During his ultimately successful run for Chicago mayor, Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson repeated four “Cs” he wanted in Chicago’s next police superintendent: competence, collaboration, compassion and Chicago ties.
It’s a tall order in a time of low officer morale, declining ranks, a pandemic-fueled surge in violence that is only beginning to see a slowdown, and as the Chicago Police Department remains under a complicated federal consent decree.
All of it comes against the backdrop of an incoming mayor who worked during the campaign to overcome statements he’d made supporting reducing department funding, and whose opponent, Paul Vallas, had the support of the city’s largest police union and many in the department’s ranks.
Even when he becomes mayor, Johnson will have little direct control over the search process for a new superintendent: The civilian-led Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, by municipal code, is responsible for finding and selecting a list of candidates.
At a news conference last month, commission members were explicit about their desire to break from past searches steered or sidestepped by previous mayors. The group has until mid-July to submit three names to Johnson, who takes office in mid-May. He can choose one or reject all three, kicking off the search process anew.
While he hasn’t named potential picks, Johnson said he wants someone who understands the city’s dynamics and has the trust of rank-and-file officers.
In an interview with the Tribune on April 5, Johnson said he was “prepared to have a conversation” with Anthony Driver, the president of the CCPSA, and emphasized he wanted community input in the selection.
“I want to make sure that law enforcement, of course, is at the table, the faith community, the business community, and people impacted by violence,” he said, “so that there could be some real discussion of who can help lead and put together a public safety plan with the community that we can actually get behind.”
Driver said the commission, which meets Tuesday for the first time since the election, will hold several forums across the city to solicit feedback from residents about what they want in CPD’s next leader. The commission opened applications for the job last week and “we’ll be going into every community, talking to folks on the front end, getting their feedback (and) talking to rank-and-file officers.”
At the “forefront” of their process, Driver said, is what regular Chicagoans want. “The commission was created to inject the community’s voice into public safety.”
As the commission’s search ramps up, though, Johnson, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul and several current and former police officials have all said they would prefer the next superintendent to come from within CPD.
Whether the commission receives a slew of applications to run one of the nation’s largest police departments is an open question: According to the city’s Police Board, which was in charge of previous superintendent searches, there were 44 applicants when the job opened up in 2011, 39 in 2016 and 25 in 2020.
Few mayors in recent history have been embraced by the rank and file, but Johnson is the first to take office having voiced previous support for the tenets of the defund movement, leading the current head of the city’s largest police union to predict an exodus from the department and “blood in the streets” after Johnson takes office in May. Mass resignations so far have not materialized.
During the campaign, Johnson pledged to quickly promote 200 officers to the bureau of detectives. Those promotions, Johnson reasons, will help improve the department’s clearance rate by lessening the burden on those officers tasked with investigating murders, nonfatal shootings and other violent crimes.
But aside from promising to promote detectives, Johnson has not proposed boosting the ranks of the department itself and, in a news conference on April 6, would not say whether or not he would embrace calls to rehire officers who had left CPD.
Instead, his public safety plans call for investments in nonpolice response and addressing the “root causes of violence. Among those priorities: sending clinicians to mental health emergency calls and civilians to resolve housing and other nonviolent and public health related issues, alongside increased spending on violence intervention, youth jobs and other social services.
“Which would you prefer, to have your crime solved or your crime prevented?” he asked at a March debate.
In the campaign’s final weeks, Johnson walked back his previous support of the “defund” movement and promised not to “reduce the CPD budget by one penny.” Arguing he could secure $150 million in “efficiencies” in CPD’s budget, he vowed to reinvest it to use for additional training and consent decree compliance.
Among proposed cuts: the termination of officers affiliated with far right or white supremacist groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys; redundant non-sergeant supervisory or administrative roles in public relations, graphic design, special projects and photography; an end to the annual $9 million ShotSpotter contract and erasure of the department’s gang database; and closure of CPD’s Homan Square facility.
“The next superintendent has an enormous balancing act,” said Chuck Wexler, the director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, D.C.-based police think tank that has helped with previous executive searches in Chicago. “You have a department where you’re losing officers faster than you can hire them. You’ve got a perpetual violent crime issue — the summer is coming up where traditionally, after March, you see a significant increase in violent crime, shootings and homicides. And you got a new mayor coming in.”
What’s less important, Wexler added, is whether or not the next superintendent comes from within the department.
