CPD opens a training session to the media as part of transparency, reform efforts
A man sits on a curb holding a 2 ½-inch knife blade to his throat. His girlfriend just broke up with him, and he’s unsure of where he’s going to live. He’s distraught, but he keeps to himself before someone sees him and calls 911.
Two Chicago police officers, a man and a woman, soon arrive at the imaginary intersection of Jimenez and Wortham streets, where the female officer calmly tells him that, “we have plenty of resources for you” and “you’re not a burden at all.”
After a couple minutes of reassurance, the man tosses the knife a few feet to his right.
About 20 feet away, a CPD training academy instructor blows his whistle. The drill is over.
The CPD on Friday opened the doors of its new training academy, allowing reporters a brief look at officer training and wellness courses provided at the sprawling facility in West Humboldt Park.
“We don’t want to do this fast,” Angel Novalez, the CPD’s chief of the Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform who was a finalist for the superintendent job, said Friday. “The public deserves better. We want to do it right.”
The access was provided one day after the independent monitoring team that oversees the consent decree released its latest report. The report concluded that despite sustained, good-faith efforts by many in CPD, reform progress has been slow.
After four years of the consent decree, the monitoring team, led by former federal prosecutor Maggie Hickey, said “CPD’s compliance efforts continue to lag and, after several reporting periods of minimal progress, bring into question the city’s and the CPD’s commitment to implementing reforms in community policing practices as required by the consent decree.”
Hickey and her team said they are encouraged by new CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling’s public commitments to boosting the department’s transparency efforts. Opening up the training session to the media Friday was part of those intentions, police leaders said.
However, the monitoring team also noted that a disconnect still exists between the CPD’s reform efforts and the department’s day-to-day operations.
The report gauged the CPD’s compliance with consent decree mandates between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2023, a time frame that saw three superintendents lead the CPD for various lengths of time. Novalez said that the gap noted by the monitoring team has already shrunk since Snelling assumed leadership of the department.
“Larry Snelling’s strong reform background and training background is the bind, and he is making sure that every member of the department understands what reform is and has that bind,” Novalez said. “When you have someone that can talk the talk but walk the walk, that gives us a strength that we haven’t had before, and I am very, very optimistic.”
Snelling’s immediate predecessor won’t be far away, though. A CPD spokesperson on Friday confirmed a report by WBEZ that Snelling rehired former interim Superintendent Fred Waller as the deputy director of the superintendent’s office. Waller will be paid about $181,000 per year, according to the city’s employee data portal, in addition to his monthly pension payments of more than $12,000.
“The tremendous trust and respect (Waller) has earned in the community, as well as the community relationships he has built, continue to be instrumental as the department continues to build trust with those we serve,” a CPD spokesperson said in an emailed statement Friday. “His knowledge of our city and the department, as well as his decades of experience, is invaluable and will continue to help us strengthen public safety across every neighborhood.”
