As Snelling gets ready for work each morning, he thinks about what his message will be for his officers. He strategizes. He looks at his schedule for the day, for the week, for the month. When he comes home, he falls asleep on the couch, reading through documents. He thinks through his plans, adjusts them as needed. He avoids reading news articles, he says. Those work him up, and Snelling doesn’t have time to get worked up over that sort of thing. “If you focus on the facts and continue to do the job the way it’s supposed to be done, you don’t have to worry about [what is written],” he says.
Snelling sums up his approach to crime in three words: “intelligence-driven policing.” What he means is tapping the latest technology, data analysis, and interagency collaboration to investigate and prevent incidents. An illustrative example is the Crime Gun Intelligence Center of Chicago, a partnership of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies led by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Established in 2024, the center uses shared databases and resources to trace guns that were used for crimes, quickly analyze ballistics evidence to connect incidents, and identify gun traffickers. “Just working together has been instrumental in helping us get crime down,” Snelling says. (After police captured the man who killed Officer Luis Huesca last April during a carjacking, Snelling declared, “This is intelligence-driven policing at its best.”)
Snelling is also an advocate for management training of his department’s supervisors. In 2023, the University of Chicago Crime Lab began using its findings from the Strategic Decision Support Centers, a data analysis and training initiative with the CPD, to create the Policing Leadership Academy, which trains commanders from departments around the country. Snelling, deputy chief of counterterrorism at the time, was tapped to help develop the program. In early 2024, he worked with the Crime Lab to design a three-day training for CPD leadership, from commanders to the chief of patrol, on how to use data to drive decision making. The Crime Lab points to recent research suggesting that without such tools, police aren’t able to correctly identify the “hottest blocks,” or areas where crime is particularly high — that sometimes they’ll be off by a block or two, or maybe even a few miles.
With Snelling an advocate of using technology to stop and solve crime, it must have stung him when the mayor ended the city’s use of ShotSpotter in 2024. Supporters considered the gunshot detection system a vital tool for helping police respond quickly to incidents. But Johnson had campaigned on removing ShotSpotter, which he insisted had led to the overpolicing of Black and Latino neighborhoods, deriding it as a “walkie-talkie on a stick.”
When I ask Snelling about ShotSpotter, he says debating the significance of its loss is moot. “At the time, did I think ShotSpotter was important? Yeah. As a commander, as an area deputy chief, I know what effect ShotSpotter had.” But he also had known that with the new administration, the technology might get yanked. “And instead of worrying about it going away, I focused more on what we were doing to work around the loss of it. We can’t be looking behind. You’ve got to look ahead.”
Without ShotSpotter, the department has been leaning more on the Strategic Decision Support Centers, which were launched in a few of the city’s most violent neighborhoods in 2017 and are now in all 22 districts, where they provide real-time data analysis. Investigators also rely on area technology centers to quickly process video from a variety of sources, including surveillance cameras and cellphone footage. Still, in November, Snelling told the City Council that the department was looking for a replacement for ShotSpotter.
That Snelling works for a mayor who has been openly skeptical of traditional law enforcement — in 2020, Johnson, as a Cook County commissioner, called defunding the police a “real political goal” — naturally raises questions about their relationship. The FOP’s Catanzara brings up what he calls “the first deputy superintendent fiasco” — that is, Snelling’s appointment of Yolanda Talley as his second-in-command, the first woman named to that post. “He was clearly told that’s who they wanted,” Catanzara says, referring to the mayor’s office. Alderperson Raymond Lopez, a frequent Johnson critic, agrees, claiming that the appointment of Talley, who had been the commander of the 15th District in Austin, brought the Johnson administration some much desired clout with West Side religious leaders.
Catanzara was initially pleased with Snelling’s selection as superintendent but is now skeptical: “The hope was that he was going to be less of a political creature.” He pauses before throwing the jab. “More of a man of his own.” Catanzara says he and Snelling aren’t speaking these days. Their relationship deteriorated after they clashed over Snelling’s handling of Officer Huesca’s funeral. According to Catanzara, Snelling insisted that the mayor be invited against the family’s desires. (Johnson ultimately did not attend.) “I wish he weren’t so delicate to criticism,” Catanzara says.
John Catanzara, the president of Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police, was initially pleased with Snelling’s selection as superintendent but is now skeptical: “The hope was that he was going to be less of a political creature.”
Snelling denies politics played a role in Talley’s selection. “When it comes to promotion, I’ll never give in to pressure from anybody,” he tells me. “I don’t care who it is.” He says he took his time to fill the role — nearly 18 months, in fact — because he wanted to first get a better understanding of what was needed in the job. “I’ve always been a believer that if you’re going to be at the top of the food chain, you need to understand the moves that are being made.” Nonetheless, Snelling reduced Talley’s role significantly less than five months into her job, and she retired in October.
