How a New CPD Supt Gets Picked

On today's show we discuss the new process for how a new superintendent (supt) for the Chicago Police Department gets selected. With the creation of the new Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability the process is slightly different from the last time a new supt was selected. In years past the Chicago Police Board would select 3 candidates for the job of supt and send that list to the mayor. Legally it seemed the mayor was forced to either selected his/her pick from that list or return the entire list to the Board for the to select a new slate of candidates. Historically mayors have just ignored the Board's selections and hired their own choice for supt. It seems like Mayor Lightfoot did choose from the list provided but it has been reported that the Board knew that the Mayor had a person in mind so they made sure to put that candidate on their short list. Now the selection process for a new supt is run by the Commission. There certainly seems like there Is potential for real change. However, some recent comments by the Commission's interim President Anthony Driver Jr have me a little worried about the potential for real change. Driver Jr was recently quoted talking about how rank and file officers didn't feel that former Superintendent David Brown had their backs. Driver Jr serving as a megaphone for alt right rhetoric that comes straight from the alt right leadership of the Fraternal Order of Police is very concerning. Driver Jr seems to think that they are going to find some one for the position of supt that cannot unite the alt right of the department, with the residents of Chicago concerned about police misconduct, and policymakers in to a united front to fight crime and violence in Chicago. Obviously this is folly. The fact that his is coming from the person leading the organization that is selecting the candidates to be the next supt is very, very concerning.

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Hello everyone, welcome to the Chicago Justice Project. So glad you are here with us. I'm Tracy Siskin. I'm host and executive director of the Chicago Justice Project. Find out more about what we do at Chicagojustice.org. Get involved, the cjpnation.org. And if you want to support our work, there's a link to our Patreon below. So today we're going to be talking about picking a new superintendent for the Chicago Police Department. There has been some reporting on this, and I just want to start talking about how that process happens now and get some things that at least in the early reporting don't sit right with me. Remember, everything you create is only as good as the people you put in to run it. And I'm telling you, if I was one of those people involved in setting up this community commission, I would take a little pause what was recently said by their interim president. If you're new to the podcast, please hit subscribe. If you're watching us on YouTube, smash their subscribe button, like this video to appreciate it, hit the bell, and you'll be alerted every time we post, which right now is once a week, but hopefully soon it's going to be picking up. Okay, picking a new superintendent for the CPD. How does this work? What's the new process? How is it different from the old process? And what, at least off the initial reporting, what has me a little bit concerned? So the job used to be um theoretically on writing and through practice, not too much practice, but in theoretically, that power sat with the Chicago Police Board. And legally, the mayors, all the scumbags before us here, were supposed to pick from the list of candidates, the three candidates that the police board produced. Now, Rom didn't do that when picking Eddie Johnson. I don't think Rom did that when picking McCarthy. Daly didn't do it a number of times. They just didn't do it. They ignored the list or sent the list back and had them put their guy on, or you know, some BS behind the scenes was going on. The mayor appoints the police board and it is paid. It's a nominal amount, but it is paid. Um, they would go behind the scenes and tell people who they wanted. I bet you that's what happened with um Lori Lightfoot's um picking of David Brown. Now that job falls to the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, of which we have been spending months going back and forth with people from the city trying to get members of this commission or their interim president on the podcast. It just hasn't happened. So we'd have already had these questions answered. Hopefully, they will come on in the in the future. So this commission, if you don't already know, was something like this commission was proposed in 2016 when we created the Citizen Office of Police Accountability or COPA and got rid of the independent police review authority, or IPRO, got rid of IPRO and created COPA, and also in that ordinance created the Deputy Public Safety Inspector General's office, which was my idea, coming off my idea. The community commission didn't happen. Rom was asked not to, he was gonna force something through the early version of this. And he was asked by a bunch of community organizations, don't we want to do all these community interaction work? We'll get to what I think about that in a minute. Um, so he didn't, and then it felt the Rom didn't run again, and it felt the Lori, and Lori spent two and a half years refusing to do it and rewrites, and she was writing the damn rewrites herself. So eventually we got one, but it's a pretty watered-down version from what we used to have. Well, I should say used to have, but what was intended. But one of the powers that this commission does have is they took over those powers from the police board to run the search for a new superintendent and provide, you know, collect um applications and um and submit a list of three candidates to the mayor. Okay, great. Does the mayor says the ability to reject that and send it back for more candidates? So the first run of this is with Brandon Johnson. Brandon Johnson will be the first mayor that has to get a superintendent through this process through the community commission rather than the police force. What is the community commission doing? They're holding four public meetings