Politics
The CPD Study on How Officers Are Deployed Required by the Consent Decree is Nearly Complete, Officials Say
A long-awaited study of whether Chicago police officers are efficiently and effectively deployed across the city to stop crime and respond to calls for help is nearly complete, officials said.
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, the study — conducted by Matrix Consulting Group — is on track to be completed on time, by the end of the year, Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling said during an online seminar held to update the public about the status of the study.
Snelling said the study is “one of the most comprehensive assessments of CPD’s manpower” and acknowledged it is long overdue. It is likely to be released publicly not long before the seventh anniversary of the implementation of the consent decree.
“It’s something that that’s been on the back burner for quite some time, and we were able to get it off the ground,” Snelling said.
The cost of the study, estimated to be between $800,000 and $1 million, was covered by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago. The nonprofit Civic Consulting Alliance, which is funded by some of the city’s biggest corporations, helped develop the scope of the study.
“This is really going to help us as a department to figure out a better way of how we distribute those manpowers when we’re dealing with calls for service,” Snelling said.
The study will also help the department become “a little more transparent, or a lot more transparent,” Snelling said.
The study will help police brass determine “if we’re getting the best bang for our buck with our officers out there showing up, overtime, things of that nature, this is going to help us get to the bottom of that.”
Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposed spending plan for 2026 would double CPD’s overtime budget to $200 million.
In 2024, CPD spent a total of $273.8 million on overtime, 6.5% less than in 2023, according to a WTTW News analysis.
The study will assess how officers are deployed, where they are assigned to work and whether that makes sense.
Johnson has vowed to transform CPD into an agency better prepared to take a more holistic approach to public safety that focuses on what he calls the “root causes of crime:” mental illness, poverty and disinvestment.
Johnson has also promised to open more of the department’s 13,700 positions to civilians who would not have law enforcement powers. CPD currently has approximately 11,500 officers, according to a database published by the Office of the Inspector General.
Non-sworn members of the police department do not have to attend the police academy and are usually paid less than officers, resulting in eventual budget savings.
“This study lays the groundwork for how we modernize CPD, ensuring that we have the right people and the right places, doing the right work, and supported by data that integrates workload variables, like calls for service, geographic coverage, as well as available personnel,” said Chelsea Diaz, the deputy director of CPD’s Office of Constitutional Reform.
But the authors of the study will not make recommendations to reduce CPD’s budget, Diaz said.
“Their task is to analyze how CPD can best use to resources that we currently have to meet operational needs and community priorities,” Diaz said. “And while some recommendations may have budgetary impacts, such as the creation of new civilian positions, that allow more officers to return to patrol, those outcomes are about improving effectiveness. The study is about smarter allocation, not smaller or larger allocation, and ensuring our staffing model supports both operational excellence, as well as public trust.”
CPD had fully complied with 22% of the court order that requires CPD to stop routinely violating Black and Latino residents’ constitutional rights by June, according to the court-appointed monitoring team charged with keeping track of reform efforts.
The consent decree requires officers to patrol the same geographic area of the city and report to the same supervisor on a consistent basis, instead of moving throughout the city to chase crime.
Officials hope the nearly complete workforce allocation study will give city officials the tools to meet those requirements. But it is unclear whether the city’s leaders are willing to make the tough decisions those changes will require.
Former Supt. David Brown commissioned the University of Chicago Crime Lab to complete a workforce allocation study in 2019, but shelved the analysis in 2022, telling the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability it was “lacking.”
Brown promised to order a new study, one that met what he said was the “gold standard” the issue required. There is no evidence Brown started that work before he resigned four months later, after former Mayor Lori Lightfoot lost her bid for reelection and before Johnson could fire him as promised.
A redacted portion of that study obtained by the Chicago Tribune found evidence that fewer officers were on the street during Friday and Saturday nights, even though that was when there were more shootings than any other time.
A complete version of that study has never been released, but the crime lab released a summary of its work in February 2022 that found that the allocation of police resources in Chicago, like other American cities, “is based on the desires and intuition of key decision-makers and often winds up being highly political and unequal.”
“In some areas of the city, residents receive rapid responses to both emergency and non-emergency 911 calls; in other areas, there are no officers available to respond for hours to 911 calls, sometimes even for violent incidents like robberies or shootings,” according to the summary that recommended city officials take “a data-driven approach to re-deploy officers to the busiest parts of the city.”
The results of a 2016 workforce allocation study, ordered by disgraced former Supt. Eddie Johnson and conducted by consultant Alexander Weiss, were never released.
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.
WTTW News coverage of policing and police reform is supported by The Joyce Foundation.
Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]
