Newly-appointed CPD Superintendent David have his second chance in Chicago? kiran misra

The Contradictions of a Progressive Police Chief

Newly-appointed CPD Superintendent David Brown left a complicated legacy in Dallas. Will he have his second chance in Chicago?

BY KIRAN MISRA

In July 2016, when five police officers were killed by a sniper at a protest in Dallas, the city’s then-police chief David Brown rose to the national spotlight for his call for unity in a difficult time. A glowing profile in Texas Monthly, coverage in the New York Times referring to him as a “reformer,” praise from conservatives in The Atlantic and National Review, and more prompted some around the country to call for the chief to make a presidential run using the hashtag #DavidBrownForPresident. Former New York Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton said that Brown “represents some of the best progressive police leadership today,” and Brown himself said in an interview, “A gap has been bridged between the community and its police department.” Just two months later, in September, Brown resigned from his position in what looked from afar like the kind of graceful exit that many big-city police chiefs are unable to effectuate—he acknowledged in a 2017 interview that most Dallas chiefs before him were “run out of town”—and soon after, published a memoir, Called to Rise: The Power of Community in a Nation Divided, and signed on as a contributor to ABC News.

Nearly four years later, Brown is entering the world of policing once again. He was confirmed as Chicago’s new police superintendent in a unanimous approval by Chicago’s City Council, replacing former Superintendent Eddie Johnson, who was fired just weeks before his planned retirement.

Brown wasn’t the obvious initial favorite choice for the role. In addition to Brown, former chief of detectives for the Los Angeles Police Department Sean Malinowski, Chicago Police Deputy Chief Ernest Cato, and west suburban Aurora Police Chief Kristen Ziman were in the running, with a reported twenty others. Malinowski seemed an early favorite for his big-city experience and success in managing a consent decree during his time in Los Angeles. He was also familiar with the inner workings of the Chicago Police Department, as a former consultant to the CPD following the release of the Laquan McDonald shooting video and the current director of policing innovation and reform at the University of Chicago Crime Lab, which works closely with the CPD. Cato had some community support, as the only finalist who was already a part of the Chicago Police. Ziman had received praise for the Aurora Police Department’s response to the 2019 Henry Pratt Manufacturing shooting.

But there was little time to collect community input—and in a shock, Malinowski wasn’t even presented as an option by the Police Board. Just a day later, in the midst of a nationwide pandemic, Brown was picked by Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

The process of choosing Chicago’s next police superintendent is led—per city ordinance—by the Police Board rather than the mayor. However, Lightfoot, who served as the president of the Police Board the last time a superintendent was selected, publicly stated in April that she had been considering Brown for the job since December, far before his name appeared on the Police Board shortlist. Local activists and progressive elected representatives criticized the Police Board’s actions in releasing the names of the three finalists only after the mayor began her private interviews with top candidates, robbing community members of the opportunity to give feedback and conduct thorough research on those in the running. 29th Ward Alderman Chris Taliaferro, a former CPD officer whom Lightfoot appointed as chair of the City Council’s Committee on Public Safety last May, defended the selection process and contended in an interview that it included opportunities for public hearings in his Austin-based ward and that “[the process] does not preclude the mayor from looking herself.” He added, “Any insinuation that Mayor Lightfoot interfered in that process would be a wrong insinuation. It's very evident not just to me, but also all of my colleagues, that the mayor did a fantastic job in allowing the process to proceed in accordance with ordinance.”

As he was getting sworn in, Brown advised Chicagoans, “Buckle your seat belts, we’re headed to the moon,” outlining his goals for Chicago to have the lowest murders and shootings on record as well as “the highest level of trust in its officers from its residents,” a particularly lofty goal for a police force that has been plagued with corruption and cover-ups spanning the last several decades. When asked why the Dallas native would want to lead Chicago's police force, Brown responded, “Are you kidding me? The city that produced Michelle Obama and elected Mayor Lightfoot. I volunteer. Sign me up.” Notably, the superintendent position is far from a volunteer role. Brown will be getting paid $260,044 each year for his work. B rown's story is a moving one. Before his move to Chicago, Brown’s family had lived in Dallas for four generations. He attended South Oak Cliff High School, a prominent predominantly Black high school in the city, before enrolling at the University of Texas at Austin. He says in interviews that he left college and his dreams of being an attorney to join the Dallas police force as a patrol officer in 1983, dropping out of college to do so, after he saw the crack epidemic's effect on his Oak Cliff neighborhood.

Over the next few years, Brown moved up the ranks of the force, working in patrol divisions, the SWAT team, internal affairs, and more.

But just a few years into the job, tragedy struck when his partner and best friend was killed while on duty by a Dallas resident. And a few years later, his brother was killed in a fight with a drug dealer in Arizona. Brown was shaken but doubled down on his career. He returned to school to finish his bachelor’s degree and went on to get his MBA. In 2005, Brown became Dallas’s assistant chief of police and served for a year as assistant city manager. By May 2010, Brown had been sworn in as the city’s police chief, only the second Black chief in Dallas history.

