Chicago City Wire

On Monday, Chicago City Council’s Finance Committee abruptly canceled a vote to approve a $1.25 million payout to the family of Dexter Reed, the 26-year-old shot dead by police last March in Humboldt Park.

It’s unclear what led to the last-minute cancellation of the vote, but Ald. Nicholas Sposato (38) speculated that the committee lacked the votes to send the settlement to City Council.

Reed was shot dead inside his stopped car on March 21 after first opening fire on police, wounding one officer. Anti-police activists, including Reed family attorney Andrew Stroth, called the police stop of Reed “unlawful and violent escalatory traffic stop in a city that has a pattern and practice of these types of discriminatory, pretextual stops.”

Reacting to the Stroth comments, the popular police blog Second City Cop, said that a pretexual stop is when police stop a vehicle for a minor traffic violation on a suspicion they might uncover a more serious offense, guns or drugs in the car.

Pretextual means something else to the anti-police activists, the site said.

“’Pretextual’ is the progressive buzzword for ‘police stops WE don't like because WE don't have to follow the rules of a civilized society.’”

News reports reacting to COPA’s April 9 release of police bodycam footage of the shooting also blasted police over the number of shots fired to subdue Reed— 96 in less than a minute.

"Literally, each bullet that was fired has to be justified," Sharon Fairley, a law professor at the University of Chicago and former head of COPA was quoted by CBS News.

But Jason Johnson, president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, told Chicago City Wire for an earlier story that the number of shots fired is immaterial to the incident.

“Police were fired upon. That’s evident from the video,” said Johnson, who has 20 years’ experience in law enforcement. “They had to do whatever they could in protecting themselves and the community by neutralizing the threat.”

Johnson noted that most of the rounds were fired into the car while Reed was shooting out. One officer kept firing when Reed stumbled from the car and collapsed in the street at the rear of it. The continued shooting was justified, Johnson said, because it was unclear from viewing the video if Reed was still armed.

In a commentary published in the Chicago Tribune, former mayoral candidate Paul Vallas wrote that Johnson’s proposed $1.25 million settlement was “no surprise.”

“The city always pays,” he wrote. “Suing the city has become a lucrative enterprise, both for those who bring the lawsuits and those whom the city hires to settle them.”

“A growing group of special interests has transformed criminal justice reform into a profitable industry,” he continued. “These include lawyers, advocates, university researchers, consultants and consent decree monitors. For many, it has become a livelihood — and for some, a very lucrative one.”

Over the past five years, Chicago taxpayers have forked over nearly $400 million to resolve lawsuits stemming from officer misconduct, according to a WTTW analysis of city data. While around 1,300 police officers were named in the lawsuits, just 200 were responsible for more than 40 percent of the total cost.

Many of those cases were filed courtesy of former Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, who exonerated more than 250 in her eight years in office. Most of the exonerations stemmed from unsupported claims of police and prosecutorial abuse.