Retrospective on David Brown

This week we take the first of what will be many looks at soon to be former Chicago Police Department Superintendent David Brown and his time in Chicago. Unfortunately for Chicago despite the Mayor's glowing endorsement and hiring of Brown the reality is that the Lightfoot administration was engaged in a conspiracy with Brown to hide his misconduct while a member of the Dallas Police Department. Their lack of transparency and integrity about this issue was emblematic of Brown's time with the CPD. Brown is skilled at co-opting the language of reformers and accountability advocates for his own ends. He probably said the words of transparency & accountability more than any former superintendent but in reality nothing changed on the ground. Brown came in to the CPD while the department was in the early stages of a federal consent decree that mandates specific reforms. He also took over the department immediately after the Mayor herself brought in former Los Angeles Police Department Chief Charlie Beck to kick-start transforming the CPD in to a 21st century police department. Instead of continuing the reforms Beck had implemented Brown reversed them. The Mayor voiced support for Brown's reversals despite making reforming the CPD a key part of her campaign. No evaluation of Brown or Lighfoot's time in power in Chicago can be done absent the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd. Both played a major part in shaping the circumstances of their time in power. Unfortunately for both of them Brown completely misread the intelligence regarding the protests sweeping the country in response to Floyd's murder. This was the same intelligence both the Cook County Sheriff and Illinois State Police read and knew protests were coming to Chicago. The pandemic alone may have doomed them but the failure of the CPD to have a professional response to the protests was probably the nail in the coffin for both Brown & Lightfoot. Become a CJP Patron: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=13274454 Get Involved: https://www.cjpnation.org Find out more about our work: https://chicagojustice.org/

