The Chicago Police Department is setting sergeants up to fail

We’re asking frontline supervisors to do too much, with minimal support

CPD Sergeant (right) and Officers. Source: CCPSA

Before we get started, a programming note: A City That Works will be hosting our first live meetup next month! We’ll be at the Berghoff on April 10th, from 5:30-8pm. It’ll be a joint event with readers of Slow Boring. You can register here (attendance is free). Hope to see you there!

I’ve written previously about two major challenges for the Chicago Police Department: we need more officers, and we need to do a better job using technology. But the performance of any police department isn’t just driven by manpower and the size of the helicopter fleet. It’s also a function of how the department is managed.

There’s a lot to look at here.¹ I think one of the best places to start is with sergeants – CPD’s front line supervisors. One promotion up from police officers, sergeants manage 85% of the department’s sworn officers. Good sergeants instill a culture of professionalism and push officers to be their very best. Bad sergeants can ensure that even the most well-designed reform efforts fail.

Personnel by rank in the Chicago Police Department. Sergeants supervise Police Officers (first rank in the Department), as well as Detectives, Field Training Officers, and Specialized Police Officer ranks. Source: Office of the Inspector General.

Chuck Wexler, President of the Police Executive Research Forum, writes:

Sergeants act as a critical bridge between the top levels of the organization and the people on the ground. Sergeants’ words and actions—perhaps more than those of any other individual in the organization, including the chief executive—can shape the attitudes of the vast majority of agency personnel. In many ways, sergeants are the employees who most directly influence whether the organizational priorities of the chief or sheriff are accepted and implemented by the officers or deputies.

On issue after issue, researchers find that front-line officers follow the lead of their sergeants. Sergeants influence how hard officers work, and how many citations or “integrity violations” they rack up. Officers spend more of their time on community policing activities when they believe it’s something their sergeant cares about. And by shaping the culture and practices of the department, sergeants play a critical role in minimizing abuses and lawsuits. As one expert puts it, “A department’s first-line supervisors, most often its sergeants, are the best protection against liability. The department, however, is only as strong and protected as its weakest supervisor.”

Unfortunately, we’re not doing a particularly good job selecting or supporting sergeants today. This is a problem that isn’t unique to Chicago. As policing has become more complex, departments across the country have pushed a mushrooming set of responsibilities onto sergeants’ plates. But our problems are particularly large and complicated – and they serve as a useful introduction to many of the other management and operational challenges that CPD is grappling with today.

I. The promotion process doesn’t set sergeants up for success

Today, there are two ways to get promoted from Officer to Sergeant. One path (70% of promotions) involves passing a series of written and oral tests. The other (30%) is the “merit” promotion path – after passing a first written exam, candidates can be nominated by senior leaders in the department and go before a merit board which reviews their case. This is an extremely controversial and fraught process, which we’ll cover in more depth in the weeks ahead. But for today’s purposes, neither path does a particularly good job setting sergeants up for success.

Book knowledge is certainly important – but passing a series of written and/or oral tests doesn’t say a whole lot about someone’s ability to exercise leadership, manage a wide range of tasks, or maintain strong relationships in the communities they’re supposed to protect. This is an issue department across the country are wrestling with. NYPD Chief of Patrol Rodney Harrison observes:

“In the NYPD, the only thing we use is a written exam. It’s pretty much based on operational, day-to-day functions for the front-line supervisors… Currently, if you do well on the written exam, you’re going to find yourself being a supervisor. I’m not sure that helps us get the best people for the job.”

But if there are problems with the testing process, the merit selection process is an even bigger headache. This process was instituted in the 1990s to increase the number of Black and Latino officers in supervisory ranks (a really important long-term objective). Individuals are nominated by senior CPD brass and reviewed by a merit board (of other senior brass), where their profile is evaluated. Final promotion decisions are made by the superintendent. Frontline officers hate the merit process. The Department of Justice investigation found that:

“Officers believe that CPD leadership gives merit promotions to individuals who are unqualified to serve as leaders, merely because those individuals have connections up the chain of command or have advocates in positions of power outside of CPD who call in favors or lobby on their behalf... This belief undermines officers’ faith in CPD supervisors and their acceptance of CPD’s systems of accountability and supervision.”

So the promotion process either selects for good test takers (a proxy for some, but by no means all of the skills necessary to be a good sergeant), or it selects for individuals who are viewed by their peers as having skipped the line thanks to political connections. Neither is a particularly strong starting point for a new sergeant, tasked with leading men and women who used to be their peers.

It gets worse. Notice what’s missing from both of these processes: input of any kind from a front-line officer’s current sergeant. Sergeants are expected to lead, mentor, and hold their officers accountable. But we’ve deprived them of one of the most basic tools in the book with which to do so – the ability to influence the career prospects of their direct reports. Every organization has issues with its performance management and promotion processes. But by severing the link between the two, CPD has left sergeants up a creek without a paddle.

