Did Chief Keef Shoot at the Police? What the 2011 Report Says

No. According to the Chicago police report, Chief Keef never fired at officers. On December 2, 2011, a 16-year-old Keith Cozart ran from police on the South Side with a loaded handgun and turned to point it at the officers chasing him, twice. The officers were the ones who fired. They missed, caught him in the chase and took the gun. So it wasn’t a shootout. It was a teenager pointing a pistol at police, with police shooting back at him.

The gun was not an AK-47 or a Draco either, whatever the internet remembers. The report describes a “blue-steel handgun.” The AKs in Chief Keef’s story come later, in a 2014 Instagram post and a 2017 accusation that was dropped. Here’s the full record, what each gun actually was, and where the Draco fits in.

Table of Contents

Did Chief Keef Shoot at the Police?

No. The Chief Keef police report says a 16-year-old Keef pointed a loaded handgun at officers during a foot chase on December 2, 2011, and that the officers fired at him and missed. He didn’t pull the trigger, at least not according to the only official account there is. The police reports, obtained and published by DNAinfo Chicago in January 2013, say he pointed the gun and the officers “discharged their weapons.” Nothing in the report says he pulled the trigger. The charges match that. They were for assault with a firearm, which in Illinois means putting someone in reasonable fear of being hurt, not for firing at anyone. Some summaries, including the opening of his Wikipedia biography, say he was arrested for firing a gun from his car. The police report that DNAinfo published describes a foot chase and says nothing about him firing.

Date	December 2, 2011
Place	South Side of Chicago, near his grandmother’s home
His age	16
The gun	A loaded “blue-steel handgun,” make and model not published
Who fired	The officers. They missed.
Charges	Three counts of aggravated assault with a firearm on a police officer, aggravated unlawful use of a weapon, resisting arrest
Outcome	Guilty plea to unlawful use of a weapon, 18 months’ probation, home confinement at his grandmother’s house

The Chief Keef Police Chase: What Happened on December 2, 2011

Officers were answering a call about shots fired when they saw Keef leave his grandmother’s house holding a coat over his hands, in front of his waistband. That’s a posture any street cop reads as someone hiding a gun. An officer stopped to question him. Keef dropped the coat, showed the handgun and ran through a vacant lot next door.

During the chase he turned around and pointed the pistol back at the officers, and then did it again. Officers fired at him and missed. They caught him, recovered the gun and found it loaded. He was 16, already on juvenile supervision from a drug case earlier that year, and about to become the most talked-about rapper in Chicago.

Prosecutors charged him with four felonies: three counts of aggravated assault with a firearm on a police officer and one count of aggravated unlawful use of a weapon, plus a misdemeanor for resisting arrest. Because he was a juvenile, the case went through juvenile court. He spent about four weeks in the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center before a judge released him to home confinement.

What Gun Did Chief Keef Have?

The one detail on the record is the finish: the report calls it a “blue-steel handgun,” and says it was loaded. The make, model and caliber have never been published, and no photo of it exists. Anyone who names a make, or tells you it was a Draco or an AK, is guessing.

“Blue steel” describes bluing, a controlled rusting process that turns the surface of carbon steel a deep blue-black and gives it some protection against corrosion. It’s the traditional finish on revolvers and older semi-automatic pistols. In a police description it mostly tells you the gun was dark rather than chrome or stainless. It rules out a nickel-plated gun and very little else.

Why a 16-Year-Old Couldn’t Legally Have It

Illinois law was only part of his problem. Under federal law, 18 U.S.C. § 922(x)(2), it’s “unlawful for any person who is a juvenile to knowingly possess” a handgun, and a juvenile is anyone under 18. The exceptions are narrow ones such as ranching, farming, target practice or hunting, and the juvenile has to carry a parent’s written consent. None of them covers carrying a loaded pistol on a Chicago street. On top of that, Illinois requires a FOID card to possess any firearm, and aggravated unlawful use of a weapon is its felony charge for carrying one illegally. Our Illinois gun laws guide covers how that works for adults today, and if you’re choosing a legal carry gun of your own, start with our best concealed carry handguns.

The Plea, the House Arrest and the Kanye Remix

In January 2012 Keef pleaded guilty to unlawful use of a weapon and got 18 months’ probation. The conditions barred him from guns, illegal drugs and contact with gang members. He served the home confinement part at his grandmother’s house, and that’s where his career took off.

“I Don’t Like” went viral that spring, and Kanye West jumped on the remix. Because Keef couldn’t leave the house, a makeshift studio was brought in and he recorded his parts at his grandmother’s place while still on house arrest. Later that year he signed with Interscope Records. All of it happened while he was on probation for the gun he’d pointed at police.

