The solution to future police scandals may hinge on the willingness of the mayor to scrub the bureaucracy clean, oust a few political cops, and bring in a Mr. Clean. But in a department like ours–defined by racial divisions, political expediency, and a brutal and corrupt history–logic dictates that the superintendent will always be someone who’s skillfully maneuvered through the thicket of middle and upper management at 11th and State. Our police chiefs will never be recruited from national talent pools because Chicago has never worked that way. When the number-one man gets into trouble, as Matt Rodriguez did when his friendship with a convicted tax cheat became a matter of public concern, the mayor selects the number-two man or the number-three man. He never picks the “stick man”–the top cop with the political clout, the one who usually calls the shots.
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In the early years of his administration Daley was not nearly as invincible as he’s remembered. Influential if shrinking Republican and reform contingents still lurked in the City Council. An ambitious Republican state’s attorney named Benjamin Adamowski smelled blood and was eager to play the Morrison card to full advantage. Adamowski had been Daley’s pal, but he became a sworn enemy after 1955, when the Democratic Central Committee dumped Mayor Martin Kennelly from the top of the ticket in Daley’s favor. Adamowski, leader of the northwest-side Poles, renounced the Democratic Party, and by 1960 he had his eye on Daley’s office. He would come close to defeating Daley in ’63. If their race had been waged on the heels of the Summerdale scandal, the mayor could have lost it.
Other elections were pending in 1960 when Summerdale broke, so Wilson was grudgingly presented a blank check and free rein in order to minimize the political fallout. A hard-drinking, chain-smoking Norwegian who favored the chummy ambience of the Swedish Club, to which he retreated every afternoon at three, O.W. dragged Chicago’s police department by the hair into a new era of professionalism. Employing the book theories of his west-coast mentor, August Vollmer, he encountered stiff resistance and a dash of ethnic hostility from Chicago’s predominantly Irish-Catholic police culture.
Ramsey, who rose to prominence in Narcotics before heading the ballyhooed Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) program, proposed a radical plan to pare down the bureaucracy by eliminating three of the department’s five bureaus. Massive reorganizations are always risky, with the elimination of jobs costing the city money and the mayor union support and cop votes, particularly in the bungalow belts on the southwest and northwest sides.
Fewer than 30 people showed up to hear Bratton articulate his theories of police accountability, of the need to attack crime strategically by empowering precinct commanders to become frontline managers responsible for the upkeep of their own turf. The New York department is the cleanest it’s been in years, and Bratton takes credit in the name of his zero-tolerance policies against crooked cops and cops who use or deal drugs.
In both Boston and New York, community policing emphasizes foot patrols. Chicago’s CAPS program still relies heavily on the auto patrol, which in the view of O.W. Wilson back in 1960 was a reform offering a faster means of canvassing the city. But it isolated patrol officers in marked squad cars, which quickly became a symbol of police repression in low-income areas.
“He made it quite clear that he considered himself the police commissioner and the real police commissioner was actually the first deputy,” said Bratton, who doesn’t mince words discussing a man whose ambitions were on a par with his own.