Just a few weeks after he was sworn in, on Father’s Day 2010, Brown got a call. His son, David Brown Jr., had been killed by police. While high on PCP, Brown Jr. had experienced a mental breakdown and shot a man named Jeremy McMillian, who was driving in a car near Brown Jr.’s home. Brown Jr. then shot and killed police officer Craig Shaw, who had responded to the shooting, after which other officers on the force shot and killed Brown Jr.

A few days later, Brown asked to meet McMillian and Shaw’s families, even attending Shaw’s funeral, which was reportedly right after his son’s services. Later, in an interview, Brown reflected that the events of June 20, 2010 gave him, “the deepest empathy for people who suffer and families with people they love who have mental illness.” Two weeks later, Brown returned to work.

PHOTO BY LEE STRANAHAN

Just a few months after Trayvon Martin was killed in Florida, the Dallas police received an anonymous call about an armed kidnapping on the south side of the city. When officers arrived at the home of the alleged kidnapping, Dallas resident James Harper ran out the back door. His mother later explained that Harper feared someone was breaking in. Police officer Brian Rowden shot Harper, killing him. Harper was unarmed, and adding to the injustice of the situation, the anonymous kidnapping tip ended up being false. The event would come to be known as ‘Dixon Circle,’ for Harper’s neighborhood.

Harper’s death catalyzed Brown’s public statement of a new slate of policing reforms to come. Brown publicly released the name of Harper’s killer and renewed his emphasis on de-escalation, promised to implement taser training and review the department’s chase policy, and stated that he would be releasing unprecedented amounts of data on officer-involved shootings to gain public trust in policing practices. He even committed to enlist the help of the FBI’s Civil Rights Office to help him implement these reforms. Per the DPD’s website, all police shootings are referred to the FBI, but there’s no information on the outcomes of any FBI reviews.

Brown often credits his statement that night and his commitments to action with quelling riots that were threatening to erupt in Dixon Circle, as hundreds converged outside a nearby grocery store to protest. In an interview conducted in the months before his retirement, Brown remembered, “without my holding a press conference by the next news cycle, it's likely that we would've been Ferguson before Ferguson was Ferguson."

John Fullinwider, co-founder of Mothers Against Police Brutality, has been organizing in the Dallas community since the 1970s and for reform within the Dallas Police Department since the 1990s. He first met Brown in the 1980s, when Brown was a new officer providing security at a local credit union. He explained, “Chief Brown is the best ambassador that a police department could you ever have... He presents the good face to the police department, and he tells the story of the police department in a way that resonates with policymakers and the general public.”

However, he and other activists say that Brown’s plans and reforms often sounded better on paper than they ended up being for members of the Dallas community.

“He’s painted this story about himself as someone who’s for police reform… He’s not,” said Walter “Changa” Higgins, an organizer and the head of the Dallas Community Police Oversight Coalition, in an interview with the Weekly. “We have a very different picture from our side in the community than the picture that he painted.”

Holding Brown accountable was hard. He was a local and the community was hesitant to push back against one of their own. “A lot of people knew him, he had roots, he had ties here, and he used that to his advantage. Because of that, people were less likely to attack him, because that's just the nature of Dallas,” Higgins explained. “But people like the activists, organizers like myself, we had a really hard time getting anything done with his office.”

Decades before, when Brown was a newer officer, he had done a stint with the police department’s community policing team. When he became chief, Brown made community policing a central tenet of his strategy to reform the Dallas Police Department, an effort to build trust between officers and neighborhoods that were overpoliced and under-resourced.

Terrance Hopkins, a member of the DPD at the time, remembered, “Chief Brown was instrumental in bringing community policing teams to Dallas to the point where the community just raved. I mean, they rave about our community policing program.”

Activists remember the program a bit differently. “[Brown’s idea] of what community policing was is having a ‘coffee with the cops [event],” Alexander explained. At these events, the Dallas Police Department police officers and community members could meet over a cup of coffee to build relationships and discuss the community’s goals and concerns.

However, these efforts rarely seemed to reach the community members they were supposed to serve. “The people who are being impacted the most by bad policing, who bear the brunt of modern day policing, don't come to [events] like coffee with cops because they have no incentive, they have no reason to be there,” Higgins explained. As a result, according to activists, these and other community meetings came to be dominated by those who were already supporters of the police department. “It wasn’t welcoming for people who were critical of the department,” Higgins added.

Many of these programs were reportedly short-lived and the underlying factors driving crime and violence in the communities went unaddressed.

Activists remember the police chief engaging with and getting the support of community members like pastors who had little experience engaging in policy discussions about issues with policing in the area, but not those who had been working on these very issues for decades. “When it came down to meeting in a room… he would have those conversations with people who were not working on these issues. And then he come back to say, ‘well I'm already meeting with this group and, you know, why are you not part of this group,” Higgins remembered.

Dominique Alexander of the Next Generation Action Network, an