across the city to find out what the people from Chicago want in a superintendent. Now, here's where I'm going to go a little bit on a rant. Gone over to this idea of community participation, community engagement. And I think this originally started in Chicago, or at least related to criminal justice matters, with the Chicago, the creation of the Chicago Police Board in 1960 was only supposed to be for a year, but the public liked the meetings, they could go yell at someone, so Mayor Daly kept it. Old Mayor Daly kept it. And they would hold these monthly meetings, and the public would be able to come in and scream or yell or whatever, compliment the cops. My question is, what did that actually really accomplish besides putting the veneer of community engagement and the community being in control of police? What did it create? And then you go on to the early mid-90s with the creation of Chicago's version of community policing, although there's no community in the name, Chicago's alternative policing strategy or CAPS, maximum heavy here, as you know. Well, CAPS had a community meeting, and uh just about every beat, 271 of the 279 or 82 beats in the city, had community meetings every month where the sergeant on that beat would and a couple of his officers would meet with the public. Did that accomplish something? Did it accomplish something meaningful? Did it accomplish something other than creating the veneer of the public being in control of the police rather than daily? Did it really do that more than that? Because it definitely did that to some degree, the public feeling they're being engaged and the voices are being listened to and everything. It definitely did that, but did it make a difference? There's this professor I've talked about on before on the podcast from a Florida AT. God, I can't remember his last name, his name, but he wrote a crappy book on police culture. But in there, he wrote this interesting line about policing. And in his interview, I'm not policing, but community policing. It always made me think of Chicago. And he said, community policing is nothing more than the police going in and getting a warrant from the community to go in and do what they were ordinarily going to do, anyways. Think about it, it's pretty profound. One of the reasons beyond that it shouldn't have been a program, and I'm going to go into CAPS more deeply through our Patreon, so you should should subscribe there. But the the you know, there was the big problem with CAPS, the short of it is it was a program rather than an overall policing philosophy in Chicago. But did anything meaningfully change? I had an alderman once tell me, hey, community policing is the best re-election campaign that Daly has ever run says years ago. I think that Alderman's now a judge. And I bring this all up because, like, I'm all for community participation and community engagement, but what do you have to know? Go to the areas where Brandon Johnson won the majority of the vote, and those people are gonna be more engaged in police, more asking more for police reform, community policing, um, crisis intervention, things like that. The lessful harm harmful side of policing. Go to the areas that ballasts mostly won. Okay. Unleash the police. They're gonna be asking for um get the Black Lives Matter people, get the protesters, grid them, lock them up, throw away the key. You already know that. So why do we need these four meetings if you're just gonna get what you already know? Now, my wife, the PhD health economist that she is, says sometimes there's the need for the research of the obvious because then you have it in um you have statistically significant results, and you really know you can prove it. You got an analysis and a scientific method to prove to it. So maybe that's it. But I'm not sure. I mean, I would really like some answers after the process over. I don't want to get engaged in the um interrupt the process. But what the hell the four meetings did and whether there'd be a difference, it'd be interesting if you like had the people pick their top four now, seal in an envelope and then, or top three, and then do the four public meetings and then have them ungive you their next three picks and then see if there's a difference. If the credentials alone are not enough, if the credentials are going to be outranked by what they hear in these public meetings. I don't know what there is to learn. Maybe I'm wrong. So supposedly the commission, this is going mostly from this NBC report, but I looked at a bunch of other reports too, but we're looking at one here that I'll link to in the notes. The commission is 120 days from David Brown's departure to find to submit a new set of uh candidates for the superintendent's job to Brandon Johnson, March 16th, April, May, June, July. So middle of July, the work's got to be done. So let's go to the article because I have some quotes from Anthony Driver Jr., who's the interim president. Driver said his team is looking for a leader who has experience working under a federal consent decree mandating sweeping police reforms. Ding, ding, ding. That is very good. That is very good. I would caveat that by saying working under a reform that instituted sweeping changes and meaningful change was found at the end. Consent decrees are found to be about a 50-50 gamble, 50-50 chance of being successful. Cleveland, Cincinnati. I think uh the Marshall Project had a story recently about uh consent decree fatigue in cities. So it seems good. But here's where it goes to shit a little bit. Back to the article. This one's a little long, but it's meaningful. But Driver said the commission also looked for someone who can garner support from sworn officers of all ranks. Something Brown was never able to do. Brown said he was a glaring issue. Well, Driver said that was a glaring issue when he recently joined officers on a ride-along. Uh oh. Quote. I think it's pretty clear that a lot of them felt that the superintendent at the time didn't have their backs. And it's not somebody who actually cared about them, he said. Our officers are part of our community too. They live in the city of Chicago, so their input is also valuable. Hmm, last part. We're looking for somebody who can get buy-in from the residents, buy-in from the department rank and file, and buy-in from the brass and the administration, Driver said. Somebody who can collaborate and bring everybody together. