This story was copublished by Invisible Institute and the Reader.
John Poulos’s past might have prevented him from being hired by the Chicago Police Department—if he had been honest about it. Instead, the lieutenant’s rise through the department’s ranks is emblematic of many of the problems identified by critics of the CPD’s “merit” promotion system.
On his initial application to join CPD, Poulos omitted past arrests he’d gotten expunged. (He later claimed to internal investigators he did not believe the law required him to disclose expunged information.) An early misconduct investigation could have led to his termination in the early 2000s, if bureaucratic errors hadn’t kept it on ice for more than a decade. And he fatally shot two young Black men—in 2013, three years before his promotion to sergeant, and in 2016, shortly after he was promoted. In both cases, the city paid around $1 million related to police misconduct lawsuits.
Any of those individually could have been enough to derail his career. Instead, Poulos kept rising. Records released in 2017 showed that Poulos didn’t make sergeant by passing a competitive exam—the way that most Chicago police supervisors rise through the ranks. Instead, he was a beneficiary of the CPD’s long-controversial “merit” promotion system, in which superiors nominate subordinates for a process intended to recognize the merit of officers who are not suited to a standardized testing environment.
After the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) harshly criticized the program in its excoriating 2017 report on CPD misconduct and excessive force—directly referencing Poulos’s promotion—then Chicago police superintendent Eddie Johnson took the unprecedented step of publicly releasing the names of officers who had received merit-based promotions since 2006, along with their nominators.
Johnson hailed the move as a commitment to transparency, pushing back against accusations that the process was shrouded in secrecy. “If I were trying to hide something, if we weren’t being transparent, we wouldn’t even be talking about this,” he said, “because you wouldn’t know who the merit selections were.”
Johnson pledged to continue disclosing this information moving forward. Police spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi doubled down on the commitment, telling the Chicago Sun-Times, “CPD will be identifying those individuals who received a merit-based promotion—not just for sergeant but for all going forward. And we will identify who the nominating members are.”
But the brief window of transparency has slammed shut. After revelations about his 2016 merit promotion to sergeant prompted greater scrutiny, Poulos’s 2024 promotion to lieutenant happened in the dark—because the city now claims that the release of records about the manner of an officer’s promotion would be an invasion of their privacy, a claim rejected by public records and civil rights attorneys. The public has no way of knowing whether he received his most recent promotion through the exam or the merit system.
“I see this as a departure in law and practice and policy,” said University of Chicago law professor Craig Futterman. “The public has a legitimate interest in knowing which officers are promoted and how that process works.”
The 2017 list released by Johnson remains the only one available to the public. In February, Invisible Institute sued the city over its denial of records about merit promotions, which are now held by the city’s Office of Public Safety Administration (OPSA), created in 2019 under then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
“[O]PSA, the Chicago Police Department, and the [Mayor Brandon] Johnson Administration have a terrible track record of improperly denying Freedom of Information Act requests on important issues of police accountability,” said Matt Topic, a partner at Loevy & Loevy who is representing Invisible Institute in its lawsuit. “Unfortunately, it often takes lawsuits like this to force them to comply with basic transparency obligations.”
In response, the city has written in court documents that it “denies” Invisible Institute’s claim that “the public has a right to understand the process by which government employees armed by the state are promoted.” The lawsuit is ongoing.
For most Chicago cops looking to advance through the ranks, the path is through an exam that is notoriously difficult and inconsistently offered—sometimes only once or twice per decade—that has inspired multiple cheating scandals over the years. For a select few, the alternative path is to be nominated by a department higher-up for the CPD’s merit process.
After being nominated, such officers are reviewed by a Merit Board made up of additional CPD insiders, including five deputy chiefs and the head of the OPSA, who serves as a nonvoting secretary. For most of the program’s history, members of the Merit Board couldn’t also nominate officers. That changed under Superintendent Johnson, who only required that they recuse themselves from votes on their nominees.
The city’s human resources and OPSA offices then compile a nomination packet on each nominee, including their complimentary histories and limited disciplinary information from recent years, and the Merit Board interviews some nominees, according to city policies. Merit Board members vote up or down on each nominee and send their results to the superintendent—who has ultimate decision-making power. The superintendent can even select officers for merit promotions who weren’t put forward by the board at all.
The merit promotion system was implemented in the mid-1990s as a way to increase the representation of women and officers of color in leadership positions within the CPD, a department whose upper ranks have historically been dominated by white men. It followed two decades of litigation, including from groups representing Black officers and the DOJ as well as white officers, asserting discrimination in CPD hiring and promotional practices.
“In consideration of the historical adverse impact that had been observed on minority candidates, the merit process was intended to identify CPD personnel who did not necessarily score well on tests and yet exhibited supervisory potential,” wrote consultants hired to study the CPD’s promotional system in 2020.
