Two months since the retirement of former police Superintendent Larry Snelling, Chicagoans have had their say in what the priorities of the next Chicago Police Department boss should be.
And maybe it’s no surprise, they want everything.
“If there’s something going on in my community, something as minor as dogs who are travelling through the community, we don’t call the dog catcher — we call the police,” Sharon Pincham, president of the West Chesterfield Community Association, said at a recent public meeting. “The police are the ones we ask to respond first and foremost to come somewhere so they can assess what needs to happen. I don’t call a social worker when I have a problem.”
With a Nov. 12 deadline to submit three finalists to Mayor Brandon Johnson, the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability has now completed five listening sessions, held across the city, to solicit feedback from residents about what qualities should be held by the next superintendent.
It’s not known how many applications have already been submitted for the job — the opening was posted on Aug. 27 and will close on Sept. 24 — but the insights shared with commissioners will now be used to craft questions for prospective candidates who advance to the interview stage.
“Chicago deserves a superintendent who understands the progress our city has made and is ready to build on it,” CCPSA President Remel Terry said in a recent statement. “We’ve seen historic reductions in violent crime, a department continuing to implement meaningful reforms, and communities that expect both safety and accountability. We’re looking for an experienced leader who is ready to take on that work and move the Department forward.”
The listening sessions
In recent weeks, CCPSA members heard from dozens of residents calling for more thorough training of police officers and fuller adherence to the consent decree, as well as a commitment to investigate the Police Department’s relationship with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Several more urged the department’s next leader to be a local — as Snelling was — but unlike in the 2023 superintendent search, so far there has been no campaigning on behalf of any prospective candidate.
“The most important thing, in my mind, that I want out of the next police superintendent is an enthusiastic commitment to prioritize the safety of Chicagoans over solidarity with other law enforcement agents,” Noelle Clennon, an organizer with Indivisible Lincoln Square, told Terry and Commissioner Sandra Wortham during a listening session earlier this month at DePaul College Prep.
Clennon was among many police reform advocates who spoke at the hearings to call for greater transparency and accountability regarding the Police Department’s relationship with ICE since the federal agency started its surge in enforcement in the Chicago area a year ago.
Others, primarily older, Black residents from the West and South sides, raised alarms about day-to-day policing issues in the parts of the city most afflicted by crime and other quality-of-life deficiencies.
Snelling retired July 15, and city law gives CCPSA 120 days to submit three job finalists to the mayor, who will then nominate his selection for a vote by the full City Council. A search firm has been retained, and CCPSA will vote on the body’s three nominees during its Nov. 12 meeting. During the last search for a superintendent, in 2023, CCPSA received 54 applications and conducted interviews with 16 candidates.
Snelling left the Police Department after nearly three years as superintendent, garnering praise from residents and leaders across the city. In the months since, though, bureaucratic and ideological differences within the CCPSA were put on full display.
Shortly after Snelling stepped down, CCPSA Commissioner Anthony Driver Jr. — the body’s former president, who oversaw the 2023 search — wrote to aldermen asking them to amend the city ordinance to allow for more time to conduct the search. Several aldermen told the Tribune that the effort never gained traction, but with Chicago’s next mayoral election coming in February 2027, it remains unclear exactly who the next CPD superintendent will report to.
After Snelling retired, Mayor Brandon Johnson named Fred Waller, a longtime CPD supervisor and former chief of patrol, as interim superintendent. Waller remains in charge as the process plays out.
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Infighting on the rise
Before the commission held its Aug. 27 meeting and listening session, about a dozen organizers with the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression held a small rally outside Morgan Park High School to urge changes to bylaws that would allow for the removal of a commissioner — Wortham — from a CCPSA working group.
Wortham, a South Side native who’s the daughter of a retired CPD sergeant and sister of slain Officer Thomas Wortham, works as an attorney and also serves as executive board president of the Chicago Police Memorial Foundation.
“Corruption remains throughout the Chicago Police Department, and that is why this commission exists — to address and root out the corruption,” Jasmine Smith, co-chair of the CAARPR, said before the Aug. 27 meeting. “Commissioner Sandra Wortham comes to this meeting every month and gives speeches claiming that those of us who show up here to demand this commission do their job, the job of addressing the racism and corruption in CPD, do not represent the community. That is a lie. It is Commissioner Wortham who does not represent the community.”
Activists later charged that Terry violated democratic principles by “choosing to shield Commissioner Wortham from truthfully meeting the demands of the people to end the brutality and mistreatment of Black and Brown Chicagoans at the hands of the CPD.”
During the meeting that followed, Wortham said the effort to change the bylaws was a thinly veiled attempt to stifle debate and “usurp the bylaws and the existing authority of the president to kick someone off of a work group with no cause because you don’t like their opinions.’”
“This whole narrative that this is about democracy is a false narrative lacking an origin story,” Wortham said. “No one ever had a problem with work groups until I was on (the) Traffic Stops (working group) for CPD policy and until I was on (the) Superintendent Search (working group). And I happen to have a different opinion than the majority of my colleagues.”
It was disclosed that five commissioners asked for a vote of no-confidence in Terry, though none was called. A change to CCPSA bylaws was approved, though, to allow any four commissioners to add an item to a meeting agenda.
Differing priorities
Roughly 100 people attended the meeting at Morgan Park High School, and generational fault lines quickly emerged.
Most of the younger attendees and speakers focused on officer oversight, discipline and training, while older attendees raised concerns about experienced officers being taken out of majority-Black patrol districts on the South Side and reassigned to white neighborhoods on the North Side.
At times, the sides traded jeers and loud protests when a speaker went beyond their allotted two minutes.
As is always the case, the Police Department’s next permanent leader will face a host of challenges beyond the incursion of federal immigration agents and adherence to the consent decree.
After several consecutive years of decreasing violence, citywide murders and nonfatal shootings are, effectively, flat in 2026 compared with a year earlier. However, CPD data show, violence trends vary by neighborhood. A dramatic spike in shootings within Area 1, covering most of the South Side between Cermak Road and 79th Street, has offset decreases in violence within the department’s four other patrol areas.
The uptick in violence is especially present in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. Speaking with the Tribune recently, Ald. Raymond Lopez, 15th, urged a “back to basics” approach to stifling shootings.
“We need to get back to common sense and doing what we know works: to go after these magnets of violence in our neighborhood,” Lopez said. “Go after the troubled buildings, go after the bad actors and businesses that support gang and drug activity. Prosecute them, build the cases that investigate where the weapons and the connectivity between the weapons and the gang leaders are, as well as track the shootings and put technology to use to catch these individuals.”