HIGH QUALITY, MANDATORY PUBLIC SERVICE FROM RACISTS From [HERE] In the days and hours before police murdered 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 March 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 using 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.