“The notion that you need someone from outside or inside should be put aside and you should say, ‘Who’s going to be the person to take Chicago and the Chicago Police Department to the next level?’” Wexler said.
Johnson’s superintendent pick will also need approval from the Chicago City Council. Ald. Anthony Napolitano, 41st, is a former police officer and firefighter whose ward includes many first responders.
“Coppers already know that the superintendent answers to the mayor and (expletive) rolls downhill,” he said. “The dynamic here is for the mayor of the city of Chicago to find a superintendent that is honored or acknowledged or respected by the department so that when (expletive) rolls downhill, coppers take it easier.”
Outsiders “don’t know the streets where you were beat up, shot at. Then they come and put your uniform on,” Napolitano said. When David Brown, the city’s last permanent superintendent, took over “and he doesn’t even know where some of the hot spots are in the city of Chicago where you bled, sweat, cried because you watched a life taken, you don’t gain their respect,” Napolitano said.
Brown was selected for the job in April 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic was setting in. In fact, Brown’s introductory news conference was held just hours after the CPD announced the death of an officer who contracted the virus.
Lightfoot chose Brown, an outsider who’d managed the 3,500 sworn officers of the Dallas Police Department, based on his past efforts to implement community policing initiatives and increase transparency, accountability and training for officers.
But in his three years at the helm, Brown faced criticism for his handling of the widespread unrest and looting in the summer of 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a Minnesota police officer.
Meanwhile, violent crime — murders, nonfatal shootings and carjackings — spiked and still remain at levels higher than before the onset of the pandemic. In 2022, the city continued to outpace its pre-pandemic violence totals, recording more than 700 murders and more than 2,100 nonfatal shootings.
A day after Johnson and Paul Vallas advanced to the runoff election, Brown announced his resignation as superintendent. His first deputy, Eric Carter, has led the CPD since then. Weeks before Brown’s exit, Brendan Deenihan, the CPD’s chief of detectives and one of the few members of the command staff widely respected by rank-and-file officers, announced he was leaving the department.
But there are recent signals that a top cop’s origin doesn’t automatically lead to success. Brown’s two most recent full-time predecessors — outsider Garry McCarthy, who came up in the New York City Police Department and led the Newark Police Departments, and CPD veteran Eddie Johnson — were both fired amid controversy.
Then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel ousted McCarthy in November 2015 after the release of the Laquan McDonald shooting video. Lightfoot fired Johnson in December 2019 — just weeks before his scheduled retirement — after she said Johnson lied to her about an embarrassing drinking-and-driving episode near his Bridgeport home.
Anthony Riccio was first deputy superintendent under Johnson. A career Chicago cop, Riccio worked as a violent crimes detective and a district commander, among other assignments, before ascending to the department’s No. 2 post. Perhaps unsurprisingly he is in the camp that believes the next leader of CPD should have a strong familiarity with Chicago and the department.
Riccio said Brown promoted officers too quickly during his tenure as superintendent. Those quick rises through the ranks left new CPD supervisors without the time to develop crucial leadership skills and earn the trust of rank-and-file officers, Riccio said.
“They see you as a political appointee or somebody with clout and they don’t really respect you,” Riccio said. “That’s a problem with a lot of people right now.”
Despite his assurances to the contrary, Brown revived the CPD’s controversial merit promotions system after it was disbanded under interim Superintendent Charlie Beck in late 2019. The merit system was started in the 1990s in an effort to diversify the supervisory ranks of the department, but it soon morphed into a vehicle for clouted officers — mostly white men — to rise up the department’s ranks.
With a relatively new crop of high-ranking supervisors, Riccio said, Mayor-elect Johnson would be wise to consider several members of the command staff who have retired in recent years, though he insisted that he would not want the job himself. However, he said he’d be willing to step into the superintendent’s role in an interim capacity if asked to.
“I think the retired bench is pretty deep, actually,” Riccio said.
Some likely applicants for the superintendent job include Ernest Cato III, the former chief of the CPD counterterrorism unit, who previously worked as the deputy chief of Area 4, which covers Johnson’s Austin neighborhood home. Cato was a finalist for the superintendent job in 2020, and he abruptly resigned from the department last September.
Angel Novalez, the chief of CPD’s office of constitutional policing and reform, is another possibility, as are retired Chief of Patrol Fred Waller, Chief of Counterterrorism Larry Snelling, Chief of Internal Affairs Yolanda Talley and Tina Skahill, the executive director of CPD’s office of constitutional policing and reform.
