In a little over two weeks, when Deborah Witzburg’s term ends, Chicago will be without an inspector general.
The search for her successor is underway. A committee will select three names to put before Mayor Brandon Johnson. His final selection will then be subject to City Council approval.
It is urgent the mayor move quickly on his selection and that the City Council act with dispatch thereafter. With allegations of mismanagement swirling around City Hall, Chicago can’t afford a long timespan without a fully empowered IG.
There’s no reason such a delay should happen.
Back in April 2022, when Witzburg began her term, Chicago had gone seven months without an IG. Her predecessor, Joe Ferguson, had left the office the previous October. Following that delay, the city changed the process to require a mayor to disclose whether or not he or she intended to reappoint a sitting inspector general at least six months before the end of that IG’s term.
As a result, the search for Witzburg’s successor has been ongoing for months. Witzburg, whom no one believed Johnson was going to reappoint anyway, took herself out of the running last July, well before the six-month deadline.
The immediate future of the inspector general’s office is particularly pressing now because of recent revelations that one of Johnson’s most senior lieutenants, Deputy Mayor for Community Safety Garien Gatewood, had lodged a whistleblower complaint with Witzburg’s office last October. That complaint, according to reports, centered on irregularities in the city’s contracting and procurement processes and focused on the conduct of Johnson’s chief of staff, Cristina Pacione-Zayas, and his senior political adviser, Jason Lee.
Pacione-Zayas and Lee fired Gatewood last month despite a decline in homicides last year to levels not seen in decades. That firing shocked aldermen and led to a series of media appearances by Gatewood in which he accused the mayor’s office of punishing those who criticize the job performance of progressive allies working in City Hall with Gatewood asserting that he was just such a victim.
Gatewood and Witzburg haven’t commented directly on the complaint filed with the IG. Johnson, Pacione-Zayas and Lee have asserted they had no knowledge of the complaint’s existence when they sent Gatewood packing.
Since the initial news of Gatewood’s filing with the IG, speculation regarding the content of the complaint has focused on ShotSpotter, the gunshot-detection technology formerly employed in parts of the city, which Johnson ended in the fall of 2024 over the objections of a majority of aldermen. Shortly afterwards, City Hall began a formal contracting process to identify an alternative gunshot-detection technology, but progress has been unusually slow.
“We have to explore better options that save more lives,” Johnson said back then in a statement. But there are whispers that the company, SoundThinking, Inc., which owns ShotSpotter graded out well in the new bidding. Could such an inconvenient outcome have led to a deliberate slowing down by the mayor’s office of the contracting process?
Needless to say, it would be extraordinarily embarrassing for the mayor’s office to preside over the return of ShotSpotter after many months of living without any gunshot-detection system at all and seeing numerous instances of victims of gun violence going unnoticed for hours on end because no one had alerted the Chicago Police Department to shots being fired. Not to mention Johnson’s past vilification of ShotSpotter as “walkie-talkies on a stick.”
We don’t know the scope of or specificities in Gatewood’s complaint, but any irregularities in contracting and procurement are serious allegations that need to be treated with the highest priority. And Gatewood’s complaints may well go considerably beyond just the ShotSpotter replacement contract.
It’s unnerving that the timing of this whistleblower action from the highest levels of Johnson’s City Hall is coinciding with turnover in Chicago’s watchdog agency. Our worry is that the mayor will have every incentive to take his time with a replacement for Witzburg. The longer it takes to install a new IG, the longer it will take to finalize this investigation.
And few need reminding that we’re less than a year away from the mayoral election.
A bombshell IG report on contracting problems in the mayor’s office on the eve of that election would be something Johnson presumably would wish to avoid at all costs. That’s assuming, of course, that he runs for reelection. So far, he hasn’t said one way or the other whether he will seek a second term.
The mayor frequently asserts his commitment to transparency and accountability. Those pledges will mean little if anything if he slow-walks this critical appointment.
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