By Sam Charles
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — Chicago police officials this week said more civilian investigators will join the department’s bureau of internal affairs as the office works to finish investigations more quickly and decrease its backlog of pending cases.
“Those investigations have to be done timely and they have to be taken seriously across the board,” Chicago Police Department Superintendent Larry Snelling said during a Tuesday status hearing on the city’s ongoing federal consent decree. “When we’re doing these investigations, we want to get them done as quickly as possible because if there’s a sustained finding (of misconduct), we want to be able to apply training or discipline as quickly as possible.”
Hastened internal affairs investigations would bolster both complainants’ and officers’ faith in the discipline process, Snelling said.
As is the case in most of CPD’s consent decree shortcomings to date, departmental staffing remains a key challenge. The long-awaited CPD workforce allocation study is expected to be unveiled in the coming weeks, and Snelling said he’s already received broader recommendations on “the needs of each district and the civilianization of some of our bureaus.”
While discussing the workload of internal affairs personnel, Deputy Chief Traci Walker told the court that BIA is budgeted for 144 positions, though 31 of those remained vacant as of last week. City attorney Allan Slagel later told U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer that the city hoped to fill 25 of those vacancies with civilians by the end of 2026.
City data shows the number of complaints received by CPD internal affairs has steadily ticked up each year since at least 2020. That year, during the initial outbreak of COVID-19 and a summer of widespread unrest, internal affairs received 4,000 complaints. Last year, BIA received a little more than 5,300 complaints.
Assistant Illinois Attorney General Emily Hirsch highlighted for the court a recent audit of CPD internal affairs that found the bureau closed 834 disciplinary cases in 2024. However, less than half of those — 294 — were completed within six months of the initial complaint.
“These delays represent an ongoing and serious concern regarding accountability,” Hirsch said. “Often, delays mean officers will experience no consequences at all.”
Though BIA investigates the majority of complaints alleging officer misconduct, other mechanisms exist within CPD, too, though their efficacy remains in question.
Among its many mandates, the consent decree calls for the Police Department to assign two “accountability sergeants” to each of the 22 patrol districts to investigate officer misconduct.
However, those sergeants are frequently pulled away from their investigative work to address other time-sensitive needs of a given district. CPD is now revising a general order to ensure those sergeants remain focused on misconduct, and the department will promote at least two classes of sergeants and other supervisors in 2026.
Going forward, Snelling told the court, CPD’s 22 district commanders will face greater scrutiny over misconduct investigations involving officers and sergeants under their command. Snelling said those district-level complaints will be analyzed weekly, and district commanders will soon have to answer directly to Snelling for officers’ behavior and the resulting investigations by accountability sergeants.
“This isn’t a suggestion,” Snelling said.
Though Tuesday’s hearing focused largely on the investigations into alleged CPD misconduct, the future of adjudicating those cases remains murky.
For more than two years, the Chicago Police Board has been largely curtailed during a legal fight between the CPD officers union and the city over the future of public access to proceedings in the most severe cases of alleged misconduct. Arguments from the union and the city are expected this month, with a decision from the Illinois Supreme Court likely following later this year.
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