Politics
250 Jobs Charged With Implementing Court-Ordered Police Reforms Are Empty, Chicago Officials Say
(WTTW News)
Approximately 250 positions charged with implementing a court order that requires the Chicago Police Department to stop routinely violating Black and Latino residents’ constitutional rights are vacant, even as Chicago officials are facing increasing pressure from a federal judge to “accelerate” the reform effort, records show.
A department spokesperson told WTTW News police officials are “actively” working to fill the vacant positions charged with implementing the court order known as the consent decree and reforming CPD, which has faced decades of scandals, misconduct and brutality.
Mayor Brandon Johnson acknowledged that the reform effort, which began in earnest when the consent decree took effect six years ago, remains a work in progress.
“Are we moving in the right direction? Yes,” Johnson said Feb. 25. “Are we moving faster? Yes. Do we still have a long way to go? Yes. All those things are true.”
The wide-ranging roadmap for reform stemmed from a 2017 federal investigation prompted by the police murder of Laquan McDonald that found officers routinely violated the constitutional rights of Black and Latino Chicagoans.
“It is sad and frustrating to mark another anniversary under the consent decree without real progress toward transforming CPD,” said Alexandra Block of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, which sued the city to force it to agree to federal court oversight. “While the city may have made modest progress on paper, the reality is that Black, Brown and disabled Chicagoans haven’t experienced meaningful changes on the street.”
In all, 37.6% of the 665 positions within CPD assigned to making sure officers follow the Constitution while on duty and implementing the required reforms are vacant more than two months after U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer publicly criticized the pace of reforms for the first time.
“The level of compliance is unsatisfying to the public,” Pallmeyer said Dec. 10, calling for an “aggressive” reform effort. “I am determined that we will be seeing good progress ... in 2025. Let’s accelerate the progress.”
The vacant positions include all 162 positions that Johnson cut from the city’s 2025 budget but was forced to restore under intense pressure from advocates for police reform as well as Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul and the team monitoring the city’s compliance with the binding agreement. All warned it would be impossible for the city to comply with the requirements of the court order if those positions were cut or remained empty.
In all, the city set aside $887.6 million to implement the consent decree between 2020 and 2025, according to Chicago’s annual budget overviews.
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.
“The entire consent decree process has become a series of missed opportunities and disappointments,” said Block, the director of the Criminal, Legal and Policing Reform Project at the ACLU of Illinois.
Read More: In Five Years, Chicago Has Barely Made Progress on Its Court-Ordered Police Reforms. Here’s Why.
The monitoring team — which is made up of lawyers and public safety specialists — has the power to recommend to the judge that the city and CPD be punished for failing to meet the terms of the consent decree. While it has repeatedly highlighted the slow pace of reforms in its reports, the monitoring team has never demanded sanctions, despite pleas from a coalition of reform groups.
In all, taxpayers paid the monitoring team, led by attorney Maggie Hickey, $23.8 million since the consent decree took effect on March 1, 2019. It will be in effect until at least 2027.
A spokesperson for the judge and the monitoring team declined to comment on the record for this story, saying they’re prohibited from doing so under the consent decree.
CPD has fully complied with just 9% of the agreement’s requirements, according to the most recent report from the monitors, released in November.
Twice in the weeks leading up to the sixth anniversary of the consent decree taking effect, Johnson told reporters CPD was actually in full compliance with 16% of the court order, without offering any evidence to back up his assertion.
A spokesperson for Johnson declined to provide WTTW News with any evidence to support the mayor’s statement, which would represent the largest-ever increase in the number of consent decree requirements to reach full compliance.
The next report assessing the city’s compliance with the consent decree is not scheduled to be released until mid-May.
CPD is in preliminary compliance with approximately 45% of the consent decree, which means the department has finalized written policies addressing those items. CPD is in secondary compliance with approximately 37% of the court order, which means that a majority of officers have been trained on those new policies.
CPD is considered to be in full compliance with each requirement of the consent decree, which is broken down into 714 paragraphs that require officials to change the way CPD operates, when the department proves to the monitoring team that CPD is complying with the new policies.
Johnson said when he took office in May 2023, CPD had complied with just 3% of the consent decree. But that is incorrect, records show. By June 30, 2023, CPD had complied with 6% of the consent decree, according to reports from the monitoring team.
Compliance at all levels has “jumped drastically since I have been in office,” Johnson said.
Between June 2023 and June 2024, full compliance rose by 3 percentage points and secondary compliance increased by 2 percentage points while preliminary compliance went down 6 percentage points, records show.
Delays Caused by Staffing Shortages
The monitoring team has repeatedly warned that the number of vacant positions in the police department tasked with enforcing the consent decree has slowed CPD’s progress in complying with its requirements.
The court order requires supervisors to review all reported instances in which an officer uses force that causes an injury or results in a complaint of injury, including when they point a firearm or use a taser or OC spray while issuing an order, records show.
Those reviews are designed to “identify trends in those incidents across units or the department as a whole and to make recommendations for changes in CPD tactics, policy or training based on its reviews,” according to a joint report filed by lawyers for the city and the attorney general’s office.
But CPD officials have fallen significantly behind on completing those reviews because of “insufficient staffing levels,” according to that report.
The backlog “frustrates” the purpose of that requirement, according to the report.
“Any feedback it provides to officers may relate to incidents of which the officer has little memory, and any trends it detects will be outdated,” according to the report, which calls the review a “critical component of CPD’s reform efforts.”
To reduce that backlog, the judge will consider approving an agreement that would allow the city to stop reviewing a random sample of reports about incidents where officers used force to overcome the active resistance of a subject but did not cause an injury or prompt a complaint of injury during the first six months of 2025.
Supervisors will continue to review reports of incidents that included officers pointing a gun at a member of the public or pursuing them on foot, according to the proposed agreement.
During that moratorium, the superintendent agreed to hire additional employees to review those reports and reduce the “overall backlog” as a final agreement is drafted and CPD officials work to fill vacant positions.
Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone| (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]
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