I ask Snelling if politics ever gets in his way. He shrugs off the question. “Quite often people believe that the mayor is involved in the movement within the Chicago Police Department. He’s not.” It’s the superintendent who calls the shots, he emphasizes, adding that Johnson trusts him. “I tell him that this is what we’re going to do. People on the outside may not understand that. But on the inside, we do.”
In Snelling’s office, there’s a framed photograph. It’s familiar because photos like this one made the rounds on social media in August 2024, right after the Democratic National Convention. It shows him standing in the middle of the street wearing a bulletproof vest, starched white shirtsleeves crossed over his chest. Two officers flank Snelling, their posture loose but focused. Behind them, a line of police in riot gear. It’s dark outside and shadows are cast onto the asphalt from street lamps. Night has fallen and the city is calm.
Snelling was charged with managing security surrounding the convention less than a year into the job. To him, the famously chaotic 1968 Democratic convention here was a result of insufficient training. So that’s where he began his preparation, tapping not just his academy experience but the program he developed for safeguarding the 2012 NATO summit here. As the 2024 convention approached, Snelling met with organizers of the various planned protests. “Come express your First Amendment rights,” he told them. “But don’t come here with violence or vandalism.” Snelling planned details down to how to ensure officers stayed hydrated and fed. When an outer security fence was breached, he was on the scene — in fact, he made sure he was onsite every day. “It can’t be ‘Do as I say, not what I do,’ ” Snelling tells me. The force’s handling of the event was widely praised. This was no repeat of 1968: This time, there were only eight complaints of police misconduct filed during the convention.
Just over a year later, as ICE and Border Patrol agents surged into the city, Snelling faced another significant challenge. In October, tensions were raised by the Brighton Park incident in which a woman was shot and wounded; she was accused of ramming her car into a vehicle belonging to federal agents, but prosecutors dropped the charges. Fox News, citing an internal CPD dispatch, reported that the chief of patrol had told officers not to respond with help for the boxed-in agents.
Soon after, Snelling held a press conference. He had wanted to stay away from politics, but he couldn’t keep silent — not when outsiders were questioning his people. He insisted that his officers were never told to stand down and, in fact, were at the scene. (Body camera footage released in November, though, confirmed that a lieutenant, citing Chief of Patrol Jon Hein, initially ordered officers not to respond, a directive that was ultimately countermanded.) Then, in a calm, no-nonsense delivery, Snelling pointed out something that had gone unsaid by city leaders: that protesters were taking a risk when they made federal agents feel threatened: “You are breaking the law when you do that, and you are putting yourself in danger. You may not like what they’re doing. I can understand that there’s a lot of emotions out there, but that does not mean that you get to commit a crime, especially one that could lead to deadly force.”
With so much anti–federal agent fervor around town, it may not have been what Chicagoans wanted to hear. But it was what they needed to hear.
The room roils with tension. It’s February 2024, less than six months into Snelling’s tenure as superintendent, and he is speaking at the monthly meeting of the Chicago Police Board, an independent civilian body that makes disciplinary decisions in cases of serious police misconduct. Also in attendance are officials from the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, another independent agency, created in 2016 after the McDonald shooting to investigate misconduct complaints.
“What I’d like to talk about is transparency, accountability, and officer wellness,” Snelling says. He’s sitting at a long table directly facing Andrea Kersten, COPA’s chief administrator at the time, and he’s referring to the ways in which COPA conducts its investigations. “It’s affecting officers’ performance, but it’s also affecting the safety of members of the community.”
Snelling is concerned that anti-police bias is playing a role in COPA’s reviews. “What we’re seeing are egregious penalties for extremely minor infractions,” he continues. He also wants COPA to take into account that police are often faced with split-second decisions. “We have officers right now who have been called murderers who were simply trying to protect themselves or protect someone else.” As Snelling speaks, he taps his pen on the table for emphasis. These kinds of allegations hurt officers’ mental health, he points out, and they become afraid to police effectively. Willful misconduct is one thing, but mistakes? Those are unavoidably human.
Then Snelling punches hard: “I hear it all the time: police accountability, police accountability. But who’s overseeing the overseer?”
Kersten’s response is measured. She argues that even honest mistakes can be misconduct. “Just like you walk with officers, we walk with complainants who’ve had a very different experience,” she says. “And we’re not siding with them. But we have to receive their version of events.” After she brings up the tenets of the federal consent decree that require de-escalation, Snelling responds. “De-escalation? You don’t have to explain it to me. I wrote it,” he says, referring to his years as a police trainer.