In reality, according to the DOJ, many officers—“minority and non-minority alike”—experienced the merit system as a “reward for cronyism rather than a recognition of excellence.” They tied the system to the city’s longtime traditions of promotions based on “the ‘clout’ you hold in the Department or ‘who you know.’” Officers told federal investigators they felt that some merit promotees were “unqualified to serve as leaders” and had been promoted “merely because those individuals have connections up the chain of command.”
This echoed complaints made by officials with the city’s rank-and-file and sergeants unions as well as the African American Police League, which represented the interests of many Black officers, as far back as 1995. After Matt Rodriguez, the superintendent at the time, merit promoted 13 sergeants to lieutenant that year, a spurned sergeant sued and won a state appellate court decision blocking the promotions from going forward.
Among those up for a promotion was Peter Dignan, who was at the time facing litigation in a series of cases stemming from his alleged torture of several later-exonerated men as part of his work under notorious Commander Jon Burge. Rodriguez said he was “not aware” of the allegations against Dignan when merit promoting him.
Then mayor Richard M. Daley forged ahead with a plan for merit promotions despite the appellate court decision—again despite litigation and complaints from police unions—a few years later in 1998. Controversy would continue; the sergeants union filed its own Freedom of Information Act litigation seeking a merit promotion list in 2003. (Long-standing dissatisfaction on the part of rank-and-file officers with the city’s merit promotion processes notwithstanding, John Catanzara, the president of the city’s main police union, told an Invisible Institute reporter to “F-off!” in response to a request for comment for this story.)
“You can lie, . . . even shoot unarmed people in the back, and then not only escape discipline, but be rewarded—get promoted—for doing so.”
In a 2024 study, Taeho Kim, an economics professor at the University of Toronto, looked at the effects of the CPD’s infrequently scheduled promotional exams—and how those limited opportunities push officers to seek alternatives, such as merit promotions. He found that officers who were denied the opportunity to take the promotional exam responded by conducting a higher proportion of low-level arrests and seeking roles on controversial tactical teams, likely with the goal of impressing supervisors who can nominate them for merit promotions.
Kim said in an interview that, while it can be interpreted as a positive sign that officers don’t respond to limited promotional opportunities by simply loafing on the job, it raises serious questions about whether encouraging officers to conduct a large number of low-level arrests and seek out tactical work as a means of promotion is beneficial to the city. Tactical teams have faced renewed criticism in recent years for their aggressive policing tactics.
He suggested that the CPD could reward community engagement and other efforts in its merit promotions as a way to encourage more officers to seek out roles and activities besides increased arrests and serving on tactical teams. “Sometimes having alternative response teams through a community engagement may be better, right?” he said. “My guess is that community engagement is not really prized by police officers” when considering promotions.
The merit system also has limits as a means of diversifying CPD leadership, its intended goal. Compared with current statistics that show white men make up 30 percent of the department, 40 percent of merit promotees between 2006 and 2016 were white men, according to a 2016 Sun-Times analysis of department data.
One of those men was John Poulos. That was despite Poulos having lied on his application to join the CPD about previous arrests that had been expunged—a violation of CPD policy that was ultimately ignored by officials, Injustice Watch reported. Then, while on an extended medical leave between 2002 and 2010, he operated a tavern in violation of CPD policies that prohibit cops from owning businesses that sell liquor, the Chicago Tribune reported.
After he disclosed his partial ownership of the tavern while applying for medical benefits, the CPD’s Bureau of Internal Affairs (BIA) opened an investigation in 2004 and ultimately recommended that he be fired in 2007. That recommendation was overturned by Debra Kirby, the head of BIA at the time. Kirby instead pushed for a 60-day suspension over the objections of two other officials who accused Poulos of “a pattern of deception,” according to reporting by Injustice Watch. Because he was still on medical leave, neither disciplinary action was implemented, and he returned to work in 2010 with the case still technically pending.
Back on the force, Poulos continued to rack up disciplinary actions and uses of deadly force. In 2013, he was reprimanded by the department for accidentally firing his weapon during an arrest. Then, four months after the reprimand, he fatally shot a man while off duty. While returning home from his family’s tavern, Poulos thought he saw Rickey Rozelle, a 28-year-old Black man, trying to break into a building. He fatally shot Rozelle in the back with a revolver owned by his brother after he claimed he thought Rozelle’s chrome wristwatch was a gun. He was cleared by criminal and administrative investigations, but the city eventually settled with Rozelle’s sister for $950,000.
In February 2016, about a year after he was cleared in the Rozelle shooting, Poulos received a merit promotion to sergeant. His promotion took place as protests rocked the city following the November 2015 release of video of the murder of Laquan McDonald by officer Jason Van Dyke in 2014.
