Chicago police Superintendent David Brown to exit CPD this month in the wake of mayoral election

A day after a mayoral election that appeared to signal his imminent dismissal from leadership, Chicago police Superintendent David Brown informed Mayor Lori Lightfoot he would be resigning this month.

Brown’s nearly three-year tenure as Chicago’s top cop was marked by skyrocketing gun violence and slow progress with court-mandated police reforms as the department struggled to navigate through the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a statement, Lightfoot cast a positive message about Brown’s legacy as Chicago’s police boss, commending him for ”his accomplishments not just for the department but the entire city.” Lightfoot touted Brown’s promotions of more women to command ranks and the Police Department under his leadership “setting a record number of illegal gun recoveries for two consecutive years.”

But some observers of the department were less impressed with Brown’s leadership.

Edwin Yohnka, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, described Brown’s legacy as “that of a missed opportunity” and said the department during his tenure was far behind schedule in meeting the requirements of the U.S. Department of Justice’s consent decree, sparked by the 2014 murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by an on-duty Chicago cop.

Yohnka pointed to Brown’s firing of Robert Boik, the CPD official leading the department’s reform efforts to comply with the consent decree. Before Brown fired him last year without warning, Boik had sent an email criticizing Brown for deciding to distribute staff to patrol duties instead of officer training, arguing that the staffing decision would hurt the department’s consent decree compliance and impede a “fundamental obligation” to train officers.

“Those are priorities you make,” Yohnka said.

Civil rights attorney Sheila Bedi, a clinical law professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, criticized Brown for allowing an officer with ties to the Proud Boys white nationalist group to remain on the force and for directing “incredible violence and unlawful action” from CPD officers toward protesters following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020.

”The next superintendent needs to realize that police have to give up some of their power,” Bedi said, calling for police to not be involved in mental health crises, traffic stops and schools.

Brown, who the Tribune could not reach for comment, highlighted the challenges he faced as superintendent as the city showed modest signs of gun violence reduction from 2020 into 2021.

“We would love to be back on the momentum of 2019′s decline,” Brown said to reporters in summer 2021 referring to a drop in gun violence two years before. “But we’re grinding our way with progress, and I would argue through the most difficult challenges in the history of policing in this country with, coming off a global pandemic, social justice movements, civil unrest. You all have heard all of the challenges that we face.”

He often cited the dangers of the job and urged the public to support the police, and his announced departure came on a day when an officer was fatally shot on the Southwest Side.

Brown came to the department amid unprecedented challenges, including the pandemic, mass protests and rise in violence, said Will Calloway, a community organizer who led police reform efforts after the police murder of Laquan McDonald.

”It’s not bad or good when it comes to Brown. It’s nothing,” Calloway said. “This wasn’t the job for him,”The superintendent was less visible and accessible than his permanent predecessor, former Superintendent Eddie Johnson,

Callowayadded. ”It was a huge challenge, especially for those of us who were working to bridge build between the department and the community.”

Calloway urged the winner of the mayoral runoff election to pick the new superintendent from among the Police Department’s ranks. ”We want someone who understands the plight, who understands these neighborhoods, who understands the politics, the violence, who loves this city like we do,” he said.

The top two finishers in Tuesday’s election who will square off in April, former Chicago Public Schools chief Paul Vallas and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson, each weighed in Wednesday on Brown’s impending departure. Neither had pledged to keep Brown on if elected.

“Superintendent Brown failed to make our city safer and his resignation is a positive step forward,” said Vallas. “As mayor, I will appoint a new police superintendent and command team from within CPD that will prioritize community policing, end the failed friends and family promotion system and invest in building trust between the police and our communities.”

“The next superintendent of the Chicago Police Department must be as fully committed to the health and safety of all Chicagoans as I am, and to immediately meeting all requirements of the federal consent decree while addressing the root causes of crime” Johnson said. “As mayor, my preference will be to appoint someone from within the current ranks of the Department, but most important is appointing the right person for the job — someone who is collaborative, competent and compassionate, and who truly cares about protecting and serving the people of our city.”

