There’s a new court filing in the federal lawsuit against the city and the police department over the fatal shooting of 26-year-old Dexter Reed in March of last year, alleging his civil rights were violated during an unlawful traffic stop.
The latest filing by attorney Andrew Stroth says the five officers involved in the Dexter Reed incident had a history of unconstitutional traffic stops, allegedly
falsely claiming people weren’t wearing seat belts, among other infractions, he contends.
The filing says that on the day that the officers pulled Reed over, they had stopped at least 9 other vehicles in the previous hour.
Body camera video of the incident was released by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability.
“Open the door now,” an officer is heard yelling repeatedly.
She had her hand on the driver’s side door handle of Reed’s SUV.
Other officers in plain clothes had the vehicle surrounded.
Reed fired a shot through the window, hitting an officer in the hand.
The officer is heard saying, “I’m hit” as he gets away from the SUV, no longer in possession of his weapon.
The other officers returned fire.
Four of them fired 96 shots in 41 seconds. Three of the officers reloaded.
Reed was hit 13 times, including after he was outside the SUV and on the street.
The officers would later say Reed wasn’t wearing a seat belt.
His SUV had tinted windows.
After the shooting, one officer is heard telling others to say nothing as supervisors arrived.
“Nobody say anything, you hear me,” a female officer says.
The attorney for Reed’s family says in the court filing, the officers involved not only had a history of unlawful stops, but also complaints.
The suit alleges that the department knew that and chose to do nothing.
It says “CPD leadership had notice of these five defendant officers' repeated violations of citizens' constitutional rights and failed to stop these predatory and pretextual stops.”
Stroth alleges that Reed was killed because of the “illegal actions” of the officers and “inaction by leadership.”
There had been a settlement in the case. The City Council Finance Committee rejected a payment of 1.25 million dollars to Reed’s family.
The lawsuit says, “For generations, Defendant City of Chicago’s Police Department (“CPD”), and particularly specialized units like Tactical Teams, have intentionally preyed on Chicago’s young Black men in divested and low-income neighborhoods. CPD leaders promote brutally violent,
militarized policing tactics. They encourage discriminatory, pretextual traffic stops under the guise of protective policing. Despite millions of taxpayer dollars invested in a Consent Decree intended to remedy these systematic deficiencies, CPD makes a mockery of reform and refuses to comply with the most basic principles of constitutional policing.”