The killing of Dexter Reed. Have targeted traffic stops replaced stop and frisk?
When Mayor Brandon Johnson appointed Larry Snelling as police superintendent Snelling promised he would have his officer’s backs.
I don’t recall this as having been a problem with previous Chicago police superintendents.
What is needed in the wake of the killing of Dexter Reed is not a knee-jerk response by the superintendent to have the officers involved backs.
We need an independent investigation.
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In a memo to Snelling from COPA Chief Administrator Andrea Kersten, dated April 1, Kersten requests that all four officers involved in the Dexter Reed shooting be stripped of their policing powers.
What would you have done if you were in Reed’s place?
You are in a city with an epidemic of carjackings, in a high-crime neighborhood, you are surrounded by unmarked cars. Individuals in street clothes - described by witnesses as moving aggressively, surround your car with guns drawn.
According to the police this was a traffic stop in response to Reed driving without wearing his seatbelt.
A traffic stop for a seatbelt violation by tactical officers in street clothes driving an unmarked police car?
C’mon.
Some video suggests Reed fired first.
If true, what might Reed have been thinking?
In a new report by the advocacy group Impact for Equity and the Free2Move Coalitionpolice data of more than 537,000 traffic stops made by Chicago police in 2023 was analyzed. In about 80 percent of these stops, the driver was Black or Latino, the report showed.
The Chicago Police Department have made a "search switch," replacing controversial pedestrian pat-downs with new, and sometimes aggressive, vehicle searches.
Civil rights advocates and researchers have been sounding alarms over the use of traffic stops, arguing they are being used as a method of racial profiling; the very problem that police were tasked with ending with the consent decree.
This switch to traffic stops replaced the racist practice of stop-and-frisk.
Faced with public pressure, the Chicago Police Department formally agreed to stop the practice where people are searched on the street often with little-to-no probable cause.
But stop-and-frisk was replaced with a huge increase in the kind of traffic stops that led to the death of Dexter Reed.