After watching the exchange, Kalven was initially cautiously optimistic. In his mind, the open exchange offered a sense of new possibility for what police reform could look like. He saw the tension as a means for strengthening the quality of COPA’s investigations. But that’s not what ended up happening. “I think the superintendent ran roughshod over that moment and that possibility,” Kalven says.
The trouble began less than a month later when Dexter Reed, a 26-year-old Black man, was shot and killed by officers in Humboldt Park after a traffic stop. Reed fired first, injuring one officer, but the subsequent hail of gunfire by police — 96 shots in 41 seconds — raised concerns of excessive force. Reed’s family also claimed that racial profiling had been behind the stop.
In the ensuing weeks and months, the hopeful tension Kalven had seen between Kersten and Snelling got strained to a breaking point. On April 12, Snelling made his first public comments about the Reed shooting while meeting with the press about another matter. By then, COPA had announced that a seat belt violation prompted the traffic stop, a finding that Kersten then discussed in an interview with WTTW. At the press conference, Snelling expressed concern that comments about the case had been made before an investigation had been concluded: “Those who are putting that information out there to the media are doing so irresponsibly.”
When a reporter asked the superintendent to clarify his remarks, Snelling shifted his body toward the mic, his eyes narrowed. “If that information came from COPA, then that’s who I’m talking about,” he responded. “Information spreads like wildfire, and here’s the issue — and this is important to me.” He paused. “I’m passionate about this because a police officer was shot.” Snelling looked around the room. “I’ll repeat, a police officer was shot. A man lost his life. This isn’t something that should play out in the court of public opinion.”
Snelling had turned the heat up on Kersten. That fall, two former employees sued the city for wrongful dismissal, saying they were fired after criticizing Kersten’s leadership. One of them claimed she made public comments about the Reed case that were “unsupported by actual evidence” from the investigation. Then last February, facing a vote of no confidence by the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, which oversees COPA, Kersten resigned.
Kalven, for one, thinks the rigor of COPA investigations improved under Kersten’s leadership, and he argues that focusing on the other aspects of her ousting obscures what he sees as the origin: Snelling’s complaints about the way investigations were conducted. He’s worried that Snelling’s growing influence will result in the appointment of a new COPA chief who won’t operate with the same level of independence as Kersten did.
“I don’t know if [Snelling’s] criticism is warranted,” says a former member of COPA. “But what I do believe is that it risked undermining the integrity of the organization as a whole.” If Snelling had real concerns about police bias or improper investigations, this person contends, he should have brought it up with the city’s inspector general.
With Kersten’s departure, LaKenya White was named interim chief administrator of COPA. She has been with the agency since its inception. She also once worked in the CPD’s now-defunct in-house internal review office. In August, the Sun-Times reported that White had withdrawn six previous disciplinary recommendations, including four that called for officers to be fired.
A siren whirs outside the Hyatt Centric in the Loop as someone shuts off the lights and clicks on the projector. Inside a narrow conference room, Snelling faces a collection of round tables pressed against one another, wall to wall, each fully occupied. The room is packed with police leaders from around the country, plus one from Glasgow, who are in Chicago for a week of training with the Policing Leadership Academy.
Snelling comes off relaxed but professional. He shifts his weight onto his heels, cracks a joke. He’s killing some time while awaiting the arrival of a man named Darryl Smith, whom he calls Smitty. Snelling is here to lead a training session with him called Strategically Reducing Violence and Building Trust: A Community Case Study. More specifically, he is here to convince the men and women in the room to find a Smitty of their own.
Snelling gets started without Smitty, telling the story of how they met. In 2020, a year after returning to Englewood as a lieutenant in the 7th District before his elevation to commander, Snelling saw Smitty screaming at a group of politicians on the corner of 63rd and Halsted. Smitty, the president of the community-led Englewood Political Task Force, was sick of people parading into the neighborhood looking for photo ops. Snelling walked up to him. “I went to Englewood High School,” Snelling began. “I grew up right here. I understand you.” Smitty heard that and thought, Well, OK, then I guess we can talk.
Not long after, on August 9, a mile north of where Smitty met Snelling, the police shot a man named Latrell Allen near Moran Park. The air in Englewood was thick with false rumors: that the person who was shot was only 15 (he was was 20), that he was unarmed (he wasn’t), that he had died (he was only wounded). A couple of days later, organizers from Black Lives Matter Chicago pulled together a rally. But many of the protesters weren’t from Englewood, and Smitty couldn’t stand the thought of outsiders coming into his neighborhood to cause trouble. He had heard that the 7th District station had been identified as a target. There was talk of smashing out its windows. Smitty worked for the construction company that had built the station. There was no way he was going to let these outside agitators touch it. So he called Snelling.
