Chicago Police Department Headquarters, 3510 S. Michigan Ave. (Michael Izquierdo / WTTW News)
Mayor Brandon Johnson announced Monday he would reverse deep cuts to the number of employees charged with implementing the federal court order requiring the Chicago Police Department to stop routinely violating residents’ constitutional rights, bowing to intense pressure from advocates for police reform.
In all, Johnson said he will ask the Chicago City Council to restore 162 now-vacant positions to the Chicago Police Department charged with implementing the court order known as the consent decree. Johnson reversed course after Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul and the team monitoring the city’s compliance with the binding agreement warned the cuts would make it impossible for the city to comply with the requirements of the court order.
Representatives for Johnson and Budget Director Annette Guzman did not immediately respond to questions from WTTW News about the cost of funding the positions the mayor’s initial spending plan had proposed cutting, but it will certainly complicate efforts to ink a budget deal by the Dec. 31 deadline set by state law.
City records show the average cost of a Chicago Police Department officer is $150,000 annually, including benefits. That means restoring 162 positions to the city’s 2025 spending plan could swell the city’s budget gap by more than $24 million, according to a WTTW News analysis.
CPD has fully met just 9% of the court order’s requirements in the more than five years since it took effect, according to the most recent report by the monitoring team.
Johnson’s decision to reverse course comes less than a week after WTTW News and ProPublica reported that the effort to implement the reforms required by the consent decree is at a tipping point, with advocates for police reform losing faith in the process. They are increasingly concerned the opportunity for lasting reform is slipping away.
Read More: In Five Years, Chicago Has Barely Made Progress on Its Court-Ordered Police Reforms. Here’s Why.
Hours before Johnson’s announcement, the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability joined the chorus of groups condemning the proposed cuts in its annual evaluation of the CPD budget.
“Slowing reform efforts means more suffering and higher costs,” according to the report by the commission, known as the CCPSA. “Just as the city has not proposed cutting staff that generate revenue, the city should not cut staff whose work is essential to improve police practices, reduce harm, and reduce the costs associated with bad or unconstitutional policing.”
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 had proposed spending an additional $194.6 million on the reform effort in 2025, which eliminated 79 positions, a 13% cut as compared with the reform budget in 2024, 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.
The cuts included in Johnson’s first budget proposal would have chopped funding for the Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform in half, to $3.7 million, and eliminated more than 57 positions, records show.
Raoul warned Nov. 12 that he would seek sanctions against the city if Johnson did not reverse the planned cuts.
In a statement released by the mayor’s office, Raoul praised Johnson’s decision to reverse course.
“I appreciate that the concerns that I expressed regarding the proposed cuts to CPD’s budget were heard and addressed, and I am encouraged by the positive conversations I had with the corporation counsel,” Raoul said. “After stops and starts over the last five years, CPD now has an opportunity to build real, sustained momentum toward effective, constitutional policing with adequate staffing.”
However, it remains unclear whether city officials will fill the positions Johnson now intends to add back to the city’s budget.
City officials have failed every year since the consent decree was finalized in early 2019 to spend all of the money it has budgeted for the reform effort, 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.
If Johnson’s cuts had been enacted by the City Council and made permanent, it would have dealt a “devastating blow” to the reform effort, attorney Maggie Hickey said during a Nov. 13 court hearing on consent decree compliance. Hickey is in charge of the monitoring team.
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.
Poor record keeping by city officials has made it impossible to accurately gauge how much taxpayer funds ar being spent each year to comply with the consent decree and hold officials accountable for the reform efforts failures, said former Inspector General Joseph Ferguson, who helped craft the consent decree and now heads the Civic Federation, a nonpartisan budget watchdog group..
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]