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SPEAKER_00 0:10

Hello everyone, welcome to the Chicago Justice Podcast. I'm your host, Tracy Siska. I'm also Executive Director of the Chicago Justice Project. If you want to find out more about what we do, Chicagojustice.org. And if you want to get involved, cjpnation.org. If you're new to the podcast, please subscribe. If you're watching us on YouTube, smash subscribe and like. We really appreciate it. And if in the show notes will be our link to Patreon if you want to support our work. Today we're going to talk about a retrospective look on David Brown's career, former or soon-to-be former superintendent of the Chicago Police Department. He think he retires in a week, resigns, retires in a week. So basically, um, this will probably be the first in a couple first in a series we're gonna have on looking at David Brown's time in Chicago. Obviously, he's become big in the mayor's race. That's probably one of the reasons the mayor lost was Brown's actions and the way they handled crime and violence. Although we're talking about it, not all their fault. Um, so basically, and I'll answer this question at the end is he a clown show or a sophisticated police leader? Um, I for um listeners of the pod, you pretty much know how I fall on that, but uh let's let's dig into some of what has happened during his time in Chicago. First of all, let's get straight with it though, to be honest. And fair to him, fair to Lightfoot. Everything in Chicago during David Brown's time has to be put into the context of COVID-19. I believe he actually took the job as COVID had or COVID had already hit publicly. And I think lockdowns had started. Um he also had to deal with the loss of manpower from people not wanting to get tested and an FOP who were right refusing to push the testing and just lack of recruits coming in. All right, so take my comments with all of that context in there. I'm not trying to ignore it, I'm just not gonna keep repeating it. So, should have David Brown been hired from the start? For those that know CJP, our answer is no. We're not even sure why he was hired, to be completely honest with you. It could be that a black mayor, um, for um reasons of building trust with communities of color wanted a black superintendent, and I believe he was the only choice on the list. That's a police boardgaver, that could be it. But was he qualified? Yes, he was police chief in Dallas and worked his way up from control men, no doubt about it. But Mayor Lightfoot, David Brown, the Lightfoot administration, basically lied by omission by failing to tell the citizens and residents of Chicago that David Brown had a suspension in his career in Dallas. What was that? He lied, and you can look it up on our website. It'll be in the show notes, a link. You just search David Brown, you'll at ChicagoJustice.org, you'll find it. He basically lied during an internal and he lied many times during an internal misconduct investigation into a police chase he was involved, and he went the wrong way down an exit ramp to a highway, and then he got into an accident and he lied about all of that. And I lied, I'm I'm saying he lied several times because he couple lying on the way up as it went through the chain of command and into an internal investigation, took a lie detector test, failed it, went to then he had to go through the city's review, and he lied there and he was suspended. Some period of time I forgot about it. And even with that in his background, after so many years in the department, they hired him as police chief. Amazing. But Layfoot and her administration and Brown himself should have talked about it. They didn't. And remember, ladies and gentlemen, David Brown wrote a book. I read it. Courage is something courage to lead, or something like that. While you know, in a couple hundred pages, you know what was missing? The suspension and the fact that he learned from it. I mean, that's just kind of the hack he is. And it didn't really get made public in Chicago. We're the ones, CJP is the one that made public because I did what journalists in Chicago wouldn't do, besides reading the clips on him. I called journalists. And they're the ones I called a couple different journalists, and they're the ones that turned us on than a suspension. So with that in his background, I don't think if they had talked publicly about that, um, he would have been the city council would have um approved of him. And I don't think the public would have either. So that to me tells me not um someone that should have been hired. Also, you gotta look into the context. Eddie Johnson got fired in December of 19. Mightfoot then immediately brought in retired chief of police in the loss of the Los Angeles Police Department, Charlie Beck, to come in and do what he did in LA, which was modernize the department, best practices, getting rid of special units completely, pushing everyone into the district, um, pushing all the cops and from narcotics and all these gang units and saturation units, getting rid of all of them and pushing them all into the district. Beck's agreement, as far as we know, was to get that process rolling. It seemed like, it seemed like the groundwork was being laid for the for mayor for Mayor Lightfoot to hire Sean Malinowski, one of Charlie Beck's previous lieutenants or top people. And he was working with the crime lab and had been working in Chicago for a few to several years now, um, trying to help reform the Chicago Police Department. He applied. For some reason, um Lightfoot chose Beck. I mean, Lightfoot chose Brown. Much to the surprise of many, I would bet, including um Charlie Beck. Um, supposedly his agreement was Lightfoot. I'm here till you name a successor, then I'm out. She named a successor a few days later, Charlie Beck left Chicago. David Brown comes in, COVID's hitting. David Brown comes in, he's approved by the city council. And what does David Brown do? Well, David Brown basically reverses everything Charlie Beck had put into place and started in motion that supposedly life would want it. Okay. Brown was known and is known. He's kind of archaic. He's an old school. There's nothing innovative about him, nothing innovative about what he's ever done. Um, the big move he made was a like a summer community policing summer saturation team of 300 cops, I believe the final number was. I think it went up from 100 to 200 to 300. There was nothing new. It's typical CPD, typical special unit assignments. There were people with really horrific um histories of violence on that team, on this community policing team. Is that a crack up? They're going to go into areas and clean and do all these things and then heavily patrol with not being supervised. It's it's ridiculous. He could have just done that the best, have taken all those officers, five officers from every district, and put put them in each district, five, six officers. Nothing changes in the city. Brown basically reverted back to what um Phil Klein would have done, McCarthy would have done nothing new. So as we start to move along here, George Floyd gets killed. And the days between George Floyd's death and the protest hitting Chicago, which like three or four or four or five days, the protest started spreading out of Minneapolis to cities across the country. David Brown, being the intrepid, innovative police leader that he is, looked at that intelligence that he had gotten, that the intelligence division of CPD collected and got from the FBI and other sources, and determined that protests were not coming to Chicago. Did not gear up, did not prepare for protests. I don't know one in Chicago's history gave him that idea. I don't know if the mayor was told that by Brown and bought it. I don't know what happened. But he completely missed the intelligence. There was some research done into this, and the the Sheriff's Office, Cook County Sheriff's Office, and Illinois State Police were geared up big time. They were gearing up to send people to Chicago and for the protests to spread to other parts of the state, city and state, city, county, state. The CPD wasn't. It was sitting on its hands because David Brown didn't understand the intelligence. And because he's a lot like Mayor Lightfoot, always the smartest person in the room, he did not listen. What people have to understand is his time in Dallas is unremarkable. The thing that put him on the national spotlight was there was a sniper during uh protest, the sniper started taking out citizens and police officers. I think six officers died, something like that in that day. During the incident, they cornered the guy down a long hallway. And supposedly, if you hear from Brown, what Brown says is he sent officers down that hallway. This guy just kept picking them off. So someone in the Dallas administration, Dallas Police Department Administration, comes up with an idea to attach an explosive to a robot like bomb-sniffing thing. And they do that and they kill him. Protests come from that. Your judge, jury, executioner. I um if they probably could have waited him out. They said that he had food, and that I don't know one way or the other whether they should have waited him out, but I don't think that is um, I understand they may have been making, if you agree with it, the right decision at the time, at that moment. Um, but that doesn't make him an innovative police um official, police leader. Besides that event, his time in Dallas is filled with hating the media, honesty and integrity were not