Mayor Brandon Johnson’s choice to be Chicago’s next police superintendent sailed through a City Council committee Friday following a hearing where the South Side native and 31-year Police Department veteran delivered the progressive administration’s most strident support for cops yet.

Chief Larry Snelling, the department’s current chief of counterterrorism and a longtime instructor at the training academy, received unanimous support from the council’s Police and Fire Committee. His confirmation now heads for a final vote Wednesday, when a special council meeting will be held.

Unlike some council hearings in which aldermen use the setting to lay out a litany of complaints about a city department, Friday’s afternoon hearing was a mostly peaceful affair, with progressives who have bashed the Chicago Police Department in the past and more conservative aldermen sounding much the same tune.

Newly elected Ald. Timmy Knudsen, 43rd, who represents Lincoln Park, commended how aldermen from both sides of the political spectrum felt validated by Snelling: “I just wanted to applaud Mayor Johnson on this choice. I think he really listened to what people were looking for and found balance in you, Chief Snelling.”

Ahead of the committee’s voice vote, Snelling delivered an unwavering defense of the often-maligned Chicago Police Department and officers’ acute ordeals over the last few years, while also acknowledging police are not the entire solution to the persistent gun violence that often plagues the nation’s third-largest city.

Asked by Ald. Angela Clay, 46th, how he would support his officers’ mental health after a spate of suicides within the department, Snelling stressed: “These are human beings.”

“I saw them through civil unrest and I saw what they dealt with. I saw the names that they were called. The yelling and screaming. I saw the 16 hours (per day) they worked, dehydrated, hungry, sleep-deprived,” Snelling continued. “They responded the way the city needed them to respond to stop the city as a whole from burning down. They were taunted, and then they went home and then got up and came back to work the next day to do it all over again.”

He finished with: “Again, there are a lot of things that we can do better as a police department. But we have to support those people who are standing between those who will do you harm, because they’re the only ones who will stop them.”

Snelling also appeared to knock the “defund the police” movement, which has been embraced by some in Chicago’s political left — including Johnson himself after the 2020 police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, when Johnson was a Cook County commissioner. But the Chicago police insider who would become the new mayor’s first choice to lead the department rejected what he said he heard someone at a meeting recently say: “Imagine a world without the police.”

“I would like to be a part of that world,” Snelling said. “But in order to imagine a world without police, I have to imagine a world without murder. Without robbery, without shootings. I have to imagine a world without sex trafficking, without kidnapping, without criminal sexual assault, child abuse, child molestation. These are all things that people don’t necessarily want to hear or want to talk about.”

Snelling, 54, grew up in Englewood and joined the Police Department in 1992. He worked as a patrol officer and supervisor in the Englewood and Morgan Park district on the South Side, but he has spent most of his career to this point as an instructor in the department’s training academy. Records from the city’s Human Resources Department also show that Snelling took a two-year leave of absence from CPD in the late 1990s when he was a regional security director for AT&T.

He has been called to testify as an expert witness in more than two dozen civil and criminal cases involving police officers. Among those cases was the 2018 criminal trial of three CPD officers who were accused of conspiring to cover up the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald four years earlier. Those three officers were ultimately acquitted in a bench trial.

Snelling’s ascent through the CPD ranks was quick — he held the rank of sergeant less than five years ago — and city records show he received two merit promotions in his career. Snelling was suspended on two occasions early in his career, too, for a total of seven days.

The permanent CPD superintendent position was vacated in March when David Brown — the former chief of police in Dallas — submitted his resignation one day after former Mayor Lori Lightfoot failed to qualify for the mayoral runoff election.

Once Johnson was in office later in May, he tapped Fred Waller, the former popular Chicago police chief of patrol who had retired in 2020, to lead the department on an interim basis. Then the mayor tapped Snelling as the permanent replacement after reviewing recommendations from the Community Commission for Police Safety and Accountability, a new civilian oversight body tasked with selecting the finalists.

During Friday’s hearing, Snelling hit many of the same points his predecessors, including Waller and Brown, had touched on when it came to chipping away at the city’s persistent violence.

He emphasized the urgency in complying with the 2019 Police Department consent decree that resulted from the 2014 murder of McDonald by former Officer Jason Van Dyke, while cautioning that “what we don’t want to do is rush through it” because effective training takes time. He lauded ongoing efforts to get illegal weapons off the streets, saying repeat gun offenders should face more severe consequences.

Like other big cities, Chicago saw a significant crime wave starting in 2020 amid a pandemic and civil unrest, with violence peaking the next year to levels not seen since the 1990s. Through mid-September, the city has recorded 444 homicides this year, an 11% decrease from the same period in 2022, according to city data. But while shootings are decreasing, the city is in the midst of a large spike in both robberies and car thefts.

In contrast with Brown’s confirmation more than three years ago, Snelling took pains to stress he was a child of Chicago. Brown hailed from Dallas, a fact that became a frequent sore spot as he failed to ever fully connect with the rank-and-file, who often saw him as aloof during a time of crisis.

Though Snelling did not have obvious answers to one of the department’s most pressing issues — slow recruitment and rapid attrition — he harked back to the idea that the department could tap the “community” and those living in the neighborhoods to entice new trainees. He also nodded to some of Johnson’s campaign themes on policing, too. On plans to divert youths to reentry programs upon their first brush with the criminal justice system, he warned naysayers: “Don’t pass judgment.”

Snelling vowed to reexamine the department’s specialized units, downtown and administrative positions in order to possibly assign more officers back to neighborhood beats. At the same time, he said he wants to promote sergeants and detectives in an incremental pace so as not to deplete street cops. And he endorsed the co-responder model of the Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement — or CARE — pilot for nonviolent 911 mental health calls.

He did not address ShotSpotter, a gunfire detection technology that Johnson vowed to do away with during the mayoral race but has avoided criticizing since assuming office in May.

Ald. Jeanette Taylor, 20th, a Johnson ally who has been critical of police, said during the hearing that she hopes Snelling’s confirmation will bring about a return to true community policing.

“I live in a ward where half my ward love the police, the other half can’t stand y’all. And it’s because we don’t have Officer Friendly,” Taylor told Snelling. “So those are the things that I want us to get back to, but … I want us to remember that some of these things are systematic, and it’s not on the police. We depend on you all for a lot. And I didn’t realize that until I got this job.”

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