Chicago Police Department Headquarters, 3510 S. Michigan Ave. (Michael Izquierdo / WTTW News)

Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposed 2025 budget would slash by 13% the number of employees charged with implementing a federal court order requiring the Chicago Police Department to stop routinely violating residents’ constitutional rights, the latest massive swing in the amount of taxpayer dollars dedicated to the reform push, according to a first of its kind analysis by WTTW News.

If the mayor’s spending plan is approved by the City Council, 79 vacant positions charged with implementing the court order known as the consent decree would be eliminated, records show. Those cuts will make it impossible for the city to comply with the requirements of the court order, reform advocates said.

CPD has fully met just 9% of the court order’s requirements during that five-year period, according to the most recent report by the team monitoring the city’s compliance with the consent decree released Tuesday.

In all, the city set aside $667 million to implement the consent decree between 2020 and 2024, according to Chicago’s annual budget overviews. Johnson has proposed spending an additional $194.6 million on the reform effort in 2025, documents show. While that represents a 3.2% increase in total spending, those additional funds will be just enough to cover the cost of employee raises required by the city’s contract with the Fraternal Order of Police.

That includes the budget for the Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform, which is set to be chopped in half, to $3.7 million, and its workforce slashed by more than 57 employees, according to Johnson’s proposed budget for 2025.

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul warned Nov. 12 that he would seek sanctions against the city if Johnson did not reverse the planned cuts.

“I must remind you that the consent decree is not optional,” Raoul wrote to the mayor. “The City of Chicago must deliver on its consent decree obligations.”

Read More: In Five Years, Chicago Has Barely Made Progress on Its Court-Ordered Police Reforms. Here’s Why.

If Johnson’s proposed spending plan is approved by the City Council, the total amount of taxpayer dollars set aside to implement reforms ordered by a federal judge will be more than $862.2 million through the end of 2025, records show.

But city officials have failed every year since the consent decree was finalized in early 2019 to spend all of that money, according to a WTTW News analysis that compared what the city earmarked for the reform push in its annual budgets with what the city actually spent, as documented by the city’s certified annual audits from 2020 through 2023.

That comparison, also the first of its kind, shows officials failed to spend a quarter of the funds earmarked to fund CPD’s reform efforts every year. That has contributed to the city’s slow progress in complying with the consent decree, which reform advocates now say is at a tipping point.

Johnson told WTTW News after unveiling his budget proposal he was “confident” that the cuts he proposed to reform efforts and consent decree implementation would not hinder the court-ordered reforms.

Bob Boik, the former head of CPD’s Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform, which is responsible for implementing the consent decree, said the cuts would doom the reform push.

“Ultimately, the success of the consent decree will be determined by whether the city makes the necessary investments,” Boik said. “The consent decree requires big structural changes, and that requires money and personnel. The question is whether officials have the backbone to make those investments.”

Former Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown fired Boik in August 2022 for warning that Brown’s decision to move 46 employees to patrol shifts would violate the consent decree.

Johnson’s 2024 budget reversed those cuts, increasing the number of employees charged with implementing the consent decree by 8%, and expanded its 2024 budget by approximately 18% to $188.5 million. Johnson’s 2025 budget reverses his effort to undo the cuts that led to Boik’s firing, records show.

It is unclear how many of those positions were filled, and what those employees accomplished.

During the second half of 2023, CPD made only “incremental progress” toward resolving the issues that “have caused disproportionate delays,” according to a June report from the independent monitoring team led by attorney Maggie Hickey, which is charged with determining whether the city is making good on its promises of reform.

If Johnson’s cuts are enacted by the City Council and made permanent, it would deal a “devastating blow” to the reform effort, Hickey said during a Nov. 13 court hearing on consent decree compliance.

“The proposed budget cuts would be a step backward for the CPD reform process at a pivotal point just when progress is starting to be felt,” Hickey said, in her most public criticism of CPD since Johnson took office and appointed Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling to lead the department.

“Those cuts are shocking,” said former Inspector General Joseph Ferguson, who helped craft the consent decree and now heads the Civic Federation, a nonpartisan budget watchdog group.

Ferguson called on the monitoring team to recommend that U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer demand that Johnson reverse course.

“This is a moment of deep concern,” Ferguson said. “This is a moment for the judge to act.”

Cara Hendrickson, who helped former Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan craft the consent decree, and Walter Katz, former Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s deputy mayor for public safety, urged members of the City Council to reject the cuts, which they said would gut reform efforts, again.

“Following hundreds of hours of negotiations, we were both hopeful that, in time, the deep need for reform would be met by the commitments made in the consent decree,” Hendrickson and Katz wrote. “We no longer have that same sense of optimism, and all of Chicago’s residents are right to be frustrated with the pace of reform.”

Since the consent decree was finalized, the city’s budget for implementing its reforms has swung wildly from year to year, expanding as demands for reform grew louder, and waning as crime and violence increased.

The reform effort’s budget was slashed by 25% between 2021 and 2022, under former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, only to grow 16% between 2022 and 2024, records show.

“We are not going to wish these changes into being,” Chicago Inspector General Deborah Witzburg said. “Reform takes resources. There is a great deal of work to be done and we need people to do that.”

Ald. Matt Martin (47th Ward) blasted those wild swings in the city’s financial commitment to reform, saying Johnson’s budget proposal represented a “step back.”

“We are just not cutting it when it comes to modernizing our public safety efforts,” Martin said. “We are being pennywise and pound foolish.”

Poor record keeping by city officials has made it impossible to accurately gauge how much taxpayers funds are being spent each year to comply with the consent decree, and hold officials accountable for the reform efforts failures, Ferguson said.

For example, the city’s annual budgets and audits do not specify how much the city has spent to fund the work of the monitoring team.

Since 2019, the city has paid the monitors $20 million, records published by the team show.

In addition, neither the city’s annual budgets nor audits identify the cost to taxpayers of the city’s decision to hire two private law firms to represent the city in the ongoing effort to ensure the city complies with the consent decree. That has cost taxpayers $9.8 million, according to records obtained by WTTW News through a Freedom of Information Act request.

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