Reforming Chicago's police force within the framework of the federally mandated consent decree should never become a second-tier priority. A recent personnel move at the department suggests it already has.
Chicago Police Department Superintendent David Brown recently fired Robert Boik, CPD's executive director of constitutional policing and reform. Boik was Brown's point man for keeping the department on course with implementing the consent decree, the 2019 court order that mapped out in painstaking detail how the city must reform its Police Department.
Boik's work was critical for two reasons. First, the consent decree isn't a set of suggestions or guidelines. It's a document with teeth. A federal judge enforces the consent decree's implementation, and won't free the city of its oversight until City Hall and CPD show they have carried out every reform.
Second, Chicago will never solve the chasm in trust between police and the city's largely Black and Hispanic communities on the South and West sides unless it puts real, long-lasting reforms into action. Over the decades, CPD has failed miserably in showing it can reform itself — it needs the consent decree as a blueprint, and as motivation.
Boik was fired after sending an e-mail to Brown about the superintendent's decision to move members of Boik's staff to patrol duty, the Tribune reported. Boik told Brown in the e-mail that the move would prevent the department from offering a gender-based violence course to officers this year, and set back CPD's crisis intervention training, an important aspect of consent decree-mandated reform.
"Beyond the consent decree requirement to train our frontline officers, we have a fundamental obligation to ensure all our officers are provided with equal tools to do their jobs in the field. With the proposed cuts, every single officer will fall short of 40 hours of training this year," Boik wrote in the e-mail.
He asked Brown to reverse the decision, and was let go, according to the Chicago Tribune, which also quoted the department as saying it "does not comment on personnel matters."
Last week, Mayor Lori Lightfoot downplayed Boik's firing, calling it "palace intrigue." She said every department needs to contribute resources to fight rising crime, particularly on CTA trains.
Lightfoot's right, especially when it comes to the CTA. A recent uptick in violent crime on CTA trains and platforms is becoming an existential crisis for the city's mass transit system, and beefing up patrols within the system is a common sense response.
But that cannot derail efforts to responsibly and comprehensively reform Chicago police through strict compliance with the consent decree.
Particularly alarming about Boik's termination is that it reminds us of other recent departures from the city payroll. When Susan Lee, Lightfoot's deputy mayor for public safety, left City Hall last year, she sent an email to two top mayoral aides expressing her concern that the mayor's administration was not devoting enough resources to "keep the ball moving forward" on consent decree implementation and violence prevention.
At about the same time Lee quit, Chad Williams, once the civilian commanding officer for CPD's audit division, resigned and told Lightfoot in an email that "the inability of this department's top leadership to even feign interest in pursuing reform in a meaningful manner has made it impossible for me to remain involved." Williams complained of the department's "check the boxes" approach that put up a facade of consent decree compliance.
Boik's firing sends the wrong message to rank and file police officers and to Chicagoans. That message: Police reform is getting in the way of keeping the streets safe.
The message that Lightfoot, Brown and the rest of CPD leadership should be sending officers and the rest of the city? Police reform is vital to the mission of keeping the streets safe.
