New Wilmington Police Chief Bob Tracy left Chicago amid 'changes'
Newly appointed Wilmington Police Chief Robert Tracy left his last policing job as a chief crime strategist in Chicago, amid a departmental controversy, but on "good terms," he said.
Tracy resigned soon after Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel asked the city's top cop, Superintendent Garry McCarthy, to step down. McCarthy, a longtime ally of Tracy's, was removed amid the fallout of the police-involved fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald, an unarmed African-American man.
Tracy said on Friday that he was not asked to quit.
"I left just at a time that City Hall looked like they wanted to make changes," he said. "I think it was probably time for a change. They were going in a new direction, and I figured, 'let them go in that direction' and move on to the private sector."
Tracy took a job as the senior vice president of United Security Services Inc., a Chicago-based consulting company. But when the chief position in Wilmington opened up, Tracy said he couldn't resist applying for the chance to work in policing again.
"I talked to my wife and she said: 'this is the profession you love'," he said. "This is my calling. I probably wasn’t ready to be in the private sector the rest of my life."
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Although he said his departure was unrelated to McDonald, Tracy said he learned from the case in which the video of the shooting wasn't released until 14 months after the incident. He said the case showed that officials should release videos in police-involved shootings as soon as they can.
"In policing in general, the law enforcement community and the criminal justice system is trying to get videos out a heck of a lot quicker, without compromising the case, for transparency," he said. "What happened in Chicago, that wasn’t done."
Tracy said the McDonald case was also a reminder of the importance of de-escalation training.
"Mistakes can happen in policing. (There are) split second decisions," he said. "We make sure we get the best training in place so that when they react in split second decisions, they’re doing it properly and it’s justified... When we have incidents like what we had in Chicago, it makes us take a hard look at how we can evolve our training so things like that don’t happen again."
Contact Christina Jedra at (302) 324-2837, cjedra@delawareonline.com or on Twitter @ChristinaJedra.