Commander Joshua Wallace doesn’t talk much about titles or ambitions. Twenty-seven years into his career with the Chicago Police Department, he’s built a reputation on something else entirely: showing up, doing the work, getting it right.
“The shift from hierarchical criminal organizations to decentralized networks has fundamentally altered investigative architecture in several critical ways,” Wallace says, sitting in his office within CPD’s Bureau of Counterterrorism, where he oversees the Criminal Network Group. It’s the kind of statement that might sound academic coming from someone else. From Wallace, it carries the weight of two and a half decades spent watching Chicago’s criminal landscape evolve, often in ways that left traditional policing strategies obsolete.
Commander Joshua Wallace graduated from the FBI National Academy and the Senior Management Institute for Police. He commanded drug investigations and supervised tactical operations. He’s been a finalist for multiple chief of police positions nationwide but those credentials matter less than what they represent: a career built on adaptation, on recognizing when what worked yesterday won’t work tomorrow…