Mayor Brandon Johnson has selected Larry Snelling, the Chicago Police Department’s chief of the bureau of counterterrorism and a longtime instructor at the training academy, to serve as the next permanent superintendent.
A South Side native who joined the department in 1992, Snelling, 54, is considered to be CPD’s preeminent expert on firearms and use-of-force tactics. His ascent to the top position will require approval by the full City Council.
“Chief Snelling is a proven leader who has the experience and the respect of his peers to help ensure the safety and well-being of city residents, and address the complex challenges we all face related to community safety,” Johnson said in a press release Sunday.
A press conference introducing Snelling as the choice for the city’s next top cop is expected late Monday morning.
“It is a tremendous honor to answer the call to serve my hometown and the people of Chicago as superintendent of the Chicago Police Department. It is also a tremendous responsibility, and one that I do not take lightly,” Snelling said in a statement.
“While I am humbled by this moment, I stand ready to lead and uphold Mayor Johnson’s ‘three Cs’ of competence, compassion and collaboration, and keep that vision at the forefront in addressing safety on every street, every block and in every neighborhood,” he added.
Snelling was chosen over two other finalists, CPD Chief of Constitutional Policing and Reform Angel Novalez, and Shon Barnes, the chief of police in Madison, Wisconsin.
Anthony Driver Jr., the president of the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, the body that submitted the three finalists to Johnson last month, issued a statement Sunday.
“Chief Snelling’s remarkable career and long tenure with the Chicago Police Department make him an exceptional choice for the role of Superintendent,” Driver said. “His proven leadership as chief of the bureau that focuses on criminal networks and narcotics, his dedication to cultivating robust community relations, and his fervent commitment to elevating professional standards within the Department set him apart as a proven leader.”
His selection to become the 64th leader of Chicago Police Department caps off a rapid rise through the ranks for Snelling, who, less than five years ago, was just a sergeant.
Snelling will helm the country’s second-largest police department as swaths of the city, particularly disadvantaged communities of color, continue to be plagued with high levels of gun violence. Fatal and nonfatal shootings are down in recent years, but still outpace pre-pandemic totals.
Meanwhile, as CPD continues to struggle in its efforts to comply with a federal consent decree, a recent survey found that a growing share of residents harbor deep distrust of the city’s police officers and public perception of the department continues to worsen amid low officer morale and skyrocketing overtime costs.
Snelling has spent more than half of his career as an instructor at CPD’s training academy .
He has twice been honored with the department’s Life Saving Award, has received four department commendations, 57 honorable mentions and 13 physical fitness emblems of recognition, according to his city employee personnel file. Snelling received a bachelor’s degree in Adult Education and Leadership from DePaul University in 2014.
His 18 years at the police academy made him CPD’s foremost authority on use-of-force, the use of firearms and report writing. According to his resume, Snelling is certified to teach courses on active shooter scenarios, the use of Tasers, firearms and batons, as well as personal fitness. Aside from teaching police procedures, he’s also a certified CrossFit instructor.
As a result of his expertise, Snelling has been called to testify as an expert witness in more than two dozen civil and criminal cases involving police officers.
Among those cases was the 2018 criminal trial of three CPD officers who were accused of conspiring to cover up the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald four years earlier. Those three officers were ultimately acquitted in a bench trial.
Snelling also testified in the police board proceedings of four officers who faced administrative charges also stemming from the 2014 McDonald shooting on the Southwest Side. All four were eventually fired.
While on the witness stand, Snelling was asked why McDonald, who was armed with a knife, should not have been considered an armed assailant. According to Illinois Appellate Court records, Snelling said:
“A subject becomes an assailant when that subject commits an act of furtherance other than just being armed. Police officers come in contact with people who are armed all the time,” he said, “If there was a movement in furtherance toward the officer that you could actually see in the video, then it would rise to the level of deadly force, but I can’t see it in the video.”
A sergeant as recently as 2019, Snelling’s ascent through the ranks has been quick. He’s gained admirers along the way, too.
“You have to have a police superintendent that’s willing to work with these community organizations and give them the power that they deserve,” Darryl Smith, the president of the Englewood Political Task Force, said during the CCPSA’s April 19 forum at St. Sabina Church in Auburn Gresham. “You can not police from a book. You have to talk to the people that are out here every day, dealing with this every day, and my choice is Chief Larry Snelling.”
Smith was just one of dozens of city residents who urged the CCPSA to nominate candidates with longstanding ties to the CPD and the city.
Pending his approval by the full City Council, Snelling will replace former CPD superintendent David Brown, who was tapped for the job by former Mayor Lori Lightfoot in April 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic was still in its infancy. Brown’s tenure as head of the CPD was marked by a spike in violent crime, several incidents of civil unrest and looting, and low officer morale. Brown, who was previously the chief of police in Dallas, his hometown, announced his resignation as CPD superintendent in March after Lightfoot failed to qualify for the mayoral runoff election.