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, the police accountability system in Chicago is a joke for the most part. Way, way, way unbelievably too weak. Remember, under David Brown, they kept an alt-right, a member of an alt-right white supremacist group. I don't know what you call them. Two of them. One, and this guy lied about it, the Proud Boys. They caught him lying about it. He lied to the feds about it, okay? And he lied to the police department about being questioned by the feds in some investigation related to the Proud Boys. Then they kept an oath keeper. That guy admitted it. But the accountability system's way too harsh. And they, you know, the superintendent doesn't have our back. That line is bullshit in the highest order. There are two groups of people, ladies and gentlemen, who most believe in conspiracy theories. Two, one, the people in the most underserved communities in Chicago, if you're talking a Chicago area, right? Chicago land, Chicago itself. People in the most underserved communities. Now they've been getting screwed for decades. You understand why. So many conspiracy theories, like there's a cop who's torturing people with this electronic device that he figured out in Vietnam while he was an MP and throwing people out of helicopters. Wow, that ended up being true, right? Second group, Chicago police officers. They think of themselves as the most oppressed people in the city. They do. They do. You would get to most of those officers, and they thought the murder of Laquan McDonald was just a great shooting. I have two specific officers I'm good friends with. Both said it was a good shooting in the beginning. They came around a month later. Two of them said it was okay. To the alt-right within the department, and that percentage is really big. Really big. The mayor doesn't have our back. That means they want no accountability, no discipline. Take the restraints off, let them do whatever they've got to do. That's it, it's over. Don't worry about it. Very much like Jack Nicholson. You need us on that wall, you want us on the wall. I don't want the person who, you know, goes to bed at night under the freedoms we give them to question the method in which we provide it. That's what that's what when you hear officers say we don't have our back. That's what they are saying. Think of Nathan Jessop when you hear that. Jack Nicholson's character and a few good, a few good, few good men. It is, it is. That's what it is. That's what it is. What do you mean have your back? Don't shoot someone 16 times for really no reason. Don't lie about it. Don't lie about being a member of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Don't have, don't vote for an alt-right leadership of the largest police union. He just won re-election in the fall. What are you doing? These are the people that say just don't have our, you know, the cops don't have our back. Here is the thing: you are not going to get buy-in from the majority of officers in that department for anything less than totally unleashing them and letting them do whatever they want. They don't want to be questioned by anyone. They don't want the prosecutor to have the authority, which they do illegally, to decide who gets prosecuted. They don't want the courts letting anyone out of jail ever. That's what you're getting. That's what they want. That's what they want. They want to be completely unleashed. They don't care that car chases wipe out families like it wiped out a woman who was a mother of six little kids. They don't care. Unleash them. They don't care that an totally inadvisable, ill-conceived foot chase of Anthony Alvarez over driving on a suspended license ended up with Anthony Alvarez, what I would say, illegally, illegally getting shot in the back and dying. He's basically murdered. And the body cam footage proves it. And the body cam footage of what the officer says afterwards is validation about why the chase at the moment it should have never started and why it's such a bad idea. And it's both those car chases and those foot pursuits are incredibly dangerous for officers. They don't care. That's the problem. They don't care. They're so caught up in their alt-right and hate of everything and their massive conspiracy theories that they don't care what keeps them safe. If the idea came from someone they view to not be 100% behind them, they don't care. You are not going to bargain with them. It's like Obama going into the campaign for his first presidential campaign and talking at the debate about how he's going to bring the insurance companies to the table when they were creating whatever health thing that came up, Obamacare, right? The American Health Care Act. And um Edwards, Stephen, no Edwards. I forgot Edwards' first name, the candidate, but he's like, you don't bring them to the table. You just put it on them. They're not, they're not supportive partners. They're not coming to the table legitimately. Neither is the FO, the FOP, the Cornwall Police Union. Neither is the police department, the rank and file. They're not coming their way. Are they all bad? Then absolutely not, but enough of them are that you're never going to win that. You're never going to win that. That has to be put upon them. They don't want the job. They can go. I know that's mean, but you're not going to bargain with them. These people think COPA is an IPRA, independent police youth, are way too harsh. They sustain like 5%. At most, sometimes IPRA was like, I think, under 2% of complaints in a year. 2% or 3% or 4% or 5%. Are you flipping kidding me? Think of any business that had people go to HR and only 2 or 3 or 4% of stuff was actually acted upon. No, no, it's it's mind-boggling. It's mind-boggling. Those are BS platitudes. That's not a real world plan. I hope that he has uh that Mr. Driver has a better plan than that. And this is just lying, bullshit rhetoric he's handing out to the media, but that's crapola. I want this committee community commission to do better. But thinking you're going to bring everyone to the table and pumbaya, no