Increasing manpower levels will cut CPD costs and reduce crime
The news last week Chicago spent $129 million on overtime pay for members of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) in the first half of 2024 could not have come at a worse time. An amount that exceeded what the City Council had earmarked for extra shifts by 30 percent, the revelation arrives at the same time the City of Chicago is attempting to solve two massive budget crises.
With Chicago on pace to spend approximately $258 million on police overtime by the end of the year, wisps of rumors circulating throughout the city have City Hall contemplating cuts to the CPD budget in amounts that send a message Mayor Brandon Johnson is finally attempting to defund CPD.
Long a goal of the former Chicago Teacher Union lobbyist, Mayor Brandon Johnson and his allies in the City Council may believe that "defunding the police" will save money to meet other city needs, but the data tells a far different story. Overtime is up, violent crime is up, and arrests are down. Not only are the cost savings non-existent, but the link between officer shortages and violent crime is undeniable, despite the mayor and his supporters' attempts to spin it. The effects are scaring and scarring Chicagoans.
Chicago can only cut so many police officer vacancies and positions before the dramatic increase in overtime costs offsets any savings. Having spent $129 million on overtime through June 2024, and likely to spend another $129 million before the end of the year, though Chicago would shell out less on overtime than it did in 2023, — $298 million — Chicago is still facing the possibility of spending three times the $100 million it did in 2019 when CPD was at full strength. That additional amount could have paid for more than 1,400 additional officers. A CBS News Data Team report revealed that the record $298 million Chicago spent on police last year amounted to a shocking 4.1 million hours of overtime, compared to an average of 1.4 million hours in past years. The $298 million spent on CPD overtime in 2023 was 40 percent higher than in 2022.
For those defund the police proponents that believe cutting police vacancies saves money, it certainly does not. What it clearly does do is lead to higher violent crime.
The decline in CPD personnel is also directly to blame for the dramatic increase in the number of high-priority 911 calls for which the CPD had no squad car available — up to 52 percent in 2023 from 19 percent in 2019. This shortage in officers and the historically low arrest rates are certainly contributing to a significant underreporting of violent crimes. Oftentimes, there is no witness or victim when the police finally able to respond to a 911 call, and many victims have abandon calling 911 or are fearful of reporting certain crimes altogether, as they fear that police cannot protect them.
Conditions on the streets will continue to worsen with Mayor Johnson’s ill-advised decision to end ShotSpotter. This innovative technology allowed Chicago's undermanned police department to cut response times significantly to reports of shots fired, accelerated police response to deter further violence, and allowed officers to administer life-saving medical assistance to victims at crime scenes. A technology that came at a cost of less than $10 million annually, ShotSpotter was often criticized by Mayor Johnson and his progressive supporters in the City Council as ineffective. The approximate $10 million cost, however, is equivalent to fewer than the cost to cover 60 police officers and was also known to save an estimated 85 lives.
Technology to assist police aside, the link between the number of police officers and violent crime, particularly murders, is irrefutable. If we turn our minds back, Chicago recorded its most violent year in 1992. At the time, Chicago maintained fewer than 12,000 officers, yet the city suffered 940 murders, or 33.1 murder for every 100,000 residents. As CPD manpower levels were strengthened to a historic high of 13,500 officers and roughly maintained at that level, the number of murders fell almost every year, reaching a modern-day low in 2014 of 411 or 15.22 murdered for every 100,000 residents.
The same link between police strength and murders was evident during Rahm Emanuel's two terms as mayor. With murders at a modern-day low, Emanuel moved to balance his budgets by allowing police vacancies to remain unfilled. This neglect eventually led to the elimination of over 2,000 police positions. As a result of a decline in police personnel, the number of murders surged to 784 or 28 murdered for every 100,000 residents by 2016. Later, in his second term, Emanuel restored police positions and rapidly filled vacancies, raising police strength to almost 13,500 by the time he left office. Murders fell to 506 or 18.6 for every100,000 residents in 2019, the year Lightfoot took office.
While delays in 911 response times, dismal arrest rates, and the pre-trial release program that returns a staggering three-fourths of those charged with felonies to the streets impact all communities, low-income communities are harmed most. In 2023, nearly 80 percent of murder victim were black. Black Chicagoans are 20 times more likely and Hispanics nearly 5 times more likely to be a homicide victim than their white counterparts. Black women comprise 30 percent of all violent crimes, and if you are a black woman under 19, you are 14 times more likely to be the victim of violent crime than if you are white.
At the same moment crime rates are trending upward, critics of CPD complain of police ineffectiveness and the need to shift money from the police budget elsewhere. While defund supporters publicly claim a purity in their intent, there is a desire among defund advocates to reap the financial benefits of shifting money from the police budget to a raft of costly social programs. Their aims have no merit. The fact is that even with the unprecedented overtime costs, total current spending on CPD is less than 12 percent of the total city budget. By contrast, almost five times as much money is actually spent, not just budgeted, on Chicago Public Schools than is spent on the Chicago Police.
The mayor and his allies who push to defund CPD now find themselves in the middle of an intractable dilemma. Both the mayor and his supporters have created a situation where their efforts to reduce police officer strength to save money effectively leads to more crime which forces the city to spend more on spend overtime in the face of police shortages. As a result of their defund efforts, potential savings are negated, Chicago has been forced to finance the excess overtime by slowing the filling of officer vacancies, and the sluggish pace of which vacancies are filled has exacerbated the problems caused by the police shortages in the first place.
To reduce the amount of overtime pay for CPD, there are some alternatives to for Chicago to consider. First, instead of eliminating police positions, the city should use the increase in annual overtime spending to restore police strength to 2019 levels of 13,400 officers. That reduction in overtime spending will cover most of the cost of those additional officers. Furthermore, this would enable CPD to ensure each police beat has sufficient officers available to respond to 911 calls in real-time and would fully restore the detectives' ranks.
Secondly, Chicago can also improve public safety on its mass transit system by taking what the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) spends on private, untrained, and unarmed transit security and using it to hire 400 additional officers specifically selected, trained, and dedicated to an upgraded dedicated professional CPD Public Transportation Unit. This would effectively extend community policing to public transportation by having adequate police officers to monitor public transit stations and to patrol CTA platforms. Public transportation safety is most critical to restoring CTA ridership levels.
It is not difficult to understand precisely why crime plummeted after a several unsettling years in the 1990s. Following an appalling year in 1992 that produced over 900 murders, lawmakers finally acknowledged the need to keep dangerous and habitual felons from returning to the streets. Prosecutors and police recognized that crime rates are a function of expectations about the rule of law and require acting against quality-of-life crimes. Police enforcing low-level, quality-of-life ordinances sent a powerful signal to criminals that more serious laws will be strictly enforced. Crucial, however, is having enough officers to provide a constant presence, respond to 911 calls in real-time, investigate crimes, protect witnesses, and make arrests.
A 2019 Gallup poll showed 68 percent of adults living in Chicago's low-income neighborhoods want an increased police presence. A recent statewide poll by the Illinois Policy Institute, Echelon Insights Lincoln Poll concluded that 73 percent wanted a larger police presence. Yet Johnson and his supporters cannot help themselves; their "defund the police" dogma is harming residents while and failing to create funding for social programs they seek to subsidize. Restoring police strength must be a priority. Anything else is failure.