The timing was not lost on Futterman, the law professor who has worked on several significant civil rights lawsuits against the CPD, including one of the three that resulted in court-ordered reforms to the department. “This is a time when CPD has drawn international attention for covering up officer Jason Van Dyke’s murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. It’s mind-blowing that CPD leaders thought that it would be a good idea to promote another white male officer who had shot an unarmed Black man in the back,” he said. “Poulos not just was, but is, kind of the poster child for all that an officer could do without being subject to any accountability. You can lie, . . . even shoot unarmed people in the back, and then not only escape discipline, but be rewarded—get promoted—for doing so.”
As with all merit promotees, Poulos was first nominated by a department higher-up. In his case, it was Kevin Navarro, his well-connected commander at the Seventh District in Englewood. Navarro would shortly afterward rise to the rank of first deputy, a post in which he notably received day-or-night phone calls from then mayor Rahm Emanuel on crime issues in the city. City spokespeople later claimed to the Tribune that Navarro would not have known about the previous disciplinary case at the time.
During this time, John Escalante was serving as interim superintendent, after Emanuel fired Garry McCarthy. Escalante, who is now executive director of public safety for Elmhurst University in the west suburbs, did not respond to a request for comment.
Nine months after he received a merit promotion, Poulos shot and killed Kajuan Raye, a Black 19-year-old, during a foot chase in West Englewood. Poulos claimed that Raye pointed a gun at him, but an expert retained by Raye’s attorneys in a civil rights lawsuit brought by his mother eventually acknowledged the gun had remained in Raye’s jacket pocket.
Johnson stripped Poulos of his police powers immediately after the shooting, pointing to “concerns about this incident.” That was when BIA rediscovered the old, unresolved case over his tavern ownership and expunged arrests. CPD leadership moved to fire him in July 2017, 16 years after he first deceived the department and six months after DOJ investigators called out his merit promotion as a failure of CPD’s internal systems.
But it was too late. The delays meant the case wouldn’t hold up. Poulos stayed on the force, and the city’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) cleared him of wrongdoing in the Raye shooting. (A jury awarded Raye’s family $1 million in a civil lawsuit in 2020.)
A few months after his tavern ownership disciplinary case was dropped by the Chicago Police Board in 2018, he was assigned to the CPD office that certifies eligibility for what are known as U visas, which are issued to immigrants who are the victim of a crime. There, he and another sergeant with a history of excessive force allegations were responsible for a disproportionate number of U visa denials, according to Injustice Watch, potentially in violation of federal standards and state law, and prompting an investigation by Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul.
In the face of this string of misconduct and bad press, Poulos, who graduated from law school while on medical leave, ran for a Cook County judgeship in 2024. “This background that adversely goes against [his] fundamental credibility should not be hanging over a judge under any circumstances,” former Chicago inspector general Joe Ferguson told Injustice Watch.
Poulos, who did not respond to a voice mail seeking comment for this story, came in fourth of four candidates, but he remains on the police force despite the long-documented allegations concerning his credibility and has never been listed as one of the officers that the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office discloses credibility questions about to defense attorneys.
In fact, even before his losing judicial campaign, he was quietly promoted to lieutenant.
Despite the harsh criticism from the DOJ, in addition to critiques from Ferguson and the Police Accountability Task Force chaired by then police board president Lori Lightfoot in the wake of Laquan McDonald video release, the merit process continued apace after 2017. That’s because the CPD’s hiring plan, created in 2014, set out that up to 30 percent of each round of sergeants and lieutenants, and 20 percent of detectives, can be merit promotions. Still, the plan leaves the decision of whether to accept a merit promotion nomination entirely in the hands of the superintendent.
In 2019, then interim superintendent Charlie Beck used his discretion to stop making merit promotions altogether, aligning with calls for reform as well as long-standing requests by the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, which represents rank-and-file Chicago cops. As mayor, Lightfoot stood by Beck’s decision, calling the merit system “illegitimate.”
Around the same time, Lightfoot’s administration shuffled some responsibilities of the CPD, including hiring and promotions, into the new Office of Public Safety Administration, with the stated goal of “streamlining” services to save money. (An analysis by the Better Government Association’s policy team two years in found that it ended up costing the city more than it saved—a trend that’s continued.)
Just months later, in April 2020, Beck’s move under Lightfoot to legitimize the CPD’s promotions would begin to unravel as Lightfoot’s handpicked choice for the permanent superintendent position, former Dallas police chief David Brown, said during his confirmation hearing before the City Council that he would be “aggressively pursuing a replacement for merit” promotions. In July 2021, Brown officially reinstated the program.
