Skeptics Whisper Worries Chicago Top Cop Is Unprepared For Crisis

CHICAGO — Police Supt. David Brown deserves to hear what people are whispering behind his back. So, I called level-headed law enforcement experts — locals who say they want Brown to succeed — to get their unfiltered take on the state of policing under the former Dallas chief.

They all talked about Brown's "moonshot" goal of limiting our shoot-em-up town to 300 murders. And how it seems he didn't come to Chicago with hand-picked team or, as far as anyone can tell, his own fleshed-out strategy to slow shootings and murders here.

The criminal justice experts, department insiders and long-time community activists who have met with Brown, expressed worry that the top cop remains surrounded by remnants of disgraced former Supt. Eddie Johnson's command staff, guardians of the corrupt status quo and police reform failure.

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They pointed out that Brown's chief of staff is a hold-over bureaucrat from Rahm Emanuel's administration. And, it seems, Brown hasn't been embraced by either community leaders or rank-and-file officers.

In private meetings, the police superintendent readily admits he doesn't really know Chicago, yet. And that is especially troubling, law enforcement sources say, because of all the other things that Brown doesn't seem to know, including whom to trust, who is on the outs with the mayor and which disgruntled insiders might be trying to sandbag him to take his job.

Plenty of those folks expressed empathy for Brown's status as a "fish out of water" who "walked into a powder keg" of the coronavirus crisis, civil unrest and looting, more than 500 acts of reported police misconduct, and reports that a radical police union boss urged cops to come down with symptoms of the "blue flu" at the start of the summer shooting season.

But that didn't override frustration over what some sources perceived as Brown's "reactionary leadership style" to protests that turned violent, the absence of a crime-fighting strategy that city stakeholders understand well enough to support, and the appearance that Mayor Lori Lightfoot dictates the superintendent's every move.

None of them were shocked that a reporter to ask the mayor if after just eight weeks on the job it was time for her to send Brown back to Texas.

The mayor publicly defended Brown, saying she still has confidence in him. For that, the top cop still might have a chance to redeem himself. (Though former top cops Garry McCarthy and Johnson, who both got fired by mayors who offered similar public support, might tell Brown to consider it a warning.)

But it's going to take more than Brown's sappy "I believe in Chicago" rhetoric that he offered up to reporters in defense of his moonshot murder goals while talking about the 106 people who were shot over the weekend.

Chicagoans weren't shocked that more than 100 people get shot-and-wounded on Father's Day weekend. No matter what the mayor tweets about the latest toddler to be shot dead, our city doesn't have a 'collective heart" that breaks over the murder 3-year-old Mekhi James, or any of the other slain children whose names most people forget after a few weeks.

The ugly truth about Chicago is that "unacceptable" levels of violence have become an expected social norm easily compartmentalized by residents of a cold-blooded city who mostly care about themselves and their particular patch.

So, Brown can spare us news conference soliloquies about how "gangs, guns and drugs" and the quick release of criminals is to blame for another summer spike in shootings.

We've heard all the excuses before.

What Chicagoans haven't heard enough of from Brown are specifics about his strategies for reducing crime, rebuilding community trust, increasing police officer morale and reforming a police department corrupted by the Thin Blue Line code of silence.

That's what folks are whispering about, like prayers for a city in crisis that needs miracle.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series, "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN, and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots.

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