City Council Set to Weigh Push to Require CPD to Study How Officers Are Deployed, Despite Political Peril

The Chicago Police Department has yet to launch a new study on whether officers are efficiently and effectively deployed across the city to stop crime and respond to calls for help, even though the Chicago City Council ordered the study to begin more than two months ago, officials told WTTW News.

Ald. Matt Martin (47th Ward), who authored the ordinance passed by the City Council on Feb. 21 that gave CPD officials 90 days to hire an outside organization to study how officers are deployed, where they are assigned to work and whether that makes sense, said he was frustrated the work had not yet begun.

“I don’t understand what the hold up is,” Martin told WTTW News. “This is years, if not decades, overdue.”

A spokesperson for the Chicago Police Department said Wednesday the contract to conduct the study has yet to be finalized. A CPD spokesperson told WTTW News June 4 that an agreement had been reached in May to set the scope of the study and efforts were underway to “finalize the contract.”

Not only did all 50 members of the City Council unanimously approve the ordinance requiring CPD to conduct the study, but it is also required by the terms of the consent decree, the federal court order designed to compel CPD to change the way it trains, supervises and disciplines officers.

Inspector General Deborah Witzburg told WTTW News the study is critical as CPD struggles to comply with the consent decree and Mayor Brandon Johnson attempts to reorganize CPD as part of a new approach to public safety that focuses on the root causes of crime, including poverty, disinvestment and mental illness.

“The city owes Chicagoans answers on these questions,” Witzburg said, calling CPD’s failure to launch the staffing study as required the “latest in a long line of missed commitments.”

Johnson and the City Council must “right size the footprint of the police department” by deciding which functions sworn officers should be responsible for, what non-sworn members of the department should tackle and which should be handled by another city department or agency, Witzburg said.

“You can’t figure out how many officers you need and where they should be deployed before you decide what you should do,” Witzburg said.

The size of the Chicago Police Department has remained steady in Johnson’s first year in office, according to city data. 

CPD had 12,360 employees on Johnson’s first full day in office and 12,274 employees on Aug. 1, according to a city database. The number of sworn officers has also remained steady, with 11,720 officers on duty as of May 1, 2023, and 11,689 on the force as of Aug. 1, according to a database maintained by the inspector general’s office

A report by Witzburg’s office released on July 25 that attempted to determine how many officers CPD members are working on a given day, in a given place found that CPD has serious “record-keeping and data limitations which pose challenges to comprehensive staffing assessments.”

“Assessing CPD’s staffing levels can be opaque and multi-faceted as positions are separated into multiple geographic and non-geographic categories, relevant data is stored in different systems by different City departments, and answers to questions such as ‘how many CPD members patrol my community?’ are variable,” according to a statement from the inspector general’s office.

As a result, Chicagoans and their elected officials do not know how CPD brass determines how many officers should work, where they should be assigned and when, in part because there is no single source to gather that data, Witzburg said. 

“That poses a public transparency challenge, and an oversight challenge,” said Witzburg, whose office maintains a series of databases designed to give Chicagoans as much information as possible about the operations of the CPD and the Chicago Fire Department that were updated as part of the new report.

Those dashboards rely on “attendance and assignment” sheets often filled out by hand by officers and their supervisors, which CPD officials told the inspector general was “the best source” for information about officer staffing, according to the inspector general’s report. 

However, CPD officials “raised concerns about the accuracy and reliability” of data compiled using those sheets and offered to provide the inspector general with additional resources to assess when, where and how officers are deployed, according to the inspector general’s report.

That prompted Witzburg to delay the report “so that CPD could demonstrate how it uses its own data resources to accurately measure patrol staffing on any given day,” according to the report. But that data was never provided, according to the report by the Office of the Inspector General.

“More than one year after OIG requested access, OIG has not been provided with access to any additional staffing data,” according to the report. “Furthermore, CPD has not provided any demonstration of how the department itself measures patrol staffing levels.”

City ordinance and the consent decree give the inspector general the authority to audit CPD and requires its leaders to provide all data requested by the watchdog, and to make officials available for interviews.

In a letter dated June 6, Snelling tells Witzburg that her office should not publish the report or updated dashboards without the additional data. 

“Producing inaccurate or incomplete data or dashboards does not continue to work toward our common goal of building trust with our communities,” Snelling wrote. “Providing incomplete or misleading information could negatively impact not only our agencies but trust in the city as a whole.”

In a letter dated June 25, Witzburg declines to delay publishing the report and updated dashboard any longer and tells Snelling that CPD and the Office of Public Safety Administration have “stymied OIG’s concerted, year-long effort to gain access” to the data Snelling said should be included in its public databases.

“In fact, interference with OIG’s access to this data ... has been so acute as to rise to the unprecedented level of requiring notification to the independent monitoring team,” which is charged with enforcing the consent decree, Witzburg wrote.

Snelling does not acknowledge in his letter that the inspector general requested additional data and delayed their report for more than a year and that CPD has yet to provide that data to the inspector general.

However, Snelling does assure Witzburg that he understands the importance of conducting an “accurate and reliable staffing study, both as part of its obligation under the consent decree but also to provide transparency in its operations.”

The result of the study—required by the City Council—will help CPD “develop a staffing model that ensures that the CPD’s resources are properly allocated,” according to Snelling’s letter, which gives no timeframe for that overdue study to launch.

Snelling is the third consecutive CPD leader to promise to take a data-driven approach to the complicated and politically perilous question of how officers are deployed across Chicago’s 50 wards and 77 community areas.

The last completed CPD workforce allocation study dates to 2010, when former Mayor Richard M. Daley was in office.

The issue of how officers are deployed has long been the third rail of public safety politics in Chicago, with City Council members loathe to take any action that residents of their wards could construe as reducing the presence of officers near their homes and businesses.

The vast majority of violent crimes and murders occur on Chicago’s South and West sides and have for decades. Those wards, home to mostly Black and Latino residents, also have some of the highest rates of 911 calls for police service per population, according to an audit by the inspector general released in August 2023.

There is no evidence more officers are assigned to patrol the South and West sides than other parts of the city to meet that additional demand.

That is partly because when violent crimes or murders occur downtown or in wealthier neighborhoods on the North Side, home to most White Chicagoans, they attract much more attention from the news media and politicians.

That all but ensures any effort to reallocate police resources to the South and West sides will be met with fierce opposition from elected officials and their wealthier constituents, who are more than willing to exert pressure at City Hall.

CPD must develop a staffing model that “considers data-driven resource allocation methods incorporating district-specific factors, including, but not limited to, calls for service, public violence and property crime,” under the terms of the consent decree, the federal court order designed to compel the Chicago Police Department to change the way it trains, supervises and disciplines officers.

CPD is in full compliance with just 7% of that more than 5-year-old court order, according to the independent monitoring team.

A Safer City is supported, in part, by the Sue Ling Gin Foundation Initiative for Reducing Violence in Chicago. 

Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]