On Monday, January 10, 2022, Mayor Lori Lightfoot appointed Parker parent Adam Gross as the first executive director of the new Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability. Regarded by Lightfoot as a “historic milestone” for Chicago, the commission will work to systematically reform the city’s policing.

In the press release announcement, Lightfoot said, “I have the utmost confidence in Adam’s experience and ability to support and guide this new commission, and look forward to working with him as we work to make Chicago a national leader in police reform.”

In July, the Chicago City Council approved an ordinance to create the Community Commission which will include seven residents overseeing the Chicago Police Department and District Councils with three residents for each of the 22 police districts. “The ordinance creates two different bodies.” Gross said. “Together they’re about fundamentally transforming the relationship between the police department and the communities it serves, about building trust where trust is broken, and ultimately about increasing public safety, which is the real measure of whether this is working.”

Policy within the police department is currently created within the police department without required public input. The commission changes this policy-making into a “much more democratic process,” since the commission will be able to create policy. “There’s nothing that’s identical to this anywhere in the country, and there’s a lot that’s happening in the world of policing and police oversight and police reform,” Gross said. In addition to changing policy or creating goals for the police department, the commission will be involved in selecting and removing various members of the Chicago Police Board, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) and the Chicago Police Department, including the CPD superintendent.

In the first few weeks of being executive director, Gross has been primarily meeting with people and organizations he will work with or continue to work with as well as leaders in the police department and police misconduct investigation agencies. In building the commission, he has to consider how to structure the commission, who will do what, and how to prepare commissioners and district council members. Gross will manage a panel of seven people serving four year terms who are nominated by the Council and appointed by the mayor. He will also be a liaison between the police department and other oversight boards in Chicago, manage the commission’s operations and budget, and hire employees. “It’s really exciting because he’s been working on it for almost a third of my life,” Gross’ daughter and sophomore Naomi said. “So seeing that one, the ordinance got passed and now that he gets to run it all within the span of a couple months is super exciting.”

Prior to being the executive director of the commission, Gross was an attorney and was the Director of the Police Accountability Program for Business and Professional People for the Public Interest (BPI). While at BPI, he supported coalitions including the Grassroots Alliance for Police Accountability (GAPA) and the Empowering Communities for Public Safety coalition (ECPS), which both worked to write the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability ordinance. 

Only the community commission can hire or fire the executive director, but since people need to be hired for the commission by an executive director, Lightfoot was able to directly appoint Gross. When the job opportunity opened, Gross decided to apply due to his extensive work developing and advocating for the ordinance. 

“I’ve spent about six years working to create this. I now want to do everything that I can to make sure that it succeeds,” Gross said. “I then had a choice: I could stay in the old job that I had and continue doing advocacy from the outside, which is what I anticipated doing for a long time. In many ways I would have been happy doing that, but thought when this position opened up, that I might have an even greater ability to work to help move the commission and the district councils in the direction that the people who worked so hard to create it wanted it to move in.”

The Grassroots Alliance for Police Accountability created a task force after the murder of Laquan McDonald that recommended a community oversight board. BPI worked with GAPA and other organizations to develop the proposal for the board and receive community input. GAPA and the Chicago Alliance Against Racist Political Repression came together to create ECPS.

Gross attended Yale and Harvard for his undergraduate and Master’s degrees, respectively, and attended the University of Chicago for law school. His three daughters, Rebecca Gross ‘21, Mollie Gross ‘23, and Naomi Gross ‘24 attend or graduated from Parker. “I’m not surprised that someone like him, with his expertise, and level of integrity, was given such a position,” Upper School history teacher and advisor to Naomi, Andy Bigelow, said. “I don’t know him extremely well, but the few times that we have met and interacted, he’s someone I look up to, he also has a reputation at Parker of being the greatest dad and just a wonderful person.”

Gross believes that independent and community based police oversight is “more important than ever before.” “It’s especially important now to address those challenges to try to build trust, to think differently about how policing and the community can engage, to think differently about police officers and how they do their jobs, in order to address those issues and create safer communities,” Gross said.

For Bigelow, Gross’s new role differs from that of other powerful Parker parents in that Gross has a focus on Chicago’s police system specifically. “This is practicing what you preach and being someone who’s engaged in this community,” Bigelow said. “We’ve had lots of parents who had access to President Obama, and senators, and congressmen and women, but this is much more local.”