A list obtained by WGN-TV that September showed controversial supervisors continued to have an outsize role in nominating merit promotees. Those supervisors included Anthony Escamilla, a former commander whom Beck demoted to captain for directing on-duty officers to babysit his son, who has a disability. (Escamilla claimed at the time that his teenage son was volunteering in the community policing department.)
Current superintendent Larry Snelling supports merit promotions, telling the Sun-Times in 2023, “To be totally honest, I would like to see the entire promotional process changed to take merit into account for promotion and not just a test. This will give everybody a great opportunity of being promoted.”
Snelling received two merit promotions between 2010 and 2019, contributing to his meteoric rise through the ranks.
Though no official merit promotion lists have been released by the city in eight years, one quasi news source has published a steady stream of leaked lists every few months: an anonymous blog called Second City Cop.
The lists published by the site show a continuation of old trends. Zachary Rubald was promoted to sergeant in 2019, according to the blog. In 2008, Rubald killed Martinez Winford, a Black 16-year-old, in a shooting. Winford’s mother alleged in a lawsuit that the shooting “could not” have happened as Rubald, who shot Winford while seated in his squad car, claimed it did. A jury sided in favor of the city and officers in 2016.
After his merit promotion, Rubald was among roughly 50 officers COPA recommended for suspension or termination for alleged misconduct during the nationwide protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd. He was suspended for one month.
In one incident caught on video, the recently promoted Rubald stood by as officer Richard Bankus beat a protester with a baton, appearing to strike the person in the head, as Invisible Institute and the Reader reported. Baton strikes to the head are considered deadly force and are prohibited except in rare circumstances. Rubald never intervened or reported the misconduct, which investigators later found to be “inexcusable, particularly for someone of the sergeant’s rank, position, and authority.”
Another officer who received a merit promotion in recent years, according to the lists published by Second City Cop, is Baneond Chinchilla, who CBS Chicago reported in 2020 provided incomplete search warrant affidavits to Cook County judges, including one resulting in a 2018 no-knock raid at the wrong house that had a family with small children. A civil case arising from the incident settled for $91,500, city records show. Chinchilla was promoted to sergeant last year, the published records show.
The person who responded to the listed email address for the Second City Cop blog said they believe the lists that the photos in the blog posts are legitimate, writing, “the department publishes the lists in the Administrative Fax Network divided up into a ‘merit’ list and a ‘rank order’ list. readers send them to us and we post them. it’s a department generated publication, so the veracity isn’t in question and the secrecy isn’t the list itself.
“what is in question and what has never been addressed is ‘what qualifications are needed [to] place someone on the ‘merit’ list. one might think that in order to qualify for the ‘merit’ procedure, the department would post the necessary or desirable traits the promotional board would look for in a candidate, so as to get the best and brightest and give everyone a fair shot,” the person continued. “someone thinking that would be – to put it politely – a moron.”
OPSA executive director Era Patterson declined to confirm whether Rubald and Chinchilla were merit promotions, citing the pending FOIA litigation.
Her predecessor, interim executive director Frank Lindbloom, previously said when asked for comment that the agency is “certainly not attempting to hinder transparency efforts,” but he emphasized its obligation to protect employee privacy and maintain the integrity of the hiring process, including the CPD’s merit system, by limiting what is shared publicly. This is perhaps in keeping with city officials’ wavering attitudes toward transparency around the merit promotion process since the beginning; even as they released the one list in 2017, CPD officials seemed half-hearted in their step toward transparency and refused to release two prior merit promotion lists because they came before Johnson’s decision.
Lindbloom added he was “not aware of any instance whereby PSA or CPD has released lists associated with CPD’s merit process.” When asked in a follow-up whether he was aware that then superintendent Johnson released a merit list in 2017, Lindbloom did not respond. Patterson, a former chief of staff to Cook County public defender Sharone Mitchell Jr. who was named as Lindbloom’s permanent replacement in June, declined to clarify Lindbloom’s inaccurate statements, citing the pending FOIA lawsuit.
But the consultants hired by the city to evaluate the CPD’s promotional process have weighed in on another question: whether merit promotions should exist at all. In a December 2023 report obtained by Invisible Institute and the Reader under state public records laws—which hasn’t been previously published or reported on—the firm DCI recommended that the city “discontinue the merit process” or at least make substantial changes, including reducing the proportion of officers promoted to “a maximum of 10-20%,” allowing officers to nominate themselves rather than requiring nomination from a supervisor, and setting “some minimum level of performance” to be considered for a merit promotion. The consultants cited the “overwhelmingly negative perception of this process throughout the CPD.”
In an undated planning document released by the city law department, city officials wrote that they were “ready to start” implementing that recommendation—without specifying whether they intend to discontinue or change the program—and that it should take one to two years.
Requests for comment sent to the CPD and city law department about whether they intend to discontinue or significantly change the merit program went ignored.
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