After Johnson was sworn in as mayor last April, he selected Fred Waller, CPD’s former chief of patrol, to serve as interim superintendent during the search for Brown’s permanent replacement.
Records from the city’s Department of Human Resources show that Snelling joined CPD in 1992 after working as a waiter at a restaurant in Hyde Park. For the first two years of his career he was a patrol officer in the Englewood and Morgan Park districts on the South Side. From 1994 to 1998, he was back in Englewood, this time as a tactical and gang team officer.
CPD records show that Snelling was the subject of two sustained misconduct complaints in the mid-1990s. He was suspended for a total of seven days in those two cases, according to CPD internal affairs records.
Snelling’s first sustained complaint came in 1994.
Around 7 a.m. on May 12, 1994, Snelling and another officer were assigned to take two male arrestees from the Englewood District station to the Chicago Lawn District station a few miles west. During the ride, one of the men tried to strike up a conversation with Snelling and his partner but he was rebuffed, according to CPD internal affairs records.
“The passenger officer, with badge #9919, now known as Larry Snelling, became angry with him and asked him ‘Do you take me as a joke (expletive) ; do you think you know everything?’” CPD investigators wrote of the allegations.
The officer who was driving then pulled the van over, and he and Snelling got out and opened the side door, records show. It was then that Snelling allegedly struck the man, who was arrested for domestic battery, in the face.
Records show Snelling denied that he hit the man or called him an expletive.
Snelling was implicated in a far more serious disciplinary case a year later when he allegedly pointed his gun at another driver — also an off-duty police officer — who was traveling through Englewood. And though he again denied wrongdoing, Snelling was eventually found to have violated CPD rules that prohibit “unlawful use or display of a weapon” and “engaging in any unjustified verbal or physical altercation with any person while on or off duty.”
Snelling admitted to investigators that he was driving his Jeep on Garfield when he “had a traffic altercation.” Snelling said he called the driver of the Cadillac an “idiot” after the driver nearly struck his Jeep. And though he had his gun in his waistband, Snelling denied that he pointed it at anyone. He also said that he didn’t refer to the driver with a racist term or call him an expletive.
Internal affairs investigators said Snelling’s explanation didn’t hold water, and the two allegations against him were sustained, CPD records show.
Snelling took a leave of absence from the department from 1998 to 2000 when he was a regional security director for AT&T. Upon his return to the department in 2001, he was once again assigned to the training academy where he was a physical skills instructor until 2010.
In August of that year Snelling was promoted to sergeant. The promotion came by way of the CPD’s much-maligned “merit” system, which was launched in the mid-1990s as a way to bolster racial and gender diversity among the police department’s supervisors.
A merit promotion is awarded to an officer after they are nominated by a member of the CPD’s command staff and approved by the department’s merit board. Though noble in intent, the merit promotions system has been long seen as a way to reward political cronyism within CPD’s ranks.
The U.S. Department of Justice investigated the department in the wake of the release of the McDonald shooting video in 2015. In their summary report, federal investigators said: “Many of the officers we spoke with, minority and non-minority alike, told us they feel merit promotions are not truly based on merit, but rather the clout you hold in the department or who you know.”
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Snelling’s two merit nominators — retired CPD deputy chief Matthew Tobias and retired Lt. Daniel Godsel — did not respond to interview requests.
After he was promoted to sergeant in 2010, Snelling was once again assigned to the Morgan Park District, but records show he was there for only a year. In 2011, he was back at the CPD training academy where he remained until May 2019 when he received another merit promotion to the rank of lieutenant. He then returned to the Englewood District.
In February 2020, eight months after he was promoted to lieutenant, Snelling was promoted to commander of the Englewood District. The following summer, as cities across the country were gripped by civil unrest after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, a police shooting in the Englewood District left the neighborhood on edge.
On Aug. 9, 2020, someone called 911 to report a male with a gun was near a park at 57th and Racine. Officers assigned to the CPD’s Community Safety Team responded to the call, and upon arrival they saw 20-year-old Latrell Allen. Allen ran off, but officers caught up with him in a nearby alley. Allen allegedly fired several shots at officers, who returned fire and shot Allen in the shoulder. Allen was charged with attempted murder and a Cook County jury found him guilty earlier this summer.
After the shooting, former police superintendent David Brown said that “misinformation” about the circumstances of the shooting led to a round of looting throughout the city’s downtown area. Police reform advocates planned to protest the shooting outside the Englewood District station on 63rd Street, but they were met by longtime neighborhood residents who chastised them for making their plans without first informing members of the Englewood community.
Four months after the shooting, in December 2020, Snelling was promoted to Deputy Chief of Area 2, which covers the four CPD patrol districts on the city’s Far South Side. Snelling was named the Chief of CPD’s Bureau of Counterterrorism — which oversees narcotics and gang investigations, as well as SWAT team operations — in October 2022 after his predecessor, Ernest Cato III, abruptly retired from the department.