The Gun Range Video That Sent Him Back to Detention

Chief Keef went back to juvenile detention in January 2013 because of a gun range video, not the 2011 chase. In 2012 Pitchfork posted an interview filmed at a shooting range in New York. It showed Keef getting firearm instruction, then loading and firing a semi-automatic Ruger rifle at a paper target of a man, with the hits landing in the chest. Pitchfork later took it down, but prosecutors had already seen it. Holding and firing a gun on camera looked a lot like breaking a probation that banned guns.

On January 15, 2013, Cook County juvenile judge Carl Anthony Walker agreed. He ruled that the video was a probation violation and said Keef had shown a “clear disregard for the court’s authority.” Keef was taken into custody in the courtroom and, two days later, sentenced to two months at the Illinois Youth Center in St. Charles. He was released on March 14, 2013.

A supervised range session with an instructor is ordinary for most shooters. For a juvenile on probation with a no-guns condition, it cost him two months.

Did Chief Keef Have an AK-47?

Chief Keef has never been convicted of anything involving an AK-47. AKs show up twice in his story, once in 2014 Instagram photos and once in a 2017 accusation that prosecutors declined to charge.

The 2014 Instagram Photos

In March 2014, a day or two before a shooting at a Northfield, Illinois, mansion rented by his manager, Keef posted photos of guns on Instagram, including an AK-47. CBS Chicago described one as showing Keef holding a gun while an associate pointed an AK-47. When a person was shot at the Northfield house on March 26, Keef was there. His lawyer said he witnessed the shooting but didn’t fire the gun, and no arrests were reported.

The 2017 Ramsay Tha Great Accusation

In January 2017 Keef was arrested in Los Angeles after his former producer, Ramsay Tha Great, accused him of breaking into his home, beating him, taking his Rolex and holding an AK-47. That’s most likely the AK people are half-remembering. Prosecutors declined to file charges in April 2018 for lack of evidence. By then the accuser was serving a 10-year prison sentence of his own, and another witness had stopped cooperating with investigators. There was no trial and no conviction.

So Was It a Draco?

No. No police report, court record or news account from any of these cases mentions a Draco. The 2011 gun was a handgun, and the AK in the 2017 accusation was described as an AK-47. The Draco gets pulled into Chief Keef’s story because of the music: it’s the gun of the drill era he helped start, so it’s easy to picture him holding one.

A Draco is an AK-pattern pistol built at the Cugir factory in Romania and imported by Century Arms, which also started making its own US versions in 2017. It fires the same 7.62×39 round as an AK-47 rifle. With no stock, federal law classes it as a pistol, so it’s sold and carried under handgun rules, not rifle rules. The Micro Draco cuts the barrel to 6.25 inches, which is why it looks almost comically short in music videos.

Rap turned it into a star. Future released a single called “Draco” on February 21, 2017, and by then the word was all over drill and trap lyrics, partly because it just sounds good in a bar. GunsAmerica tied a jump in Draco sales to its run in rap songs in 2016 and 2017. If you want the real thing, our Draco buying guide breaks down all five Draco models, and here’s what the two best-known ones cost right now:

The Draco isn’t the only AK pistol worth a look. Zastava’s ZPAP M92 tops our ranking, and PSA builds cheaper US-made options. See the full list in our best AK pistols guide. If you’d rather have the full-length rifle from the 2017 story, start with the AK-47 buyer’s guide. The classic imported choice is the Romanian WASR-10:

The Other Times Gunfire Came Near Chief Keef

Two later incidents get mixed into the “Chief Keef police shootout” story, and in both he was on the receiving end or nowhere near the trigger.

• Times Square, June 2018. Just before 5 a.m. on a Saturday in June, shots were fired outside the W Hotel in Times Square, leaving a bullet hole in the facade. New York detectives looked into whether Keef was the target. He told police about an online feud with another rapper. Nobody was hurt.
• Tarzana, September 2018. Burglary suspects trying to break into Keef’s Los Angeles home fired a shot at LAPD officers. TMZ reported that Keef was home at the time. Police caught both suspects after a five-hour search. So the one time there really was gunfire at police, it happened at his house, and he wasn’t accused of anything.

Why the Story Still Gets Told Wrong

The Chief Keef police shootout story survives because of the music. Keef is widely credited with taking Chicago drill mainstream, and drill is music about guns. When the lyrics are full of Dracos and “smoking” opps, a real police chase at 16 gets remembered as a gunfight, and the gun in the memory turns into the one from the songs. The record says something plainer: a kid with a handgun, officers who fired and missed, and a guilty plea to a weapons charge.

He’s still recording. Based in Los Angeles since 2014, he released the mixtape Skeletor in April 2026, and his US tour behind it opened in Chicago on September 12. For the drill rapper whose gun really is on the record, read our piece on King Von’s Glock 26, and for more famous people and their firearms, see our celebrity guns roundup.

Shopping for a pistol of your own? Our handgun deals page tracks the best current prices across more than 200 retailers.

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Featured image: Chief Keef in 2019, photo by glenjamn3, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0, with added text. Draco photo: Century Arms manufacturer product image.