New CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling looks back at lessons learned from his own disciplinary cases as he takes department helm

It was around 7 a.m. on Thursday, May 12, 1994.

Two officers assigned to the Chicago Police Department’s Englewood District were to take two arrestees to the neighboring Chicago Lawn District station to be photographed.

One of the men, arrested on a domestic violence charge, tried to chat with the officers during the 2 ½-mile drive west on 63rd Street. The officer in the front passenger seat wasn’t in the mood to make friends.

“Do you take me as a joke, m----------?” he said to the handcuffed arrestee. “Do you think you know everything?”

The other officer pulled over the van, and both cops got out and opened the vehicle’s side door. The officer from the passenger seat — 25 years old, with two years on the job — then slapped the man twice on the left side of his face.

He would later deny that he slapped the arrestee or cursed at him, but internal affairs investigators didn’t buy that, and the officer was handed a two-day suspension.

In August, Mayor Brandon Johnson selected that officer, Larry Bernard Snelling, a native of Englewood, to be the next superintendent of the Police Department.

During an interview with the Tribune last week, Snelling reflected on his own disciplinary history as he promised his department will balance reform-mindedness with aggressive policing by being transparent. He made his own mistakes, Snelling said, learned from them, and pressed forward.

Snelling’s background

One year after the slapping incident, Snelling was off-duty and driving his Jeep east on Garfield Boulevard, the border between Englewood and Back of the Yards. When he reached the stoplight at Loomis, he saw to his right a Cadillac DeVille with at least four men inside.

The driver of that car was an off-duty Cook County sheriff’s officer, and one of the passengers was leaning out a window to talk with a woman he knew while she waited at a CTA bus stop.

Snelling apparently then asked the sheriff’s officer, “What are you doing in my neighborhood?”

“I am minding my own business and you should do the same,” the off-duty sheriff’s officer replied before continuing east on Garfield.

Traffic thickened as the Cadillac neared State Street, and the Jeep had kept pace.

As other cars came to a stop, the Jeep again pulled up alongside the Cadillac. Snelling then reached under his seat, grabbed a gun, pointed it at the sheriff’s officer and said, “M-----------, we will see about your business.”

The traffic signal changed and the sheriff’s officer drove on, but not before he and his passengers all got a good look at the gun. They noted the Jeep’s license plate number, and the sheriff’s officer saw a sticker with police insignia on the rear of the vehicle. The Jeep soon turned off Garfield, but the sheriff’s officer drove to the CPD’s Wentworth District station to file a report.

Internal CPD investigators soon interviewed Snelling. He denied using profanity and pointing his gun, but, like in the slapping incident a year earlier, investigators sustained the allegations against him and he was suspended, this time for five days.

Snelling would go on to spend the lion’s share of his career as an instructor in the CPD’s training academy, and he was frequently called to testify as an expert witness in criminal and civil court proceedings.

A call for fair treatment

Since he assumed leadership of the CPD, Snelling has stressed that his priorities include accountability in serious cases of alleged officer misconduct, but he’s also called for officers to be treated more “fairly” in those cases.

The department he leads remains under a federal consent decree born of the fatal 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald, and, so far, adherence to the court-ordered reforms has been slow. Since the agreement was entered in early 2019, CPD’s bureau of internal affairs has opened more than 11,000 investigations into allegations of officer misconduct.

The new superintendent did not dispute the conclusions that were reached in the nearly 30-year-old misconduct cases sustained against him. But, he added, his personal experiences with CPD’s discipline apparatus only helped him — and the recruits learning under him — while he was an instructor at the training academy and later as a department supervisor.

“Do I believe (the investigations) were conducted fairly? Sure, I believe they were conducted fairly, and the outcome was the outcome,” Snelling said.

“Looking back on both of those situations, I could’ve done a bunch of things different,” he added. “I was a young officer. I learned from those things. Not only did I learn from those things, I used those things in my training when I trained new officers, when I started to work at the academy.”

Snelling said he has always been open about his past.

“I never told war stories,” he said. “I would always tell these young, new, fresh officers where I made mistakes so that they possibly didn’t make those same mistakes. And as a result of that, I’ve learned my lesson about continuously keeping myself educated, following all of the rules and regulations according to what is written, our policies, and it’s really helped me in my career. Not only has it helped me in my career to develop even more, it’s also helped me understand what younger officers are going through and what they need so that they don’t find themselves in the same situation.”

Snelling was the subject of 20 misconduct complaints between 1994 and 2010, according to CPD records. The slapping and gun-pointing incidents were the only two that were sustained.

The last misconduct complaint against Snelling came in 2016, CPD records show. He and another supervisor at the training academy were accused of giving favorable treatment to a recruit who was suspected of showing up to training while intoxicated or, at least, hungover from the night before. Snelling and the other supervisor were cleared of wrongdoing.

After he graduated from the academy, the six-month probationary period for that recruit — a man from a multigenerational CPD family — was extended four times, according to records from the city’s Department of Human Resources. After later taking a leave of absence in 2018, that officer left the CPD to join the Chicago Fire Department as an EMT in 2020.

More room to grow

Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor and police accountability expert, said that Snelling’s ability to empathize with officers could be an asset, but only if other cultural problems within the CPD are also addressed.

“I appreciate that he can identify with officers, but it’s more than just about learning from your mistakes, and violent and brutal policing is more than just a ‘mistake,’” Futterman said. “It’s about changing officers’ mentality and changing the violent, macho, ‘us against them’ culture that has long existed here.”

Futterman also pointed to the dearth of complaints lodged in recent years against the superintendent.

“I believe that people can change, and there is significant evidence that Superintendent Snelling has changed,” Futterman said. “He didn’t continue to accumulate complaints over the last 20 years, and I have heard from community members who I trust, from Englewood, too, who in recent days gave Snelling high marks for the way he engaged the community and de-escalated … a crisis in summer 2020 when there were some false allegations that a 15-year-old boy had been shot by the police.”

John Catanzara, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, said he and Snelling are in lockstep in believing that punishments for officers are “supposed to be corrective in behavior and not necessarily punitive.”

There are exceptions to that idea, Catanzara said, especially in cases of “real egregious behavior” where “punitive is the only way to go.”

Catanzara himself accumulated dozens of complaints during his CPD career, and he abruptly quit the department two years ago during a pending misconduct case.

His dealings with the police discipline system have made him a more effective leader, Catanzara said.

“Me and a couple people that work up at the Lodge, we’ve all had some pretty serious run-ins with this department, and that has only benefited the membership because we know how to address things, we know how to advise avoiding pitfalls and incidents where you could get yourself jammed up,” he said. “So experience matters. It’s just what you do with it.”

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