Leadership turnover, officer deaths, robbery spike challenged CPD in 2023

For Mayor Brandon Johnson and new leaders of the Chicago Police Department, the dust has started to settle.

After a year of sweeping changes and more controversy, the department enters 2024 with a new permanent boss facing a long to-do list: Foster stronger community relationships. Reduce violent crime and shootings. Raise the homicide clearance rate. Maintain officer wellness and morale.

And prepare for August, when the city will have an international spotlight as it hosts the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

That work will come after a year that saw a mix of highs and lows for the Police Department. Homicide and nonfatal shooting totals fell again, but the city was roiled by robbery and carjacking crews responsible for an overall uptick in violence.

Other high-profile crimes gripped the city’s attention at various points during the year, too, like a bizarre August shooting inside Guaranteed Rate Field during a White Sox home game that left two women injured. “Teen takeovers,” the large, unorganized youth gatherings in the downtown area, again left city leaders scratching their heads. Meanwhile, thousands of migrants, mostly from Venezuela, spent months living in and around CPD stations across the city.

At the same time, the first class of CPD district councilors — community relations liaisons between police officers and district residents — was sworn in.

A hope for stability

Johnson’s selection of Larry Snelling to lead CPD came after weeks of public meetings organized by the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, the new body tasked with submitting CPD superintendent finalists and police board nominees to the mayor.

Since he was unanimously approved by the City Council in September, Snelling has repeatedly called for a collaborative and nuanced effort in the city’s crime reduction efforts. In an interview with the Tribune, Snelling said identifying specific problems in each of the CPD’s 22 patrol districts is paramount.

“That’s how we get to the bottom of it. We can’t get to the bottom of it with a ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy, because that strategy is not going to fit within every district,” Snelling said. “So the key is to have a focus on the specific crime that is ailing each particular district or each area. A Far North Side district is not going to have the exact same problems that a Far South Side district. They’ll have some of those problems, but not the clusters, not the amount, not the percentages, so we have to focus on those things as such.”

What’s more, the new superintendent has used many of his public appearances to recast attention not on the perpetrators, but the victims of violent crime. Snelling, who grew up in Englewood and first joined the CPD in 1992, also pledged to balance aggressive policing strategies with transparency, even as progress remains slow in the department’s adherence to the federal consent decree that was born out of the 2014 murder of Laquan McDonald.

A Tribune analysis of CPD records found that more than 11,000 internal misconduct investigations have been initiated since the consent decree was codified in early 2019.

The department hired 698 new officers in 2023, a total that “basically broke even” with the number of retiring officers, Snelling told the Tribune.

Though Snelling will likely be the CPD’s only leader in 2024, he was one of four men in 2023 to helm the nation’s second-largest police department. The CPD started the year under David Brown, the former chief of police in Dallas who was handpicked by former Mayor Lori Lightfoot in April 2020.

Brown’s tenure as superintendent was a rocky one, largely defined by civil unrest and looting during the COVID-19 pandemic, a spike in violent crime, and Brown’s unpopularity among rank-and-file cops. Brown announced his resignation a day after Lightfoot failed to qualify for the mayoral runoff election, taking an executive position at a Texas-based law firm.

First Deputy Superintendent Eric Carter led the department until May, when Mayor Brandon Johnson selected Fred Waller, the former CPD chief of patrol who retired in August 2020, to serve as interim superintendent until a permanent leader was selected. Both Johnson and Snelling credited Waller for fostering a sense of stability within the department after Brown returned to Texas.

But Waller’s time atop the department was not without controversy. In June, the CPD’s head of constitutional policing and reform, Tina Skahill, abruptly resigned from the department after lodging a claim of “retaliation.” Skahill, a veteran CPD supervisor who spent decades within the department, left her post less than a year after Brown fired her predecessor, Robert Boik.

Waller, a department fixture who enjoyed great popularity among supervisors and rank and file cops, secured a salary-pension double-dip when Johnson called on him to return to the department. Shortly after he handed the reins to Snelling, Waller was again rehired as the deputy director of Snelling’s office. Snelling, though, has yet to announce any other changes to the CPD’s command staff.

The selection of Snelling — who spent much of his career as an instructor in the training academy — was received positively by many within the CPD. Soon after he took over, Snelling did away with a policy that gave officers minimal notice before their regular days off were canceled. In recent weeks, the city has relocated most of the more than 2,000 migrants who spent months living in and around CPD district stations across the city.

Differing crime trends

A citywide surge in robberies and carjackings, in addition to the steady drumbeat of gun violence that ticks up each summer, left many city residents feeling on edge.

According to CPD data, more than 10,800 robberies were reported across the city in 2023, a 23% increase over 2022. The department logged more than 28,000 motor vehicle thefts in 2023, a 38% jump from the year prior.

