Chicago’s new top cop guided by Dallas tenure, son’s death
By MICHAEL TARM
CHICAGO (AP) — As daunting as the challenges that await him as the new chief of a Chicago Police Department under pressure to implement sweeping court-ordered reforms may seem, they pale compared to what David Brown Sr. had to overcome 10 years ago following an afternoon phone call on Father’s Day.
His son was dead, an officer told the then-Dallas police chief. Police shot 27-year-old David Brown Jr. after he’d shot dead a stranger on a suburban sidewalk and then also killed a responding officer during an apparent mental breakdown.
“My entire body pulsated with pain, as if I’d been jolted with an electric shock,” Brown recounted in a 2017 book. “I grieved just as deeply for the loved ones of those my son had taken.”
Brown, whose former partner and brother were also killed years earlier, said he returned to work with more empathy for victims and suspects alike, and a greater devotion to his job.
“My sense of duty not only got me out of bed,” he wrote. “It also began my healing.”
The 59-year-old will need that heightened level of commitment to succeed in Chicago, the nation’s third largest city, where he’ll oversee a force of some 13,000 officers. Dallas had around 3,000.
Brown’s No. 1 priority is to ensure Chicago’s department complies with the court-monitored overhaul plan, which includes requirements unpopular with many officers that they file paperwork each time they point a gun at someone, even if they don’t fire.
It’s not going to be easy.
“This is a hard job, one of the hardest jobs in the country,” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot told reporters Thursday in announcing Brown’s selection as police superintendent.
Brown is expected to officially assume his superintendent post in April.
