investigate crimes.

“Why do we still have these … tactical teams running around, doing traffic stops and grabbing guns no matter the cost,” Block said. “That’s not what the goal of the consent decree was. The goal of the consent decree was a community-driven policing model. It needs a wholesale structural and cultural change.”

During a meeting at police headquarters on Monday, Snelling said the city has conducted 46,000 fewer traffic stops from the same point last year and vowed that those stops will soon be monitored under the consent decree.

“This will be here long-lasting after I’m gone,” he said. “So this is a commitment that I’m making to make sure that we get a handle on this situation.”

Snelling, who previously worked at the police academy, acknowledged that some officers need to “unlearn” old habits.

“I’m not going to sit here and tell you that we are where we need to be,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times

The investigation

COPA, part of the city’s growing police accountability apparatus, was launched in 2016, replacing a prior agency that rarely upheld misconduct complaints. But COPA has met stiff resistance from the city’s largest police union, and Kersten has recently been slammed by Snelling for overloading him with recommendations to fire officers.

In an interview Wednesday, Kersten said her agency’s administrative investigation of Reed’s death “all boils down to how you define the totality of circumstances,” meaning every aspect of the interaction involving Reed and the officers.

“It’s existing on a continuum,” she said. “You can’t just take that moment, 41 seconds in, and make a decision based on everything that preceded it without considering those facts as well.”

The law enforcement source criticized Kersten for releasing footage of the shooting before her agency interviewed the officers who opened fire, warning it could have a damaging impact on the investigation. Kersten declined to comment when asked if the cops had sat for interviews yet.

In some cases, she said, “there may be investigative reasons that we want certain interviews or certain steps prior to that release,” which is required within 60 days of a shooting.

“When we’re aiming toward an earlier release, we’re balancing the investigative interests against the timeline for transparency,” she said. “And in this case, we didn’t find there was any impediment to releasing the footage at this time based on what has happened thus far in the investigation, and what is already known to us.”

Kersten first commented on the shooting during a Tuesday news conference alongside Mayor Brandon Johnson and Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, who said her office was “in the very beginning stages” of reviewing the shooting for potential criminal charges.

‘Some huge training issues’

Charlie Beck oversaw the response to hundreds of police shootings as the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and later as Chicago’s interim top cop.

Beck said “tactical mistakes” may have played a part in the deadly encounter with Reed, but he cautioned against jumping to conclusions before all of the facts have been borne out.

Still, he said the initial investigation indicates there were “some huge training issues” among the officers that should immediately be addressed. “One of the main purposes of doing these investigations is to find out how to do things safer and better,” he noted.

Beck’s main sticking point is COPA’s decision to release the explosive video footage to the public before interviewing the officers involved in the shooting — a move he said “taints the investigation.”

“You want to get the interviews locked down soon,” he said. “They should be part of the investigative process and not put off until the end. It makes no sense.

“If there is criminal behavior, or if there is criminal intent, then there is a chance to sort stories out.”