Chicago’s top cop retiring after turbulent three-plus years
CHICAGO » Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson announced Thursday that he’s retiring after more than three years as the city’s top cop, a post he took over during one of the most violent chapters in the city’s history and amid public outcry over the release of a video showing an officer shooting a black teen 16 times.
During a news conference in which Johnson announced his retirement, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Johnson had agreed to serve through the end of the year. A successor hasn’t yet been named.
“These stars can sometimes feel like you’re carrying the weight of the world,” said Johnson, whose uniform includes four stars on each shoulder. “This job has taken its toll, taken a toll on my health, my family, my friends.”
Johnson, who joined the force as a patrolman in 1988, signaled earlier in the week that he was mulling retirement because he wanted to spend more time with family. He said the decision would have nothing to do with an investigation into a recent incident in which he was found asleep behind the wheel of his SUV at a stop sign and his admission to Lightfoot that he’d had a “couple of drinks with dinner” that night.
He also has come under withering ridicule from President Donald Trump, both on Twitter and in a recent Chicago speech that Johnson boycotted to a national conference of police chiefs in which Trump called the city a haven for criminals.
Johnson said none of that contributed to his decision to step down. He said the toll his job took on his family came into focus when he saw the pain on the faces of widows of officers who were killed this year, and in October when he went on his first family vacation since becoming chief.
“I saw how they missed me in that kind of setting ... and that’s pretty much what did it,” he said. “I can’t keep punishing them.”
Johnson, a native Chicagoan, held just about every rank in his more than three decades career on the force.