This is a hard problem nationwide – few police departments report much confidence in their existing performance management systems. But it’s something we’re going to have to solve. In Chicago it’s likely not solvable until CPD changes its staffing process – an issue we’ll get to in a minute.

II. New sergeants don’t get the training and mentoring they need

Newly sworn in sergeants. Source: CPD.

When police officers do make sergeant, the job changes dramatically. To the extent that they do receive additional training, it has been of the perfunctory rules-and-regulations kind – which only covers a fraction of their new responsibilities. PERF identified a series of steps departments should be taking. Those include:

• Focus training on the leadership and management behaviors that sergeants will need to display, rather than just policies and procedures

• Include scenario-based and applied training for sergeants, especially for high-risk situations

• Invest in field training and mentoring for new sergeants

• Ensure sergeants receive continuous training and support on the job, rather than making training and one-off affair

CPD’s approach is decidedly mixed. New sergeants do get 6 weeks of training, which compares favorably to other departments. After getting dinged for this in the DOJ Pattern and Practice investigation, CPD has also upped the amount of training sergeants get on leadership and professional development – but it’s still not the focus of sergeant training. In the 2025 sergeant training plan, it looks like 16 hours are dedicated to leadership and management skills.²

I can’t claim to know exactly how much time should be spent on these topics (and I’m very skeptical that you can learn all that much about leadership via lecture). But the bigger problem with CPD’s approach right now is that it begins and ends in the classroom. There’s little-to-no hands-on or experiential training for sergeants on the management skills that they need in the new job, and there’s no follow-up mentorship or peer cohorts to help support them over time.

III. Sergeants have to manage too many officers

In order to effectively coach and manage front line officers, sergeants need to manage a reasonable number of officers. A 2018 PERF survey of departments found that ratios of officers to sergeants varied widely, but departments reported an average of 7:1, and an average “ideal” ratio of 6 officers per sergeant.

Meanwhile, Chicago has no target staffing ratio at all. In 2009, in response to an academic inquiry, CPD’s Policy & Procedures section reported that “normal” staffing would be an 8:1 or 10:1 ratio, but there is no standard criteria, and it is “not uncommon” for sergeants to oversee more than 18 officers at a time. The Department of Justice investigation found something similar. Investigators found sergeants required to supervise 24 officers at a time, 35 officers at a time, and even a whole district on one occasion.

That’s an impossible task. CPD’s staffing policies makes it even worse. Front-line officers work a rotational schedule (i.e. taking different days off in different weeks), but that rotation isn’t aligned to a given sergeant. Sergeants don’t just have to manage 10 or more officers every day – they have to manage ten different officers every day. This was highlighted as a problem in the DOJ report. It was also called out in the 2014 Safer report:

In the current “rotational system,” by contrast, each CPD officer may have multiple patrol sergeants as supervisors, limiting the sergeants’ ability to develop the officers under their command and creating inconsistencies in management styles and expectations. Equally problematic, there is no single point of accountability. Because no one sergeant is responsible for monitoring a given officer, it is much more difficult to hold a supervisor accountable if that officer engages in misconduct.

The DOJ and Safer reports focus on the implications for misconduct, for an obvious reason: it’s a lot easier for bad actors to slip through the cracks without consistent oversight. But this is a terrible management practice all around. It’s wildly unfair to officers who deserve consistent coaching and guidance. And it makes it impossible for Sergeants to understand what sort of support their officers need, or to build the trusted relationships necessary to lead them effectively.

This is covered in the consent decree. Paragraph 361 requires CPD to develop a staffing model that provides unity of command (consistent reporting), and a span of control (number of direct reports), “not to exceed ten officers to one sergeant,” by January 1, 2020. That ratio is still too high (remember, nationwide the standard is roughly 7:1, and ideal is 6:1). CPD is also more than five years behind schedule on implementation. In 2024, the Department did expand a unity of command/span of control pilot program to the 4^th and 7^th districts. Unfortunately, that pilot only sets an upper bound “on average” of ten officers per sergeant – the bare minimum outlined in the consent decree.

Fortunately, there is an opportunity to do better. The Department is in the beginning phases of a workforce allocation study, required by the consent decree, which could change officer deployment practices. This is a political lightning rod, because it could result in the redeployment of officers from one neighborhood to another. But it’s just as important to re-set spans of control and scheduling, to ensure sergeants manage a reasonable number of officers – and that can manage the same officers on a regular basis.

IV. We’re drowning sergeants in paperwork

Police Superintendent Larry Snelling and a sergeant during the DNC. Source: CPD.

