Page 27 - February 2016

COVER STORY
Chicago’s Next Top Cop
Words from the members suggest the next person to wear the top hat would be best served to have an insider’s look at what makes the Department work.
n BY MITCHELL KRUGEL
What’s happening in the 11th District or the 7th District, where crime is precipitating another record year of shootings in the city, provides an inside look at the hiring of a new Chica- go Police Department Superintendent. And there’s more evi- dence of what is needed from a new leader in the 18th District, where muggings and purse snatchings increase every day.
agement. How is that person going to be able to say, ‘I’m the one who knows how to get your back?’”
Clearly, the sentiment among Lodge 7 members and lead- ers, most Chicago Police Officers, many of the city’s elected officials and law enforcement analysts declares that the new Chicago top cop must understand the city, understand the demographics of the department and every moving part from O’Hare to Rogers Park to Hegewisch to Mount Greenwood to Garfield Ridge to Montclare to Edison Park. Now even though members can’t go on the record at such a tenuous time in the history of Chicago policing, they will likely confirm that this woman or man does not need to be somebody who can leap tall buildings in a single bound. But...
Yes, it seems the hiring of the new superintendent needs to be an inside job. Certainly, one of the three final candidates the Police Board was slated to have presented to the mayor by now could be a qualified leader from outside of Chicago, but many officers convey that they have been around long enough to know that even when they hear something good, they worry that politics will take over and somebody will come in who doesn’t know the Chicago way.
“It can’t be somebody who has been in the office his whole career being primed for this,” asserts Chicago Lodge 7 Presi- dent Dean Angelo, Sr. “That’s what scares a lot of officers; that it’s going to be someone who has been continuously merito- riously promoted; someone who has never been complained against; someone who has never had a problem with man-
Making the hiring landscape especially apprehensive is the media-contrived sentiment that the new top cop is taking the toughest law enforcement job in America and that he or she needs to be a cross between the Pope, Gandhi and Marshal Dillon. The just-started U.S. Department of Justice investiga- tion of the Department and the surge in violence that has the city on pace to chart more than 4,000 shootings in 2016 con- tributes to this being the toughest time in Chicago law enforcement since the 1968 Democratic National Convention or 1996 Humboldt Park riots.
Police Board President Lori Lightfoot calls this search the most important in Chicago history, and not just because the Board is making “fostering a culture where officers elevate the
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