his friends, data manipulation. Yep. He manipulated the aggravated batteries and aggravated assaults and how they get counted. And he um so that it was so far off the definition by the federal FBI's uniform crime report, which is definitions all police departments around the country are supposed to share so that we can compare data across jurisdictions. They were so far off the FBI told them to stop sending that data in because they weren't going to count it. But he did it to kill crime. He did it to show that he had remarkable uh drops in crime. He also did that, believe it or not, with um car break-ins. They outsourced um who you have to report that to. So, like you would report it, then they would question you and they'd ask you weird questions, and then they'd mark it as unfounded, or um, it would get marked as a detective would have to follow up to check the integrity of the report. And then if the detective called once and you didn't answer the phone, non-responsive. This is the innovative leader that Mayor Lightfoot picked. This was just in the Dallas media. I mean, there were some big articles about him uh in Dallas after, you know, around the bombing and around him becoming police chief and his time there and all the issues with the FBI and the data manipulation. Lightfoot saw all that and said, that's our guy. That's the guy I want to bring to Chicago after all the problems they've had with communities. He talks, I think part of the reason why Lightfoot brought him in is he, and he's done this through the rest of his time in Chicago, is he talks a lot about community policing and reform. Loves it. Gotta make these communities, build these bridges, build these bridges, build these bridges. What did he do innovative? Nothing. It could have just well been Phil Klein in 2000, you know, I think 2000 to 2005, something like that. Or Superintendent Phil Klein or Superintendent Matt Rat Regis. I mean, there's nothing in the 90s. There's nothing innovative about what the guy does. Zero. You know, you talk about it and it did this big community policing team that he kept at adding officers to was supposed to be a summer thing, and then it kept going on and on. It kept getting bigger and bigger. And he filled it with abusive cops, or at least some of them. Like it's typical CPD. Like, you don't check the backgrounds of these cops who apply for these special units. Like you, you should you would think racking up those civilian complaints, especially for abuse, brutality would be a check mark against you. He's like, No, you're not getting a specialized unit, dude. Come back in five years with no complaints. And it's all these specialized units, it's all data manipulation, it's all lying. He's suffering also from the reality of the pandemic not ceasing. Carjacking skyrocket, homicides and gun violence skyrocket, everything else plummets because no one's out of their house. And like most major cities, he had to deal with those issues, and he just and the reality is there's not a whole lot police can do in the short term because they can't fix the social circumstances. But at the same time, he he sees a drop in manpower. They cops are resigning left and right, they don't want to take the shot, they don't want to be cops anymore, they don't respect him or lightfoot. All the typical on top of it, the fact that it was due, they they some of that was true and legitimate, some of it was just based on race, some of it for life was gender, some of it was sexuality issues. Um, there's no doubt white cops especially had issues with that, but they kept talking and talking and talking, reform, reform, reform. And they're big on reform, and then life was first year, year and a half, they didn't make a whole lot of progress on a consent decree at all. And then they started to pick that up. But it seemed like they were being dragged for a candidate who was so about progressive reforms and community policing and um, you know, really taking care of all these underserved communities, it just didn't feel like they were making reforms fast enough or really cared about it. Brown counts reform, but when you push him, there's when you look underneath the surface, there really isn't anything there. It's all rhetoric. As a backup, he hated his time in Dallas. His what during his time in Dallas, he hated the police, uh media, hated them, did everything he could to get around them, tried to get them fired. He didn't like being called out for anything. And his data manipulation was super easy to call him out for, right? That's not hard. And when you get the FBI to say, they'll tell you on the record as a journalist, they Dallas needs to stop sending their data in because we're not counting them. Aggravated bats, aggravated assaults, and they're they're police, they're carbreakings. I'm sure there was other data he was manipulating. I mean, how can you hate the journalists for that if the FBI is going on the record? The FBI will not go on the record unless you're way off the reservation. So towards the end of his time here, within the last year, Brown, let's just sit back up and say Brown had a tumultuous time. Partly due to COVID and issues related to things that were out of their control. Part of the fact that he kept stripping officers from districts, part of the fact that he kept having officers resign due to COVID and other reasons. And he didn't have enough officers to staff, at least I shouldn't say that. He didn't have enough officers to staff up to the illegitimate numbers dating back to the 90s, I think. No, it did early 2000s, about staffing how many cops should be there in each district, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They have these manufactured numbers, and politicians, especially the alt-right in Chicago, love to try to hold politicians accountable for hitting those numbers as if there's some correlation between the number of cops and the amount of crime. Strangely, there isn't, but they never say it. It's always something you get, even if we gave them that number, they wouldn't be satisfied, still be blaming you for some. It's like, wait a minute, you have the number of cops, shouldn't crime drop? No, no, no. Well, then it's this and this and this. It's never the cops' fault. So, and we get within the last year. This is probably the the saddest yet most hilarious move by David Brown and Lori Lightfoot. So, as the CPD had the investigation, the FBI investigation come in, uh FBI, the Justice Department and Civil Rights investigation, they created an office to work directly with the FBI. To be like liaison, get them data, things like that. And as the Justice Department hands down the report, and then Attorney General Lisa Manigan and some activist friends of mine pushed for a consent degree to be overseen by a federal judge and Ron fought it. As that consent decree gets approved, the city council, no city council, the Chicago Police Department creates an office called uh the Office of Constitutional Policing. And they bring in, not bring in, but they assign a civilian to run that office named Bob Boyk, Robert Boyk. He's been on our podcast and live show before, talking about the reform he was putting in place. And he was in charge. He was running the office that was supposed to see the CPD through, hitting all the marks of the consent decree, coming into um, I don't know the word, but coming into um alignment with the the marks, the grades, demands of the consent decree. At this time, while this is all going on, you got all these staff shortages, well, staff reductions, let's call them. And at the same time, no one's testing to be a cop. Wow, that's a shock. Who wants to be a cop in the mid in the midst of COVID and the CPDs and police departments around the country? George Floyd had just been murdered, and police department's response to COVID, you know, um the protests and um everything that followed. Of course, applications to the department were going to drop. That's not a shock. So, but Bob Boink's got a his office has got an obligation to make sure the CPD meets these marks of the consent degree and keeps making progress. So he requests, he sends a request in. And this is what we know publicly, we haven't gotten the backstory yet. Boyk sends in a request to the superintendent that they assign. They're not making the progress they need on the consent decree, and he needs 46 officers to be assigned either his office or the um the academy to start meeting the obligations of training officers. They have to do so many hours of in-service training every year now. You can't just watch a video during roll call or scroll your phone or watch a video at home while you're not watching it and playing on your phone. You actually have to do in service training, in the academy training. He needs 46 more officers to do that. David Brown responds in the most professional way ever. He fires Bob Boyd, the head of the Office of Constitutional Policing gets fired. They don't really say. Why they wish Bob his best, but he's out. He's not reassigned, he's gone. They fire him. Mayor Lightfoot, there's an uproar in the media and in communities. Mayor Lightfoot, because she's such a hack, comes out and instead of firing David Brown, which is what she should have done, shouldn't have hired him. But instead of firing him, she backs him. And that to me means that move was either approved by Lightfoot or she ordered it. Brown, the media is like, well, then how the hell are you gonna you just fired the guy running the reform office?

