All Chicago police supervisors will soon be enrolled in an innovative program aimed at using a $15 million gift to turn them into more effective leaders.
Police Supt. Larry Snelling said he wants department members “to walk away with a feeling of confidence” — and crucial new job skills.
“We want them to be able to think on a critical level [and] develop strategies based on things that they’re seeing in the communities,” Snelling told the Sun-Times. “It’s going to make for a much more effective police officer, and it’s going to make for much more effective planning around strategies that you need to reduce violence.”
The Sue Ling Gin Foundation gave the funding to the Civic Committee, which will develop and run the program over the next five years alongside the University of Chicago Crime Lab.
The first group of police leaders is expected to start training in January.
About 1,700 supervisors — from sergeants on up — will receive the training, according to the Civic Committee, an arm of the Commercial Club of Chicago.
A separate program for a smaller group of supervisors is also planned. That program is modeled after the University of Chicago’s Police Leadership Academy — a five-month training and management course for high-ranking cops.
Roseanna Ander, the crime lab’s founding executive director, said there’s strong evidence that developing leaders in policing can reduce gun violence without relying on more arrests or heavy-handed enforcement.
Ander said she doesn’t know any police agency providing this type of training to all levels of leadership, and she hopes it can become a nationwide model.
Ander said she thinks it’s “a national scandal” that “American policing hasn’t invested in developing and cultivating and building strong and effective leaders.”
“What we’re going to be able to do with the superintendent, because of his commitment to really building a healthy and effective police department, is to work with literally every single rank over the course of five years in a way that becomes business as usual for the police department,” she said.
The program will be part of the 40 hours of annual training required under a federal consent decree mandating sweeping changes to the department’s policies and practices.
But Snelling said he hopes to eventually “go beyond” that demand.
“There will be additional training for those supervisors because the supervisors need to be constantly reminded, they need to be retrained,” Snelling said. “Things evolve, especially in policing. Communities evolve, neighborhoods evolve. And that evolution has to happen within the department in order for us to be effective.”
Last year’s Democratic National Convention demonstrated the effectiveness of extensive training, Snelling said.
“We had a little less than a year to prepare for it,” he said. “And I knew at that time, with having a training background, that these officers were going to need repetition after repetition … on doing things the way we need them to do them constitutionally, in order to make their behavior a habit.”
The result was just 14 disciplinary complaints over six days. Snelling said. By comparison, there was a single day of civil unrest in 2020 when the department received over 1,000 complaints.
“It just goes to show you that that type of leadership training — and having the supervisors in the field pushing the message of how we want our officers to police — is more effective than not having that training for those supervisors,” he said.