Politics

Johnson ‘Won’t Rush to Judgment’ After Top Cop Suspended Officers Who Stopped, Shot Dexter Reed for Violating Rights of 2 Other Drivers

Mayor Brandon Johnson said Tuesday he would not “rush to judgment” about whether the Chicago police officers who shot and killed Dexter Reed after he fired at officers should remain on the force after Supt. Larry Snelling determined the officers violated the constitutional rights of at least two other drivers less than three weeks before the fatal shooting.

The tactical team that pulled over Reed on March 21, 2024, improperly stopped and searched Chicagoans during two separate traffic stops on March 1, 2024, and March 6, 2024, according to conclusions reached by Snelling and officials with the Civilian Office of Police Accountability.

Known as COPA, the agency has not yet completed the probe into the March 21, 2024, traffic stop of Reed or the shooting that killed him, records show. Four officers fired 96 shots in 41 seconds at Reed, hitting him 13 times, shortly after Reed shot and wounded a fifth officer, according to a preliminary investigation.

Snelling and COPA agreed that five officers collectively committed 47 violations of departmental rules designed to protect the rights of Chicagoans during traffic stops on March 1, 2024, and March 6, 2024, and should be suspended for a total of 91 days, records show.

“I won’t rush to judgment, but I will say this as the chief executive of this city: Constitutional policing ensures that our public employees are adhering to a standard that reflects our values. If you don’t do that, you won’t have a place in the city government,” Johnson said.

The outcome of the probes into the two stops showed Chicago’s police accountability system is working, Johnson said.

“I’m going to see this as a win, where we are holding people who have been sworn to serve and protect to a standard that reflects our values in constitutional policing,” said Johnson, who praised Snelling as a superintendent “who understands why it’s so critical that the trust between law enforcement and community is maintained or restored or grows.”

Tim Grace, a lawyer for the Fraternal Order of Police who said he represents the officers, said the officers will ask an arbitrator to overturn those suspensions.

“Each and every one of these stops was supported by reasonable articulable suspicion that a crime has or was about to be committed and the majority of the stops were supported by actual probable cause,” Grace said in a statement to WTTW News.

Snelling declined to relieve the officers who stopped and shot Reed of their police powers, as the former head of COPA urged more than a year ago. 

One of the five officers who stopped Reed, Alexandria “Ally” Giampapa, resigned from CPD in November and is now a police officer in Tipp City, Ohio. It is unclear whether Officer Gregory Saint Louis, who was shot in the hand by Reed during the March 21, 2024, traffic stop, remains a member of CPD.

The three other officers who stopped Reed and participated in the two other improper stops in the days before Reed was killed were Officers Victor Pacheco, Aubrey Webb and Thomas Spanos.

The decision by Snelling to concur with COPA’s findings that the traffic stops on March 1, 2024, and March 6, 2024, were improper comes amid a continuing debate over whether officers should be allowed to continue making traffic stops based on minor registration or equipment violations that are designed to find evidence of unrelated crimes.

Snelling said police officers must be allowed to stop drivers for improper or expired registration plates or stickers and headlight, taillight and license plate light offenses to keep Chicagoans safe.

However, a majority of Chicago’s police oversight board, the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, known as the CCPSA, believes that the stops “do more harm than good and should therefore be prohibited, with some exceptions.”

Johnson has declined to directly say whether he agreed with Snelling and believed Chicago police officers should continue making pretextual stops, or whether he agreed with the majority of CCPSA commissioners and thought the stops should be banned in most cases.

But Johnson on Tuesday called the traffic stops found to be improper by Snelling and COPA a “very egregious form of policing” used on the South and West sides, which are home to a majority of Black and Latino Chicagoans.

“We now have accountability mechanisms in place to address what many communities have known for decades,” Johnson said.

The city is facing a class-action lawsuit that accuses CPD of targeting Black and Latino drivers with a massive campaign of traffic stops in the latest chapter of the city’s “long and sordid history” of racist discrimination.

Three of the named plaintiffs in that case have been stopped repeatedly since they filed the lawsuit in July 2023, court records show.

Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]

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