Regardless of whom Johnson selects for the job, the next superintendent will have to work within the mandates of CPD’s federal consent decree — a court-enforced series of reforms that were born out of the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald in 2014 and the ensuing investigation of CPD by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor and police accountability expert, said, “More than anything, what CPD needs is a superintendent with courage and vision.”
Since the consent decree was approved in January 2019, the CPD has largely taken a “check the box” approach to its requirements, Futterman added. The next superintendent, he said, must be unequivocal in their commitment to complying with the reforms and be unafraid to challenge the CPD’s historic resistance to change.
Futterman said the departure of veteran officers — those hesitant to embrace the CPD’s reform efforts — may be necessary to ensure a lasting shift in the department’s culture.
“The next superintendent also has to have the same courage and fortitude to draw that hard line,” Futterman said. “You’re not with that program? You’re not a part of the change that we need to be to make the people of Chicago safer? Good riddance, we don’t need you. You’re not helping.”
The Use of Force Working Group, a collection of 20 city leaders, stakeholders and activists that convened after the unrest during the summer of 2020, issued a damning report in March that concluded CPD’s training policies and procedures still reinforce many of the ideas that the consent decree aims to quell.
“CPD training reinforces an ‘us against them’ culture that pits police officers against community members and teaches officers to fear the people of Chicago — to see everyone who is not the police as a potential threat,” the report reads. “Rather than challenge CPD’s culture of denying the reality of police abuse, CPD training teaches officers how to justify and even cover up unnecessary police violence.”
The independent monitoring team tasked with grading the CPD’s compliance with the consent decree, led by former federal prosecutor Maggie Hickey, said last December the department was at some level of compliance with 78% of the decree’s requirements. However, the majority of that compliance was categorized as “preliminary,” meaning that the CPD had only finalized a policy to address a particular mandate. The department has only reached “full compliance” on 5% of the consent decree’s requirements.
The monitoring team also found CPD regressed in several crucial areas, such as fully staffing the office that evaluates and monitors instances in which an officer pointed a gun at a civilian.
In September 2022, Brown fired Robert Boik, the head of the CPD’s office of constitutional policing and reform, after Boik protested Brown’s plan to take several dozen officers out of the reform office and move them back to the bureau of patrol.
Boik said that “building morale internally is really one of the primary objectives of the next superintendent.”
“That superintendent really needs to be able to walk in the door, whoever they are, and have credibility with the rank and file,” Boik said. “The consent decree contemplates culture change, and a lot of that can be pushed from the top down, but true culture change has to come from the bottom up. And so, the next superintendent has to be able to have the trust of the rank and file as the department pursues these structural changes that are necessary and contemplated under the consent decree.”
One veteran CPD supervisor, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that whoever next leads the department will immediately need the respect of rank and file to cultivate a feeling of stability that, the supervisor said, was lacking under Brown.
“This is a semimilitary organization,” the supervisor said. “You need that routine and stability and, right now, we don’t have any of that.”
The Fraternal Order of Police, the union that represents rank-and-file officers, detectives and retirees, endorsed Vallas in the mayoral election. The union local’s president, John Catanzara, told The New York Times last month that he expected at least 800 CPD officers to resign if Johnson was elected.
Several police officers told the Tribune they believe Catanzara’s support of Vallas is one of the reasons behind the former CPS CEO’s defeat in the mayoral runoff.
“If I’m honest, I think Catanzara may have some blame here,” one officer, who was not authorized to speak to the media, said after Johnson was declared the winner. “His continued missteps were fodder for progressives. He’s our own worst enemy.”
Catanzara, a regular sparring partner with Lightfoot, was reelected in March to another three-year term as union president.
The CPD has roughly 1,500 officer vacancies. Last month, the department announced the creation of two programs aimed at luring back officers who have quit in recent years and to attract officers from other municipalities.
At a news conference about two recent deaths in the Chicago Fire Department, Lightfoot was asked what advice she would give Johnson about leadership in those moments. She urged him: “Be humble. Be grateful. Our first responders literally give their lives. There’s a lot of rhetoric that’s out there about first responders, particularly on the police side.”
“It’s hard to motivate people when they don’t think that their leader has their back, and it’s absolutely essential. It’s why I go to roll calls,” she said. “That’s why I reach out, and we may not agree on every issue, but I thank the Lord every single day for the first responders, the firemen, the police officers, the 911 call takers and dispatchers. They experience trauma that none of us will see in a lifetime.”
