April 13--Aldermen treated Mayor Rahm Emanuel's pick for police superintendent with kid gloves Tuesday, calling on Eddie Johnson to improve the department's connection with the community after voting to waive the rules to let him immediately remove the "interim" tag from his title.
As Chicago heads into what traditionally are its most violent months of the year, the City Council Public Safety Committee recommended approval of an ordinance granting Emanuel the right to name Johnson police superintendent without making him go through a second top cop search. It's an acknowledgment that the veteran police official is a foregone conclusion to take over the scandal-plagued department.
"People are dying in our neighborhoods, and folks are killing people in our neighborhoods, and right now, we have the morale of the Police Department, they're saying police aren't doing anything, they're not doing their jobs because morale is down," said 27th Ward Ald. Walter Burnett Jr., speaking in favor of giving the mayor authority to expedite his appointment of Johnson. "And we need the morale up, and we have somebody that they respect right now, that they work for, willing to work for."
Some aldermen expressed reservations about allowing Johnson to skip the vetting and background check by the city Police Board that usually precedes a mayor picking a superintendent. Emanuel declined to nominate any of three finalists the board picked last month, instead tapping Johnson.
"I think in this day and age in the city of Chicago, what we're going through right now, I think to be open and transparent and clear, and the public knows what the process is, is the right thing to do," said Ald. Patrick Daley Thompson, 11th. "And I think we should allow interim Superintendent Johnson to continue as interim superintendent, put his credentials forward."
But Thompson, who at one point said he had to step out of the hearing to take a call from his police commander about "another shooting in my ward this afternoon," was the only vote against allowing the mayor to skip the usual procedure and simply name Johnson.
The hearing was the culmination of weeks of unusually demonstrative calls by aldermen for Emanuel to allow them to play a bigger part in the process of selecting the new superintendent. Black and Latino aldermen in particular stepped into the vacuum created by the mayor's perceived political weakness after the Laquan McDonald shooting video was released to assert their right to have a say in who would set the crime-fighting strategy for their violence-plagued neighborhoods.
But the heads of the council's Black and Latino caucuses greeted the mayor's pick of Johnson with enthusiasm, saying the African-American Police Department veteran met their most important criteria. That lack of dissent lent Tuesday's proceedings an air of theatricality as council members took the opportunity to press Johnson on his plans and qualifications, even though his support from the full council on Wednesday was all but preordained.
Ald. Pat Dowell, 3rd, reminded the interim superintendent that he had pledged to beef up patrols in city parks, an initiative Johnson has promised to put in place.
