The first meeting to solicit public comment on who should next lead the Chicago Police Department was held in Austin Tuesday evening, as residents of the West Side told members of the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability that the next police boss should have strong ties to the city and have familiarity with the department.
One potential applicant was front of mind: Retired CPD Chief Ernest Cato III.
Over the course of the two-hour meeting, 16 speakers – longtime residents, a teenager, current and former police officers – told commission president Anthony Driver Jr. and Remel Terry, another commission member, that Cato has proven himself to be a community-focused law enforcement officer who knows and cares about the city.
“I have been in meetings with officers who’ve been under his command and I hear them share something that he has taught them, and that speaks to his leadership,” said Arewa Karen Winters, a member of the 15th District Council whose great-nephew was shot and killed by a CPD officer in 2016.
“I believe he deserves this extraordinary opportunity to lead the second-largest police agency in the country and earned the chance to help transform the narrative of what public safety truly means,” Winters said.
Another speaker, Claudia Montoya, told Driver and Terry that Cato is “a man that exudes integrity, trust and understanding.”
Driver later addressed the 80 or so attendees to ask how many of them supported Cato. About 30 people raised their hands.
Cato was a finalist for the superintendent job in 2020, though Mayor Lori Lightfoot eventually offered the job to David Brown, the former chief of police in Dallas. Cato, who joined the CPD in 1992, was the Chief of Area 4 on the West Side when abruptly retired from the department last year at age 57. Cato also previously served as the commander of the Austin District, among other assignments.
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Tuesday’s meeting was the first of four in which the commission will solicit feedback from city residents about what they want in the next leader of the CPD. The next meeting is scheduled for April 19 at St. Sabina Church in Auburn Gresham on the South Side.
The CPD superintendent job opened up last month when Brown announced his resignation just a day after Lightfoot failed to make the runoff election.
Brown’s nearly three years leading the CPD were marked by a sharp increase in violent crime citywide, tanking morale among rank-and-file officers and lagging compliance with the CPD’s consent decree, a series of mandated reforms that were born out of the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald in 2014.
The July 2021 creation of the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability altered the procedure by which a new CPD superintendent is selected.
In the past, the Chicago Police Board would submit three finalists for the job. The mayor would then choose one of those three, and the selected candidate would then require approval by the City Council. Now, the newly created commission will narrow the field of candidates before submitting three finalists to Johnson by mid-July.
Driver has vowed to keep the search process as public as possible.
“The commission was created to inject the community’s voice into public safety,” Driver recently told the Tribune.