Brown previously served as the Dallas police chief from 2010 to 2016 before moving on to other work, including as a TV analyst for ABC News, and eventually becoming Lightfoot’s choice to lead the department. Lightfoot’s loss in Tuesday’s mayoral election all but guaranteed Brown’s exit, as all of her challengers had pledged to replace him.

“I personally want to thank him for his service to our city,” Lightfoot’s statement read. “First Deputy Eric Carter will be appointed as interim superintendent until the new mayor is sworn into office. We ask the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability to immediately begin the search for a new superintendent so that the new mayor will be able to make a selection as soon as possible.”

Brown issued his own statement Wednesday, saying he would take a position as chief operating officer of a personal injury law firm in Texas.

“It has been an honor and a privilege to work alongside the brave men and women of the Chicago Police Department,” Brown said. “I will continue to pray that all officers return home to their families safe at the end of their shift. May the Good Lord bless the city of Chicago and the men and women who serve and protect this great city.”

In April 2020, days before being confirmed as superintendent by the City Council, Brown sought to convince aldermen that his upbringing in a tough area of Dallas was similar to parts of Chicago that struggle with violence, poverty and other challenges.

“While many people may think of Dallas like the 1980s TV show, J.R. Ewing, and cattle ranchers and 10-gallon hats and oil fields, I grew up in a neighborhood that looked more like Chicago’s West and South sides,” Brown told the Chicago City Council’s Public Safety Committee. “I know the joys of living surrounded by others. I also know the struggles of growing up poor, living and working in a historically segregated city, as Dallas and Chicago share these difficult pasts and present.”

Brown told the Tribune in an interview the following month that he knew what he was getting himself into by overseeing the public safety of a city that routinely records the most killings in the country each year. He optimistically, if naively, set a goal to finish a full year in Chicago with under 300 homicides, which, if it ever happened, would be the lowest in the city since it recorded 296 in 1957.

“I believe in the impossible,” Brown told the Tribune during the May 2020 interview. “I believe we can improve our murders to historical lows, whatever that number is. If that number has to be 2-something, that’s what it has to be. We just have to first make the first step and believe that we can. And that’s my point. Moonshots.”

But Brown would be in for an unpleasant surprise in the coming months. Not only was he tasked with navigating the nation’s second-largest Police Department through the pandemic, but he also had to craft crime-fighting strategies to combat ever-surging gun violence, as well as civil unrest brought on by the police-custody death of George Floyd in Minnesota.

During the last weekend of May 2020, a month into Brown’s time as Chicago’s police leader, the city faced massive looting, property damage, dozens of shootings that left many dead, and a Police Department stretched beyond recognition. As the city spiraled into chaos, Lightfoot arranged for the Illinois National Guard to lockdown Chicago’s streets to bring calm.

In early 2021, the city’s inspector general’s office issued lengthy findings on the department’s litany of shortcomings and inconsistencies for that weekend and the days that followed under Brown’s leadership. Police brass lacked plans for mass arrests, leading to people facing charges that were either too serious or too light, according to a report from then-Inspector General Joseph Ferguson.

Officers were often unclear on who was in charge or what they were supposed to do. Scattered direction led to “strategic and tactical incoherence,” according to the report, where early in the protests police generally did not make arrests when people damaged property but the next day were told to crack down on vandals.

Echoing the complaints of protesters that police reacted brutally with batons and pepper spray, Ferguson pointed to “out-of-policy, dangerous and disrespectful actions by CPD members.” The full extent of those excesses may never be clear, however, because many officers failed to wear or switch on body cameras, Ferguson wrote. He noted also that some officers covered their names and star numbers.

In the immediate aftermath of that May 2020 weekend, Brown knew he had to make some internal changes.

