Larry Snelling was confirmed as Chicago’s next police superintendent in a City Council vote Wednesday, finalizing Mayor Brandon Johnson’s choice for the longtime insider and South Side native to lead the department with a vision of rejuvenating officer morale and repairing community relations.
Aldermen voted 48-0 to approve the department’s current chief of counterterrorism and a longtime instructor at the training academy as the next leader of the nation’s second-largest police department. Snelling was then formally sworn in as superintendent at a City Hall ceremony Wednesday afternoon before heading into his first day in charge.
Johnson addressed the body after Snelling’s confirmation, praising him as a “son of this city (who) can prevail through some of the greatest circumstances and dynamics” to become police superintendent.
“Having the ability to express your leadership through your heart, with love, is not weakness,” Johnson continued, quoting Ald. Matthew O’Shea’s earlier comments on Snelling’s leadership. “In fact, it is the greatest power that we possess on this Earth. … There is no greater love than someone who was willing to lay down their life. So let this be a mark and a testament to who we are: There is nothing soft about the city of Chicago.”
The mayor also asserted that law enforcement cannot be the only answer to crime, a common refrain of his progressive-minded campaign.
“As we’ve all said repeatedly, if you think that the only way we can get to a better, stronger, safer Chicago is with policing alone, you are attempting to take us in the wrong direction,” Johnson said. “This city will not tolerate it. We won’t accept it. … No matter who you are and where you are in this city, you deserve to not just feel safe, but to be safe.”
Ahead of the vote, City Council members praised his credentials while warning of challenges ahead during a critical point for Chicago police as it attempts to navigate out of a spike in violent crime, civil unrest from 2020 and historic distrust from Black and Latino communities. The session followed last week’s council Police and Fire committee hearing that too was mostly a peaceful affair and signaled the progressive Johnson administration’s most strident support for cops yet.
Snelling, 54, grew up in Englewood and joined CPD in 1992. He worked as a patrol officer and supervisor in the Englewood and Morgan Park district on the South Side, but he spent most of his career to this point as an instructor in the department’s training academy. Records from the city’s Human Resources Department also show Snelling took a two-year leave of absence from the CPD in the late 1990s when he was a regional security director of AT&T.
Snelling has been called to testify as an expert witness in more than two dozen civil and criminal cases involving police officers.
Among those cases was the 2018 criminal trial of three CPD officers who were accused of conspiring to cover up the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald four years earlier. Those three officers were ultimately acquitted in a bench trial.
Snelling also testified in the Police Board proceedings of four officers who faced administrative charges also stemming from the 2014 McDonald shooting on the Southwest Side. All four were eventually fired.
His ascent through the CPD ranks was quick — Snelling held the rank of sergeant less than five years ago — and city records show he received two merit promotions in his career.
With his sharp rise coupled with his years training recruits in the academy, Snelling strikes a balance for Johnson: a CPD lifer from the South Side, well-known and respected by supervisors, rank-and-file cops and citizens.
Records from the Department of Human Resources show Snelling was suspended on two occasions early in his career for a total of seven days. Snelling received a bachelor’s degree in adult education and leadership from DePaul University in 2014, and he’s currently pursuing his master’s degree at the University of Chicago.
Earlier this month, Snelling fielded questions from the public about safety challenges facing the city. Referencing his own upbringing in Englewood, Snelling called for a clear-eyed examination of the factors that often lead the city’s youth down a path to violence.
“We’ve forgotten about our victims and we’ve forgotten about our children,” Snelling said. “Our children have become victims, and not just victims of crime, (but) victims of being ignored. And until we step up and we start looking out for our children in these communities, they grow up to become the next statistic.”
He urged the city not to “ignore” its children.
“Because when you have a 14-, 15-, 16-year-old shooter, you can’t blame the 14-, 15-, 16-year-old,” Snelling said. “We have to start looking back to see where this child was failed. This goes beyond us.”
Like other big cities, Chicago saw a significant crime wave starting in 2020, amid a pandemic and civil unrest and with violence peaking the next year to levels not seen since the 1990s. Through Sept. 24, the city has recorded 471 homicides, down 15% from the same period in 2022, according to city data. But while shootings are decreasing, the city is in the midst of a large spike in robberies and car thefts.
A day before the vote, Tuesday, the city recorded four fatal shootings on the South and Southwest sides in less than eight hours, according to CPD.
Meanwhile, the city is still struggling to meet the reform obligations that were codified in the 2019 CPD consent decree, itself a byproduct of the fatal 2014 shooting of McDonald by ex-Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke.
The permanent superintendent position was vacated in March when David Brown — the former chief of police in Dallas — submitted his resignation one day after former Mayor Lori Lightfoot failed to qualify for the mayoral runoff election. Brown’s first deputy superintendent, Eric Carter, helmed the department until Johnson was sworn in as mayor. Once in office, Johnson tapped Fred Waller, the former CPD chief of patrol who remained very popular within the ranks after his retirement in 2020, to lead the department on an interim basis.
Historically, the superintendent selection process was led by the Chicago Police Board, the body that metes out discipline in the most severe cases of police misconduct. That changed in 2021 when a new city ordinance created the Community Commission for Police Accountability, which submitted three finalists for the job to Johnson earlier this year.
Snelling was chosen over two other finalists, CPD Chief of Constitutional Policing and Reform Angel Novalez, and Shon Barnes, chief of police in Madison, Wisconsin.