It’s not easy being an outsider in a police department with a rich tradition of people rising through the ranks. It also doesn’t help to have come from the FBI. Have the troops accepted ex-FBI agent Jody Weis as Chicago’s Police chief? He says yes, but tells the Chicago News Cooperative:”There will be a certain percentage who will never embrace me because of where I came from.”
By JAMES O’SHEA Chicago News CooperativeCHICAGO –The next few months of warmer weather will be crucial for Jody Weis, whose job running the police department is as close as it gets to “Mission Impossible” in Chicago.
Ever since he took over the department in early 2008, Superintendent Weis’s assignment has been to calm police officers who are angry at many things, including working without a contract since 2007 and a federal misconduct prosecution that put a Chicago policeman in prison with a 40-month term.
Morale problems facing the chief will not be helped by a federal arbitrator’s recommendation Friday that the police get a 10 percent raise over five years, far less than the 16 percent Mayor Richard M. Daley offered during contract talks in 2008.
In an interview in early April, Mr. Weis acknowledged that he had a rocky start as the second outsider ever to run the Chicago force. But he said that his relations with officers suspicious of his background as a former F.B.I. agent had reached a “turning point” and that he had presided over a reduction in crime.
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