unknown 22:38

Right?

SPEAKER_00 22:39

How are you gonna meet the obligations under consent degree? How are you gonna train all these cops? Blake says you need 46 officers. Brown says he's gonna have retired cops come in and volunteer to train or free the entire police department. At that point, 11,000, 12,000 officers. Is that the thought of a serious thinker? Right? That's a serious, serious thinker right there. Man, we're just gonna make people who have worked their 20 years plus come back in for free because they just love the department so much. They're gonna work for free. 40 hours a week, I guess, training, updating the training for all our officers, 11,000, 12,000 officers. Does that make any sense? Is that the is that the really innovative, insightful leader now? There's gotta be context beyond that about why Bike was fired. Maybe he was trying to get Brown to admit on paper they didn't have the officers. That may be part of it. It would be really interesting to figure out why he did that and what was going on in the background. Do I for one minute believe that Brown was giving the reforms and the consent agree the the needed attention? Absolutely not. Did I believe anything out of Brown's mouth? Absolutely not. He was a proven liar already before he even took the job. And he lied about not telling by omission by not telling the city council or the public what he did. No. Didn't trust a thing out of him. And him missing the George Floyd protest, he should have been fired for that. Whiteford didn't want to admit the political mistake, but a corporate boss that wasn't worried about repercussions from getting fired from above would have fired him to that alone. He made some all kinds of bad decisions related to the protests, raising the bridges, and all these other things that they had done. So let's return to the question I asked in the beginning. David Brown, clown show or sophisticated political leader? If you haven't figured out my answer yet, ladies and gentlemen, it's a clown show. He's gone, which is good news for Chicago. He was going to be fired anyways. Um, but the reality is he actually left because he aged out. You have you mandatory retirement for police in the CPD at 62. So he could continue as the superintendent, but he would not have been a sworn officer. So he wouldn't have had police powers, wouldn't have been able to wear the uniform, didn't want to do that. And he knew. He knew any of the mayoral, I think all the mayoral candidates except for Lightfoot were on the record getting rid of Brown. And she went, you know, she made sure that she went down with him and he went down with her because they both lost. Brown, the highest paid city official for four years, should have never gotten the job. One of his last big moves was firing the head of the Office of Constitutional for Policing. I mean, if that isn't a um, well, that is going to be um it should be hung around his neck whenever anyone talks about David Brown and his time. Um, I think he's going to work at some security firm where he can lie to them about the numbers he produces, supposedly. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much. Once again, if you want to support the podcast, cjpnation.org or patreon.org. The link will be in below. If you want to get involved, cjpnation.org, hit us up in on Instagram or Twitter if you get ideas for who you want on the podcast or issues you want us to talk about. And I'll be back with you next week.