McCarthy joined the New York City Police Department in 1981 at age 22. He rose through the ranks and became Deputy Commissioner of Operations in 2000. McCarthy was in the middle of ground zero during the September 11 attacks, working closely with then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani to operate an emergency response command post. While with the NYPD, he held a variety of positions around the city, served as commander of several different precincts and eventually was in charge of the NYPD's CompStat program.
In 2006, McCarthy left his position with the New York Police Department to take over the Police Department of Newark, New Jersey. He was chosen for this role by Mayor Cory Booker, and appeared with Booker in the documentary series Brick City. McCarthy presided over a sharp reduction in crime during his tenure in Booker's administration in Newark with homicides declining 28 percent, shootings declining 46 percent, and overall crime declining 21 percent..
McCarthy was hired by Mayor Rahm Emanuel to take over the Chicago Police Department shortly after Emanuel's election in early 2011. McCarthy was the City of Chicago's highest paid public employee, earning an annual salary of over $260,000. The number of crimes and murders in Chicago declined during his tenure. In an investigative article by Chicago Magazine reporters David Bernstein and Noah Isackson, it was asserted that the decline was in part due to the unjustified re-categorization of murders as undetermined and then if it is later determined to be a murder, tallying the total to the prior years' statistics. McCarthy responded that the article is "patently false" and criticized its reliance on anonymous sources. A 2012 audit by the Chicago Inspector General determined that the Chicago Police Department had under-counted aggravated assault and aggravated battery victims by 25 percent by not following state guidelines by counting each incident rather than each victim. McCarthy attributed the error to the administration of the prior police superintendent, Jody Weis.
Termination
On October 20, 2014, Laquan McDonald was murdered by Chicago Police OfficerJason Van Dyke. Laquan McDonald, a young black boy, was 17 years old and was shot 16 times. A cover-up of this incident occurred, lasting 400 days, yet McCarthy had seen the video footage a few days after the murder occurred. When the video was released to the public following a court order, activists condemned police violence, the code of silence, and racism in the Chicago Police Department and called on Mayor Emanuel, State's Attorney Anita Alvarez and Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy to resign. McCarthy did not resign, but was terminated by Rahm Emanuel.
2019 Chicago mayoral candidacy
On March 21, 2018, McCarthy announced he is officially running for Mayor of Chicago in the 2019 election, against Mayor Emanuel. He currently resides in Chicago, and is a father to his two daughters Kyla McCarthy, Kimberly, and son Kiernan. July 2018 polling indicated that Garry McCarthy was the leading challenger to incumbent Mayor Rahm Emanuel. In September 2018, Emanuel announced he would not be running for reelection. Garry McCarthy eventually was lead to concede in this election. His campaign for mayor had been eagerly anticipated when the man who fired him after four years as top cop, Emanuel, was still in the race. But the dynamics changed for McCarthy when Emanuel dropped out and was no longer a target for attacks. McCarthy alluded to how more than a dozen others entered the fray and it got more competitive when Emanuel announced he wouldn’t run for a third term. Though he had often been in the public spotlight, including facing protesters head-on during the city’s 2012 hosting of the NATO summit, the mayor’s race was the first bid for public office by McCarthy, who heads his own security consulting firm. During his candidacy, when meeting with the Chicago Sun-Timeseditorial board unsuccessfully seeking their endorsement, McCarthy made news for proposing that, to address the issues of population loss and budgeting the city's pension obligations, Chicago annex nearby suburban communities such as Evergreen Park, Norridge, Oak Lawn and Oak Park. The leaders of some of the suburbs balked at the notion.
