J.P. “Jody” Weis, the man selected to be Chicago’s new selected police superintendent, has a tough job ahead of him if he is approved by the city council next month, the Chicago Tribune says. For one thing, he has to win the trust of a badly demoralized police agency; for another, he needs to win over many Chicago citizens who see the department as an invading army that rides roughshod over the people they are supposed to protect.
Weis, the former special agent in charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia field office, has been in this position before, the paper says. Soon after assuming command of the FBI bureau in Philadelphia in May 2006, Weis reached out to the city’s Muslim community while aggressively pursuing criminal cases against some of its members.
What makes the task more difficult in Chicago, however, is that Weis has never been a police officer and he lived in the city only three years when he worked at the FBI field office here. He is the first outsider picked to lead the Chicago Police Department in 47 years. If approved by the City Council, he could be on the job by mid-January.
Link: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-police_bd02dec02,1,7352752.story?ctrack=5&cset=true