Activist Damien Morris has seen, under Snelling’s leadership, a department that’s more receptive to working with community-based violence intervention programs. “It’s a collaborative effort.”
Snelling was already assessing the situation. That morning, he had set up blockades, cutting off traffic two blocks from the station. He had also contacted the BLM Chicago leadership: If they lobbed any bricks or rocks at the building, Snelling told them, his officers wouldn’t hesitate to protect themselves. Then he got Smitty’s call. Smitty had gathered a group of older men from the neighborhood, given them white baseball hats. “Let us go out there and handle the protesters,” he told Snelling. Snelling considered Smitty’s offer and told his officers to hold back. “You’re going to see some old Black dudes out there,” Snelling told them. “And they’re going to be saying a whole bunch of Black dude shit.”
Smitty and his white hats stepped to the protesters when they arrived. There was shouting and some pushing but, by all accounts, no violence. Snelling walked between the groups, making sure nothing got too out of hand, and the police, in riot gear, looked down from the steps of the station ready to intervene if needed. But that wasn’t necessary. As night set in, the protesters dispersed.
“You have to get out of the mindset that it’s all about the police,” Snelling tells the officers in the hotel conference room. “You set your ego aside.” He nods to Smitty, dressed in a gray suit, who is now standing on the other side of the screen, having slipped into the room as Snelling was winding down the story. (They’ll end up telling it again, from Smitty’s perspective.) Smitty smiles his toothy smile. “You realize you are partners,” Snelling continues. “That’s when we started to reach our goals.”
It’s easy to dismiss this as lip service, but I get the sense that Snelling genuinely believes in community partnerships. Damien Morris thinks so too. As the chief program officer of violence prevention at Breakthrough, an East Garfield Park nonprofit, Morris has been instrumental in developing the organization’s response to neighborhood violence. He knows it’s critical to use what he calls a “hyperlocal approach,” hiring men and women from the community who have experience with gun violence, on both sides of the gun. “This is an issue we can’t police our way out of,” Morris tells me.
He’s seen, under Snelling’s leadership, a department that’s more receptive to working with community-based violence intervention programs. The nonprofit Metropolitan Family Services has been involving the CPD in its training sessions for its staff and community groups so that they can all better understand their respective roles. “It’s a collaborative effort,” Morris says. “I think that’s why [the police] are being more effective.”
A week after the Policing Leadership Academy training session, Smitty is driving me around Englewood. We pull into the parking lot of a small corner store on West 66th and Halsted. It’s late afternoon, the time of day when Smitty used to see Snelling walking the street back when he oversaw this area. Often, Smitty would join him, and neighbors, seeing the two men together, would ask what they were doing. “Making sure y’all are safe,” Snelling would say, calling them by name. “How you doing, Miss Jones? How you doing, Miss Brown?”
Smitty shifts his truck into reverse, and as we slowly pull out of the parking lot, we notice a pair of officers seemingly recording three Black teenagers from a patrol car. “I don’t like what they’re doing,” Smitty says, watching the scene through the rearview mirror. “That’s just an interaction you really don’t need. What I don’t like is that things like that don’t get back to Snelling.” He decides he won’t call and bug him about it.
When Snelling was promoted out of Englewood in December 2020, he made sure to introduce Smitty to the new leadership. Since then, Smitty has cooperated closely with two different commanders who have rotated in, but I get the impression that working with Snelling was unique. Smitty tells me that even people who don’t like the police like Snelling. “They know he is trying,” Smitty says. “I’ve heard no one say a bad thing about him.” Snelling does have his detractors, especially outside the department. But even those who are critical acknowledge he’s effective.
I’m reminded of the first time I met Snelling, in the hazy days of August, before our complicated city got even more complicated. After we shook hands, I noticed his boots, not standard issue. Instead of shoelaces, they had a nylon cord. Instead of eyelets and rivets, hooks caught the cord as it zigzagged up both sides to right above his ankles, where a clasp cinched it together. Strikingly utilitarian against the more traditional crispness of Snelling’s uniform: an impeccably pressed white shirt, a thin black tie with a silver tie bar.
There was what was to be expected, and then there was the engine of the operation. Formality propelled forward by focus. Deep treads and a long stride that don’t have time for tying shoelaces. The city is waiting; his officers expect him. Superintendent Snelling has somewhere to be.