The start of his tenure as police leader marked the beginning stages of a massive CPD reorganization that was put into place a few months earlier by then-interim police Superintendent Charlie Beck, former chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, which adopted a similar structure.

The reorganization in Chicago called for the movement of hundreds of cops from CPD’s specialized gang and drug units, along with detectives, to the patrol division, so police officials there could use them more efficiently to address neighborhood issues. Beck, however, did not include room for a roving citywide unit that parachutes into crime hot spots. But it was one of Brown’s first moves in Chicago.

Acknowledging he was mindful of controversies of past citywide units, including teams that went rogue and committed crimes themselves, Brown had a new vision for a citywide unit: one that took enforcement action while also participating in community service projects to show residents they’re not just about aggressive police work.

Then about four months into Brown’s tenure, an officer from his newly formed Community Safety Team shot Latrell Allen, then 20, in the Englewood neighborhood. Allen was charged with attempted murder after, authorities say, he opened fire first on police. But the team — including the officer who shot him — was not equipped with body cameras.

Forming the unit also came at an additional price for Brown when he transferred many officers from neighborhoods they were more accustomed to patrolling and knew best, a key attribute for cops working a beat. This meant there were often fewer cops available to respond to 911 calls in their individual districts, and fewer cops there getting to know their beats at a time when the department made it its mission to build trust with neighborhoods.

In January 2021, a police supervisor who worked on the Community Safety Team filed a lawsuit against the city alleging he was removed from the unit because he wouldn’t be pressured to have officers working under him make illegal stops and arrests.

The lawsuit, filed by Lt. Franklin Paz under the state’s Whistleblower Act and still ongoing, accused Brown’s hand-picked head of the unit of forcing cops under his command to generate “activity,” cop-speak for ordering officers to make plentiful arrests and stops, and take other actions.

Sources within the department said Brown had at times pushed for activity during his weekly meetings of CompStat, data-driven sessions that use crime statistics in real time to hold commanders accountable for upticks in the areas of the city they oversee.

Brown once talked to reporters about the department’s use of traffic stops and other enforcement action while trying to foster trust with the neighborhoods, though he resisted attempts to describe the efforts as instituting quotas.

Another low point for Brown’s tenure was the August 2021 fatal shooting of Chicago police Officer Ella French in the West Englewood community. Her partner, Carlos Yanez, was wounded during a shooting.

Since then, Brown moved officers from the Community Safety Team to other assignments.

It was also under Brown’s leadership that the department devised its own foot pursuit policy, which came in the aftermath of the controversial fatal shootings of 13-year-old Adam Toledo and 22-year-old Anthony Alvarez by officers in 2021.

The Chicago Police Board will hear evidence in the coming months to decide whether the cop who fatally shot Toledo, Eric Stillman, should be fired. Brown recommended Stillman only face a suspension of no more than five days for failing to activate his body camera in a timely manner, but that recommendation was overruled by a police board member who reviewed the Civilian Office of Police Accountability’s probe into the shooting.

A police board member, however, sided with Brown that the officer who killed Alvarez, Evan Solano, should only get a 20-day suspension despite COPA recommending that Solano be fired.

But aside from the criticisms lodged by Boik, Brown’s former police reform czar whom he fired, Brown presided over a department whose progress in implementing reforms in the areas of training, supervision and other areas where it’s deficient was questionable.

He was also a target of ridicule from Chicago’s largest police union, the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7 and its controversial president, John Catanzara, for canceling officers’ days off and having them work longer shifts. These policy decisions were exacerbated by a series of officer suicides.

Last summer, the Police Department announced new rules to limit day-off cancellations following a critical report from city Inspector General Deborah Witzburg that found, among other things, that more than 1,000 officers were scheduled to work 11 or more consecutive days, and some as many as 13 days straight. The report covered a review period of April 1 to May 31.

Chicago Tribune’s Gregory Pratt and Paige Fry contributed.

jgorner@chicagotribune.com

jsheridan@chicagotribune.com