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 In the largest 30 U.S. cities, nine top cops have departed in the
past 12 months, compared to an annual average of four over the prior
decade. Four retired, three were fired and two left after
unfavorable Justice Department reviews of the use of force in the
departments they led.
Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy became the latest chief
to fall this month after angry protests over a video showing a
police officer gunning down black teenager Laquan McDonald last
year.
Police chiefs have also lost their jobs in Baltimore, Newark,
Phoenix, and Cincinnati, and in smaller cities including Portsmouth,
New Hampshire; Inkster, Michigan; and Morrow, Georgia. Protesters
have called for the ouster of San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr,
following outrage at the shooting death of a black man by officers
that was caught on tape.
The advent of police body and dashboard cameras, and the use of
smartphones to quickly share video via social media has ratcheted up
the pressure, law enforcement officials and experts said.
 "I talk to enough chiefs who recognize they're one incident away
from their whole department being put under a huge microscope," said
Chuck Wexler, executive director of Police Executive Research Forum
(PERF), a non-profit organization that has been hired by dozens of
cities in recent years, including Chicago, to help recruit new
police chiefs.
"Mayors are reacting quickly," he added. "They're holding police
chiefs to a standard we really haven't seen ever, especially around
issues of use of force and community trust," he added.
Pressures on the nation's top cops have increased in tandem with a
rise in homicides and overall crime rates this year as well as the
series of high-profile police shooting incidents that have stoked
racial tensions.
"Increased media scrutiny, coupled with increasing camera coverage,
coupled with a Justice Department that has been a little bit more
aggressive, just a general questioning of police authority is what's
going on here," said Wesley Skogan, a Northwestern University
political science professor who has written three books about the
Chicago police department.
The skills required to succeed as a chief - understanding the media,
working well with politicians, strong public speaking and the
ability to both lead and discipline your officers - are the same as
always, he said.
 McCarthy stepped down on Dec. 1 after Mayor Rahm Emanuel asked him
to resign, even after white cop Jason Van Dyke was charged with
murder for shooting 17-year-old McDonald 16 times.
"McCarthy was a scapegoat, but no more than any chief ever is," said
Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of
Police, the country's largest police union with more than 335,000
members.
Nevertheless, he said, there is no shortage of people who want a
chief job in the largest cities, which according to PERF came with
an average annual salary of $195,000 in 2014. HIGHER CRIME,
SHRINKING BUDGETS
In big cities, police chiefs last only between two-and-a-half to
three-and-a-half years on the job, according to PERF.
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In smaller cities, the tenure was not much longer – just over four
years. According to the 335 chiefs surveyed by PERF, their
predecessors lasted slightly longer, from five to six years.
A Reuters review of the nation's largest 30 cities showed the
average chief had held the job for 4.2 years, relatively unchanged
over the last 10 years.
Any top cop has many constituencies to placate, including the
public, the mayors who can hire and fire police chiefs, the media
and the department's own officers, law enforcement officials said.
The chiefs are held responsible for reducing street crime amidst
shrinking budgets, while dealing with high-profile incidents of gun
violence.
Police chiefs faced less pressure earlier in this century, as crime
rates fell in many major American cities. That trend has reversed
for some serious crimes, with national murder rates up 16 percent
this year, according to an October report by the Congressional
Research Service.
Chicago's murder rate rose 14 percent through November, while
Houston and San Francisco's through October are up 30 percent and 18
percent, respectively.
The growth of social media also has made police chiefs more
accountable for what they say.
In September, a police chief in Surf City, North Carolina, said he
was forced to step down after he described the Black Lives Matter
movement as "an American-born terrorist group" in a Facebook post.
City officials said the chief's "divisive comments" went too far and
"compromised his ability to do his job," leaving them little choice.
And CompStat, a system that gathers data to help police pinpoint hot
spots and deploy officers effectively, has become a source of
controversy in Chicago and other cities where critics say police
misreport crimes. In 2012, an internal probe validated a New York
police whistleblower' s report that his precinct was systematically
underreporting crime.
"The criminals are the easy ones," Timoney joked in a telephone
interview with Reuters. Police chiefs need "really, really thick
skins."
(Reporting by Ben Klayman in Detroit and Tim Reid in Los Angeles,
additional reporting by Mary Wisniewski, Fiona Ortiz and Karl Plume
in Chicago, Julia Edwards and Marina Lopes in Washington, Ian
Simpson and Donna Owens in Baltimore, Scott Malone in Boston, Joseph
Ax in New York, Curtis Skinner in San Francisco and Jon Herskovitz
in Austin, Texas; editing by Stuart Grudgings.)
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