After two fatal officer-involved shootings in early 2023, the Rantoul Police Department conducted internal investigations into the use of force during those incidents.
Newly obtained documents show the department cleared three officers involved in the city’s first-ever fatal police shootings — including the two who pulled the trigger — and found one officer violated department policies.
In February, Officer Jose Aceves shot and killed 21-year-old Azaan Lee, and in June, Officer Jerry King shot and killed 18-year-old Jordan Richardson in the village of 12,000 north of Champaign-Urbana.
The internal investigations into the shootings occurred in the weeks following the incidents. But the findings were not made public on the department’s transparency site until Nov. 9 — 11 days after the Invisible Institute and Illinois Public Media requested the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The documents reveal that, while Rantoul police absolved both Aceves and King of wrongdoing, the department’s Use of Force Review Board made almost identical recommendations for additional department-level training in both cases.
This story is part of a partnership focusing on police misconduct in Champaign County between the Champaign-Urbana Civic Police Data Project of the Invisible Institute, a Chicago-based nonprofit public accountability journalism organization, and IPM Newsroom, which provides news about Illinois & in-depth reporting on Agriculture, Education, the Environment, Health, and Politics, powered by Illinois Public Media. This investigation was supported with funding from the Data-Driven Reporting Project, which is funded by the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University | Medill.