way. We at one time, many 10 years ago, maybe, maybe more. It was more because that was still funded. We were going to do a study of sexual assault case processing from COFA service, OEMC, Office of Emergency Management Communications data through adjudication of the courts. So OEMC's 911 data, PPD, Chicago Police Department's uh policing data, prosecutor data, courts data. And we were going to look at the whole uh life cycle of that case. Case is over five years. And it wasn't gonna be us. We had academics from Loyola University, Chicago's Criminal Justice and Criminology Department who would get IRB approval, and they were gonna have exclusive access to the data from those four things. And we're gonna put, they were gonna put them all together and give us reports, and we were gonna figure out where, in the life cycle of cases, are cases most likely to fall out. That would inform the uh service provider community and domestic uh in sexual assault to target services and plans to support survivors who are reporting it at those positions, at those points where people are most likely dropping out of the case. The police department went, Nasta. We were in a room with the chief of detectives and a couple of his underlings, researchers from Loyola, um CPD's research development division, which approved it of the uh research, and he went berserk. Now that guy was later fired in the um uh not fired, but he was like retired before being tried by the police board and fired. Um, God, his name escapes me right now. But it was the case in the sometimes kept pushing where the kid died on at Rush Street in the fight with Daly's nephew, Beneco, the Beneco case. I forgot the name of the victim at the moment. He went nuts. He got up and he was screaming, he got all red. No one's looking at our stuff. Of course not. You don't ask them, you put the rules in place, and they either follow them or they go. That's it. And to think that you're gonna bring someone together as a great uniter is insanity. Insanity, especially when you consider, and I don't know exactly what percentage I really have about how much of the department is alt, right? But let's just say a good per enough of a percentage of the patrol division, which is the largest division. Vision in the department where the alt-right has won two elections right now because the very conservative part of the union was not alt-right enough. So they put in an alt-writer who was pro-insurrectionist, hates women, hates immigrants, hates anyone that speaks the second language. Go look in our sit, our um hates his bosses, hasn't found a boss he couldn't file a complaint against during his career. Massive number of complaints. Go look on our website. You can see the report we did on him. He won re-election. So you don't sit with him at a table and discuss anything. You put it upon him. One more, one more uh back to the article for one more uh one more reading. Our plan is to bring people together. I've said that repeatedly that this is Driver, that there's more than enough for everyone. Oh no, this is I'm sorry, this is Brandon Johnson. Our plan is to bring people together. I've said that repeatedly, that there's more than enough for everyone in our city of Chicago. And and so these conversations that we're going to have throughout this, throughout the week and in the coming days is going to be centered around how do we continue to collaborate to build a better, stronger, safer Chicago. What does that mean? Mayor elect. You got to start governing, my friend. That's a campaign speech of bullshit. That quote. That's all bullshit. We're gonna bring people together. No, you're not. The people who voted against you, many of them, but not a certain percentage of them, are alt-right, racist, extremely pro-police, and maybe very, very alt-right. They ain't coming to the table. That idea is um um ridiculous. Whether he believes it wholly or not, I don't know. It may be all BS for the public. Who knows? I'm not um, as I said before, I I'm um a little scared of his lack of experience running large organizations. We will see. I don't politics are good, but if you don't have, I mean, your positions, policy positions are great, obviously. But if you don't have the skills to get stuff passed, you need to get passed, right? Or that you're gonna stick to your guns, neither of which, because he hasn't really been in a uh um an elected office cook county board commissioner, but that's not really saying much. Um, so he doesn't have a long track record, you could say, of holding him to it. And being a teacher is great, but that's not a long track record of being able to be successful in politics and governing a city the size of Chicago. So those are my feelings. We'll see who driver and them um pick in the selection. I I mean in the selection process for the mayor, and I'll say this one last time, ladies and gentlemen. Less that last thing for today. I think people really have to get um get um their heads around an idea. I'm not sure who, given the issues at the city, given how divided it is, given that the FOP is run by the extreme alt-right, who the hell would want this job? Really? Who would want it? I doubt that David Brown was the best pick. Life would may have wanted him because she wanted to hire another black, which is great. Um, she may have wanted him because um he would just do what she said, which is very possible. Either way, four years later, they're both out of a job. Um, Chicago can only be better for both of those. Brown, I would say, moved back to Dallas, but didn't have to move anywhere because he never moved to Chicago. Oops. He never moved to Chicago. Um, something that the public didn't hear enough about by the uh press. They should have, every time he was not responsive to some tragedy over the weekends that he was supposed to be or he sent underlings to, they should have talked about him being in Dallas. How the mayor would let that happen, I have no idea. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much. Thanks for coming. Thanks for listening. Once again on YouTube, hit subscribe and like. If you're it's another podcast, please subscribe if this is your first one. I really appreciate it. I'll be back with you next week. Have a great week.