Before gunfight with Dexter Reed, Chicago cops made 50 traffic stops in just 3 days

In the days and hours before a deadly shootout with Dexter Reed, tactical police officers conducted dozens of uneventful traffic stops on Chicago's West Side — none of which appear to have generated so much as a ticket.

As the Civilian Office of Police Accountability continues to investigate the March 21 shooting and the traffic stop that sparked it, the oversight agency has also launched a probe to determine whether those other stops were “unjustified,” records show.

Body-camera footage obtained by the Sun-Times shows that five officers who were involved in the shooting conducted 50 traffic stops between March 19 and 21, including eight stops that were made in the roughly three hours before they encountered Reed in the 3800 block of West Ferdinand Street.

In the wake of the shooting, Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling has pushed to overhaul the department’s controversial traffic stop practices under an ongoing federal consent decree.

Advocates and activists argue the pace of court-ordered reform is too slow to address a pressing issue that was brought into sharp focus when Reed was fatally shot. Many have called on the department to immediately disband its tactical units and to stop making traffic stops as an excuse to conduct searches.

Reed was boxed in by two unmarked police SUVs, then resisted orders and shot one of the officers. The four other cops fired back, firing nearly 100 rounds, striking Reed 13 times, according to COPA and the Cook County medical examiner’s office.

It’s still unclear why he was pulled over.

COPA has questioned whether police officials lied when they attributed the stop to a seat belt violation. More recently, city lawyers fighting a lawsuit brought by Reed’s mother have instead cited the tinted windows on Reed’s SUV.

The newly released body-camera footage shows the five officers repeatedly stopped people for both those reasons, as well as for moving violations and smoking weed. But in some cases, they didn’t appear to provide any explanation for stopping and searching people.

None of the searches appeared to result in a traffic ticket, much less a felony arrest.

Meanwhile, COPA has opened a separate investigation into another shooting incident that happened a day before Reed was killed. As the five tactical officers responded to a block where a group of people had congregated, another cop shot and killed a charging dog, angering residents.

"We don't do nothing. Every day, we stand here getting stopped and frisked,” one person is heard saying in the body-camera footage.

The videos would seem to support criticism that heavy-handed traffic enforcement seldom leads to arrests for more serious crime. The ACLU of Illinois last year filed a lawsuit against the city on behalf of Black and Brown motorists who are stopped at much higher rates than drivers in predominantly white neighborhoods.

The practice of using traffic violations as a pretext to search vehicles and their passengers began in 2016 after the Chicago Police Department curtailed pedestrian stops under a settlement with the ACLU. The number of traffic stops rose from fewer than 100,000 in 2015 to a peak of 600,000 in 2019, after which stops dropped dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to data cited in the lawsuit, fewer than 1% of all stops made by CPD officers result in police finding drugs or weapons. The Harrison District, where Reed was shot, has the highest number of shootings per capita in the city and has led the city in total traffic stops.

A recent WBEZ analysis found that traffic stops have fallen by more than 40% so far this year, coinciding with Snelling's commitment to curtail the practice. The Harrison District saw the steepest decline citywide — a drop of more than 60%.

In the videos released by COPA showing 50 stops over three days, officers found only one gun prior to stopping Reed and the owner had a permit. In the other 49 stops, officers do not appear to even issue a ticket for the alleged traffic violation before moving on.

The motorists pulled over by the officers typically seem annoyed, with several encounters descending into shouting matches before the officers leave the scene. But several interactions seemed jovial, with one officer even joking with a man whom she apparently once ran down in a foot chase, offering to share the video with him the next time she stopped his vehicle.

Some of the stops were contentious, but none were as aggressive as the encounter with Reed, in which officers trained their guns on Reed’s car soon after he was stopped.

The interactions typically are brief, lasting only as long as it takes officers to search the inside of the car, sometimes less than a minute. The COPA files show officers making roughly two dozen stops during their shift on March 20, the day before the Reed shootout, with stops separated only by a few minutes.

Almost always, the officers ask the driver if they have any drugs or licenses to own or carry a firearm, the latter of which would allow the cardholder to have a firearm in their car.

“That just shows that the traffic offense is just a pretext to get in and search the car,” said Crystal Brown, a supervisor in the Cook County Office of the Public Defender.

Attorneys representing clients in gun cases routinely receive hours of body-camera footage that show dozens of traffic stops that lead to searches, Brown said.

Brown said she has watched hours of similar video, which often shows drivers complaining bitterly about being stopped for minor or non-existent infractions — and rarely shows cops finding contraband.

“These are officers on specialized units, they are not required to patrol, they are not doing investigations,” Brown said. “They are just doing these stops and searching people with questionable (probable) cause, that are only very rarely leading to any kind of arrest.

"Is that the best use of their time?”