Police Superintendent Larry Snelling
As a kid, Superintendent Larry Snelling always wanted to be the neighborhood hero. Today at age 54, he has the power to make your children heroes and guide them down the road of success and away from crime. He also vowed to increase the clearance rate for murders with the help of the community.
As of this year, Snelling, who oversees a budget of $1.7 billion, said the clearance rate for murders is 50 percent, and he is working to raise it higher. When asked what the number of police is, he said the Department is down by 1,500 officers. The current number of police is 11,723.
He said there will be a recruitment for new officers. Snelling admitted the reduction in the police force is a national problem he attributed to anti-police sentiment, especially through social media. Other officers leave the Department for various reasons, including feeling they aren’t appreciated.
One thing that has to be done, according to Snelling, is to professionalize the calling to become a policeman for those who want to join the Department to help others.
Looking back on his childhood in Englewood, Snelling said, “One of the things I was passionate about, especially being an officer in Englewood and having grown up there, was to help those people I knew who could not defend themselves.
“I wanted to be there, to be the defender of those people, especially when we knew there were people out there who wanted to do them harm.” Snelling said his Department is looking for those people who share the same goals and passions.
“We have to start recruiting from those places showing them that policing can be a great career and a way to give back to their community. That is one of the ways to regain that trust and to make the job more attractive to people in the neighborhoods who want to rebuild their community.
“The goal is to catch young people to deter them from going down that wrong path, but it has to be the goal of families, community leaders, the clergy, our politicians. Everybody has to be involved. It can’t just be the police. We cannot arrest ourselves out of this situation,” said Snelling.
That is what Snelling told the Chicago Crusader in an exclusive interview in his Chicago Police Department Fifth Floor office on Tuesday, October 17. Snelling said he would like to have police officers speak with Chicago Public Schools about crime and the consequences, while sharing information about careers in policing, but CPS officials and other agencies have to agree to that partnership.
Big in stature, Snelling is a gentle, soft-spoken man, but don’t let that fool you, because he’s tough on crime but not in an abusive way. He has big plans for the Chicago Police Department and one that he hopes will heal the tense relationship between the community and the police.
After a September 27 City Council vote of 48-0, Snelling was sworn into office slightly more than 20 days ago as the 64th police superintendent and the fourth one in nine months. So far, Snelling said the process of being the top cop has been “pretty tedious, but I’m happy to have gone through it.
“I expected there would be a lot of hard work. I expect there will be some hard decisions to make in the near future, and I am ready, willing and able to take on this challenge.”
When asked why he wanted to be top cop, Snelling said, “I didn’t want the job for myself. I actually didn’t apply for the job for myself, but I had enough people to reach out and ask for my help, because they believe that I could make a difference in the Chicago Police Department.
“Looking at it as a whole, looking at the city, how much I love the Department, how much I love the communities and the one I grew up in,” Snelling had a mission.
“I figured if I could do something before I left this job to mend some relationships between the Police Department and the community, rebuild that relationship and bring back some safety to the city, that would be my ultimate goal. If I could do that, I could be helpful to the city and the community as a whole.”
Proud of being raised in Englewood, Snelling is a home-grown hero who has spent 31 years on the police force. His last position was chief of counterterrorism for the Police Department and an educator at the Chicago Police and Firefighter Training Academy, where he mentored students interested in law enforcement, criminal justice, public safety, and fire science.
A graduate of Englewood High School, Snelling received his bachelor’s degree in adult education from DePaul University. He is known as “the son of Englewood.” And that is Snelling’s passion—teaching, mentoring and guiding youth, but Snelling made it clear that he can’t mend the distrust between police and the community by himself.
When asked how this can been done when the trust has been breached so many times, Snelling said, “The first thing we have to do is to understand the history of how we got here. Once we understand that history, now we start to build upon it.”
By doing this, Snelling said, “This will help us develop the tools to go in and now try to regain the trust. That will not be easy because we did not get here overnight. This will take a little time.” Snelling said the effort that is put into this mission “can get us to a better place over time.
“We have to reach out to our community partners, our community leadership, and we have to get to those homes to those people we have not reached. Those people just want to be saved and to have their children “play in a safe environment without worrying about the safety of their children.”
“We got to get to people we’ve never talked to before,” he said. “We have to have those conversations. We have to be highly visible. We have to convince people that we are there in their best interests and not there to work in a silo fashion where it’s us and them.
“Once we break down those walls, we make everybody a stakeholder. We work in partnership with people. I think we can begin to mend those relationships and build that trust back up. Then we can start to move forward with solving some of the crime. Our clearance rate will increase.”
Snelling said the clearance rate for solving murders is a little above 50 percent. “We can increase that by building public trust. A lot of our homicides and our shootings are not resolved because a lot of times we don’t have people willing to come forward. That has to do with that lack of trust.
“Once we can rebuild those relationships and build that trust back up, I think more people will be willing to have those conversations when they know they can trust the police,” said Snelling.
When asked why the Police Department doesn’t promote its anonymous tip line by texting TXT2TIP to the Police Department, Snelling said, “We have had some success with our tip line, including solving a double homicide and a few others. We would like to see more information come through the tip line. We can do a better job in getting that information out to the public.”
Snelling said he would also like a ban on dark-tinted car windows used by some drive-by-shooters.
