If Dexter Reed had not been stopped by Chicago police, he would still be with us.
His horrible death played out on body camera video released last week by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability. On March 21, Reed, 26, was sitting in his SUV in the 3800 block of West Ferdinand Street in Humboldt Park. A crew of five tactical police officers drove up and jumped out of their vehicle. One demanded that Reed roll down his car window. At first, Reed complied, then rolled the window back up. Officers screamed and shouted more demands. Reed started shooting. One officer was wounded in the wrist, according to COPA.
The officers fired 96 shots in 41 seconds. Reed staggered out of the car on the driver’s side and stumbled to the ground. The officers kept shooting. Three of those shots came while Reed was lying “motionless on the ground,” according to Andrea Kersten of the Civilian Office of Police Accountability.
Reed should have never, ever have shot at the officers. Traffic stops that go awry are dangerous for both motorists and the police.
This tragedy leaves us with so many questions. For example, the police say he was being stopped for not wearing a seat belt. How did the officers know he wasn’t wearing the belt, since his car had tinted windows? On the video, the officers, wearing street clothes, drive hard and fast, jump out, and surround Reed’s car. Were they looking for undisclosed criminal activity?
“Why would a police officer, not in uniform, bother with something like that?” asked Geoffrey Alpert, University of South Carolina researcher, who specializes in studying high-risk police activities, in an interview with The Associated Press.
When the officers rolled up, mortal chaos ensued. Did Reed shoot out of terror? These questions will be investigated by COPA and will take months to answer.
Meanwhile, we know one thing. Driving while Black is nothing new. It is a systemic, decades-old problem. Every Black man in urban America knows the existential dangers of being stopped by the police.
These “pretextual stops” are often for minor offenses, such as an unlatched seat belt, a missing city sticker or license plate, texting while driving. They can be used as pretexts for efforts to harass young Black men and look for criminal activity. Every Black man on the street is a suspect, in the eyes of some.
The stop that led to Reed’s death occurred in Chicago’s 11th Police District, a predominantly Black area. In 2023, more than 10% of all the total traffic stops happened there, according to a new report from Impact for Equity, a nonprofit advocacy and research organization. More than 51% of all drivers stopped by police in 2023 were Black, and nearly 31% of drivers pulled over by Chicago police officers were Latino, while 13.6% of drivers stopped by police were white, the analysis showed. Also, 73% of all the stops made by Chicago police last year resulted from a car registration problem or equipment violation. The vast majority of stops by police do not end in a ticket or arrest, the group found.
“Black drivers in the city of Chicago, for example, are six times more likely to be stopped than white drivers,” Cara Hendrickson, the group’s executive director, told NBC Chicago. For Latinos, twice as likely.
A 21-year-old law on the books in Illinois has done little to stop it. The Illinois Traffic Stop Statistical Study Act of 2003 required law enforcement agencies in Illinois to compile and report data on traffic stops, including the race of the driver, the circumstances of the stop and its outcome.
Last year, a joint investigation by the Investigative Project on Race and Equity and WBEZ looked at 42.5 million records of traffic stop data across Illinois that were collected under the law. It found that the percentage of police traffic stops involving Black drivers continues to rise, unabated. More law enforcement agencies aren’t complying with the law. And racial disparities are widening. In the last two years, stops involving Black drivers have topped 30.5% of traffic stops statewide, up from 17.5% in 2004, the first year the data was released. Illinois’ adult population is 13.6% Black. In Chicago, stops of Black drivers in 2022 were four times higher than for white drivers, though the city has a larger white adult population.
Last week, the Chicago Police Department issued a statement to NBC:
“Fair and constitutional policing is the foundation of the Chicago Police Department’s efforts to strengthen public safety and trust across the city. Officers only conduct traffic stops when they have probable cause or reasonable articulable suspicion that a crime, including but not limited to traffic violations, has been committed, is being committed or is about to be committed. These stops are not conducted based on race or any other protected class. Additionally, as part of our ongoing reform and consent decree compliance efforts, CPD mandates implicit bias training for all Chicago Police officers.”
That federal consent decree, enacted in 2019, is designed to improve the way the Police Department trains, supervises and disciplines officers.
We know the problem. How many more Black men will die before we fix it?
Laura Washington is a political commentator and longtime Chicago journalist. Her columns appear in the Tribune each Monday. Write to her at LauraLauraWashington@gmail.com.