The police superintendent is the most consequential hire a new Chicago mayor can make.
There is no greater responsibility than public safety, and the police budget constitutes the largest fiscal expenditure under the mayor’s direct control. The pending selection of the superintendent has added importance, given the spread of violent crime into downtown and other affluent areas while remaining pervasive in the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
The superintendent selection process implemented by the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability is thoughtfully designed to involve the community, gain stakeholder feedback and solicit ideas from potential applicants on the issues affecting Chicago. It certainly provides an avenue for more candidates to be considered both in-house and externally and forces the mayor to be more transparent in justifying a rejection of recommended candidates.
At the end of the day, the mayor is ultimately going to select the candidate he wants, whether he picks from the commission’s three finalists or rejects those candidates and has the commission produce a new slate and possibly even reopen the search.
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The part of the selection process that has long been wanting is the City Council’s role in approving the mayor’s nominee. Chicago is one of the only major cities that is totally dominated by the office of the mayor. This has led to consistently poor decisions that result in outsize problems, such as the selling of city assets like the parking meter and Skyway deals.
It has also led to bad mayoral appointments, most recently David Brown, whose nomination as superintendent was rubber-stamped by the council — as is the case with nearly all mayoral appointments. By law, the City Council should be the ultimate check on the quality of a mayor’s selection of superintendent through serious vetting of the candidate.
The council’s scrutiny of Johnson’s nominee is going to be critical given his apparent indifference to worsening crime. While homicides and shootings have dropped slightly in 2022, that positive comes with two sobering caveats. First, it is in line with a national trend and decidedly not a reflection of anything Chicago is doing. Second, it is a statistical dodge of the fact that overall crime is up this year by 38%, according to the Chicago Police Department’s latest data.
Yet, two months on, Johnson, his administration and his transition team have had little to say on the subject of public safety. The mayor seems to respond to each violent weekend by either ignoring events or lecturing us about historic injustices and generational disinvestment and telling us he’s focused on the “long game.” In the mayor’s world, the driving force behind homicides, shootings, carjackings, auto thefts, retail thefts and armed robberies is historical “inequity” and the solution lies in the future redressment of root causes. He appears untroubled by the violence that continues now.
Make no mistake. Root causes are absolutely critical to a larger vision for public safety. But meanwhile, lives are being lost, mostly Black lives, and that is not being acknowledged. An incoming superintendent has to carry the authority and support of a mayor to make the case for the size of the department and deployment strategies needed to address crime now and in a way that makes the case to the officers themselves that this, too, is what they want.
The City Council can help by focusing on two fundamental issues during its confirmation hearings: What will the nominee do to contain crime? What resources and support does the department need to accomplish that?
The superintendent’s job is not about addressing root causes. It’s about violence containment, and there is no substitute for providing police the resources and support needed to accomplish that. To help this process along, the mayor’s superintendent nominee should be queried on the following, among other issues:
* Implementing a policing strategy that prioritizes local police beat integrity for a timely 911 call response.
* Increasing the percentage of officers assigned as detectives and inviting retired officers to serve as analysts and help protect witnesses and victims.
* Freezing the demoralizing “friends and family” merit promotions.
* Restoring patrol officers to a normal, predictable, humane work schedule.
* Expanding the pool of officer candidates by streamlining the process for officers to transfer from other police departments and inviting former CPD officers to return with no loss of seniority.
* Canceling CTA private security contracts to finance 300 additional police officers to cover CTA stations, walk platforms and ride trains.
It’s important to note that restoring police strength is less about additional funding and more about allowing CPD to fill vacancies and deploy officers more effectively. The city has historically neglected to fill police vacancies as a way to help balance its budget. The reality is that the potential savings from vacancies is largely negated by overtime spending, — a record $210 million last year — for an increasingly overworked and demoralized force.
With a “perfect storm” of an underresourced CPD, the penalizing of proactive policing and a permissive state’s attorney and courts, violence and disorder are reaching epic proportions. While there’s a need to address the underlying causes of violence and provide the service supports and anti-violence outreach workers so police are not the only responders, there is no substitute for providing CPD with the resources, strategy and support needed to contain the violence.
Before confirmation, the City Council must ensure that the next police superintendent understands that — until the day when redressment of root causes has produced equity for all.
Paul Vallas is an adviser for the Illinois Policy Institute. He ran for Chicago mayor this year and in 2019 and was previously budget director for the city and CEO of Chicago Public Schools.
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