Sergeants also need time to actually manage their officers. A National Institute for Justice study finds that sergeants who spend significant time on patrol and regularly show up on their own initiative to incidents their officers are handling, get much more out of their officers than sergeants who spend more of their time in the office. Officers reporting to these ‘active’ sergeants spend more time on proactive and community policing.³ As a result, police departments now expect sergeants to spend the majority of their time on the street.

Unfortunately, in Chicago sergeants “generally spend their shifts on administrative tasks rather than interacting with and guiding officers,” according to the DOJ investigation. The DOJ found that was partially a function of what sergeants’ thought the job entailed – a problem that requires setting a different set of expectations and training.⁴ But it was heavily influenced by the volume of administrative paperwork that sergeants are expected to do. This is one of the many costs of CPD’s inability or unwillingness to hire more civilian administrative staff to handle paperwork – sergeants have to do far more paperwork in Chicago than they do in peer cities.

I’ve written before about the solutions to the city’s broken hiring process, which would make CPD able to bring in more lanyard-wearers to support the badge-wearers. The workforce allocation study also includes a component to identify opportunities for more civilian support and might help push the Department to be more ambitious about opportunities to civilianize the force.

But this is also an area where the consent decree could make the problem the worse. Consent decrees are notorious for adding for more paperwork, both to ensure adherence to new policies and to support follow-up investigations. A lot of that extra paperwork ends up on sergeants. In Oakland, one sergeant told PERF that the burden has gotten so bad (30-page investigations for rudeness complaints), that fewer officers are bothering to take the sergeants’ exam at all. I’d be shocked if something similar isn’t happening at CPD – remember, every arrest that includes use of force requires an officer to fill out between 3 and 5 separate forms.

Where possible, it’d be great for CPD (and related entities) to start identifying areas where fewer forms or signoffs are required. One smart example: Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke’s Felony Bypass Program, which allows officers to file felony firearms charges directly, rather than waiting for approval from the Felony Review Unit (charges got approved 89% of the time last year).

Better policing requires better judgement

Much of the coverage about the consent decree has centered on the need to write and comply with new polices -- on everything from vehicle and foot pursuits to investigations and officer discipline. That’s all well and good. In many cases it’s long overdue.

But at its core, good policing also depends on the application of good judgement. Every day officers need to make hundreds of small decisions about how to carry themselves, when to intervene, and how to react to fluid, complex situations. We need officers who can make gutsy calls about when to pursue a suspect, how hard to lean on a witness, and when to let a minor infraction slide.

If we want officers to exercise better judgement, they need sergeants who can teach, coach, and when necessary, hold them accountable. Thanks in part to the consent decree, CPD has an opportunity to put sergeants in a position to succeed.

The bottom line

Chicago deserves a police department that is effective at both reducing crime and respecting the rights of its residents. To do that, police officers need (and deserve!) sergeants who can give them high-quality coaching, support, and oversight. But today, it’s almost impossible for sergeants to function as effective leaders. We don’t select for the right behaviors or give them the right training, and we require sergeants to supervise too many officers while drowning them in paperwork. To fix this, CPD needs to:

• Change staffing schedules to ensure sergeants manage no more than 7 officers, and that they manage the same officers every day.

• Hire additional civilian personnel to reduce the paperwork burden on sergeants and eliminate reporting requirements where possible.

• Update the promotion process to select for the leadership and management skills that sergeants need to have – ideally with input from current sergeants.

• Offer ongoing training and cohort support to help sergeants continue to develop their skills.

1. As we get started, a disclaimer. Analyzing the management practices of any large organization (especially one facing as much scrutiny and criticism as CPD), is much, much harder than comparing inputs like headcount or technology spend. It’s hard to assess and compare policies across departments – and even harder to understand how those policies actually shake out in practice. Even if a policy change is positive in isolation, it may create incentives or workarounds that spring up in response. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t huge challenges and opportunities here that are worth engaging with – but I’ll freely acknowledge incomplete knowledge in uncertain terrain, and welcome input or criticism from folks with additional information.

2. Starting on page 285 of CPD’s 2025 training plan, relevant coursework is: Emotional Intelligence (2 hours), Leadership Development Course (8 hours), Leadership & Mindset (2 hours), Perfomance Evaluation/Recognition Systems (2 hours), and Role of the Supervisor and Transition (2 hours).

3. They’re also more likely to use force against suspects. That’s not necessarily a negative, if it means that officers are using force in appropriate circumstances (we want officers to use force when it’s called for). That report didn’t analyze the type or appropriateness of the use of force. But I will note that San Diego’s Police Department found that officer-involved shootings fell by 80% when a sergeant arrives on scene within 15 minutes of a initial call.

4. This is one of the reasons that it was so good to see current Superintendent Larry Snelling making it a point to be on the ground engaging with protestors while wearing his bodycam during the DNC. Not only did that set a tone for frontline officers about how to handle protests, but it sends a message to the rest of the brass about what good leadership looks like.