CPD suffers ‘deficit of trust’ from public, officers, deputy inspector general says

The Chicago Police Department suffers from an “enormous deficit of trust and confidence” — from the public it is sworn to protect and from its own front-line officers — that is undermining police reform, a top official said Thursday.

Deborah Witzburg, the city’s deputy inspector general for public safety, argued “transparency” is the key to rebuilding public trust shattered by the court-ordered release of the Laquan McDonald shooting video and more recently by the death of George Floyd.

“People are understandably inclined to distrust things that happen in literal or figurative windowless rooms,” Witzburg told the Chicago Sun-Times on Thursday, citing the political controversy generated by Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s plan to spend $281.5 million from a federal relief package passed last year on police payroll and benefits.

“Rendering the problems and processes and the challenges of the police department publicly visible is sort of the road back. People recognize ... that big problems don’t have small solutions. They don’t get fixed overnight. But if we can ensure that the efforts that are underway to fix the problems of the police department are happening in the light of day, that goes a long way.”

Restoring the confidence of front-line officers who feel under siege and left to fend for themselves will be even more difficult to reverse, in part because it has such serious consequences, Witzburg said.

“Members of the police department are entitled to work for a department that provides them with adequate guidance and support. We are seeing ways in which they are not getting that. That leaves officers feeling undermined and feeling sort of left on their own,” Witzburg said.

“That, when combined with inadequate resources for officer wellness, leads to very, very bad outcomes. … Suicides are certainly the most heartbreaking. ... A loss of senior personnel who have institutional knowledge and experience. That’s a bad outcome as well.”

Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times

Witzburg pointed to the inspector general’s blistering critique of CPD’s handling of civil unrest last summer that devolved into two devastating rounds of looting.

It concluded CPD was “outflanked and unprepared” for problems it should have anticipated and that rank-and-file officers were “left to high-stakes improvisation without adequate supervision or guidance.”

“Inadequate training. Lack of equipment. No clear direction. Gaps in policy. All of those things sort of came together into a situation which, sort of, could only have gone badly,” she said.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot has responded to the IG’s complaint about “failures at the highest levels” of CPD by saying she retains “a thousand percent confidence” in CPD Supt. David Brown.

Instead of focusing on failures described in the inspector general’s report, Lightfoot has highlighted what CPD has learned from how ill-prepared it was and how poorly it handled last summer’s unrest.

“That manifested itself in a very peaceful fall, particularly around the federal election, looking at Black Friday after Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve and other potential threats that came to our city,” Lightfoot has said.

Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times

Witzburg was asked whether the mayor’s confidence in Brown was misplaced. “We’ll see,” she responded.

“The measure of Superintendent Brown’s time in the police department will be in how successfully he meets the enormous challenges of the moment,” she said.

Witzburg noted Interim Police Superintendent Charlie Beck had ordered CPD’s “most substantial” reorganization in recent memory, one that would disband specialized units and put officers back in police districts. Now Brown has undone virtually all of those changes.

Was that a mistake?

“I don’t know yet,” Witzburg said.

Four months ago, Inspector General Joe Ferguson likened lagging compliance with the federal consent decree to trying to fix an airplane in mid-flight.

Ferguson noted then that Chief Risk Officer Tamika Puckett, Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Susan Lee and Deputy CPD Supt. Barbara West, head of constitutional policing for CPD, were all gone.

He further noted the civilian police review board critical to restoring public trust in CPD was stalled by Lightfoot’s insistence that the mayor have final say in disputes over police policy and by the mayor’s refusal to empower the civilian panel to take a vote of no-confidence in the police superintendent that could trigger the superintendent’s firing after a two-thirds vote by the City Council.

What troubles Witzburg is that nothing has changed since then. No wonder CPD has missed 70 percent of its court-ordered deadlines in two straight reports.

“We’ve got to get going. …. There are some salient challenges,” she said.