“I want the next generation of shooters to not become shooters, but the generation right now is what we’re all freaked out about and why I worry about my kid riding her bike two blocks from her house,” Rod O’Connor, a resident of Humboldt Park for more than two decades, said during a community safety meeting in September.

Meanwhile, the city’s annual homicide tally fell for the third year in a row. Through Dec. 28, Chicago had recorded 648 homicides, still the most of any city in America, but down from 712 homicides in 2022, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office. Chicago police use a slightly lower number, eliminating killings deemed non-criminal and those on expressways within the city limits.

Through Dec. 30, there were 2,877 people shot across the city in 2023, according to a CPD spokesperson — a decrease of nearly 600 shooting victims from 2022. However, a Tribune analysis in November found the city is in the midst of a sustained uptick in youth homicides.

Several more mass shootings were seen, too, including one at a park cookout in Roseland over the Juneteenth holiday weekend and another at a Halloween party in North Lawndale.

In late August, the department handled one of the year’s most bizarre incidents. Two women were shot as they sat in the bleachers of Guaranteed Rate Field while the White Sox played the Oakland A’s. No one has been charged in that shooting, and CPD sources have previously suggested that no one will face criminal charges.

In late spring and summer, the city’s downtown area once again witnessed a spate of large-scale youth gatherings that sometimes turned violent. Sixteen people were arrested after three teens were shot during an unseasonably warm weekend in April. Another 40 people were arrested during a similar gathering in July.

Police suffer their own losses

Two Chicago police officers were killed in 2023.

Andres Vasquez-Lasso was fatally shot in March as he chased an allegedly armed suspect in the Gage Park neighborhood. The suspect was also shot but survived, and his case is still pending. Two months later, Aréanah Preston was shot to death outside her home in Avalon Park shortly after she finished her shift at work. Four teens were charged in her killing.

And while Vasquez-Lasso and Preston received traditionally large funeral services, replete with first responders and elected officials, the union that represents CPD officers took steps this year to recognize officers who have died by suicide.

In September, the Fraternal Order of Police unveiled a memorial at the entrance of the union’s West Loop lodge to commemorate more than a dozen CPD officers who have died by suicide since 2018.

“I think the thing we want most is for our loved ones to be remembered,” Margaret Dougherty, whose husband, Sgt. Edward Dougherty, died by suicide in March 2022, said at the unveiling. “Something like this, just the acknowledgment and the love that they’re showing, it just helps to keep the memory alive.”

Fight heats up over discipline

An arbitrator’s ruling during contract negotiations between the city and its largest police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, produced perhaps the year’s biggest controversy involving the Police Department.

In an award made public over the summer, arbitrator Edwin Benn ruled that members of the FOP, a public-sector union, are entitled to having a third party hear and decide the most serious misconduct cases. Those hearings would be off-limits to the public and press.

For more than six decades, the nine-member Chicago Police Board was the arbiter in such cases — those in which the CPD superintendent has sought an officer’s firing or, at least, a yearlong suspension.

The agreement between the city and union also provided for a nearly 20% raise for officers over four years, on top of a one-time $2,500 bonus. Beyond that, the deal creates a new “Peoples’ Court” where more minor police discipline cases can be decided by an arbitrator in a single day.

The deal also paved the way for a new rotation of homicide detectives aimed at improving the department’s homicide clearance rate, which hovered near 50% throughout 2023.

The FOP, citing Benn’s award, tried in August to remove 22 pending disciplinary cases from the Police Board’s docket and have them decided instead by a third party. The board shot down the effort.

One of those 22 officers, David Laskus, was later ordered fired over his actions during an arrest at the Brickyard Mall in 2020, though court records show Laskus has filed a lawsuit seeking to reverse that decision.

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The City Council held two votes on the tentative contract agreement: one for the economic package, the lion’s share of the deal, and another to address Benn’s arbitration award. The economic package was approved, but the council voted against the disciplinary provision.

John Catanzara, the FOP president, predicted a costly legal fight for the city.

“They want war; we’ll give you war,” Catanzara said in an interview with the Tribune following the vote.

With its future up in the air, the Police Board saw much turnover in 2023, too. Ghian Foreman’s final term as board president ended, though he’s agreed to continue serving so that the board can reach a voting quorum. The terms of two other board members, the Rev. Michael Eaddy and Mareilé Cusack, also expired, though their replacements have not yet been named.

Kyle Cooper, the board’s new president, presided over his first meeting in December.

It was then that the board’s vice president, Paula Wolff, announced that four officers would face an evidentiary hearing for misconduct allegations lodged against them in the nearly 20-year-old case of disgraced former CPD Sgt. Ronald Watts, perhaps providing an early test for the reconstituted panel.