Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Tuesday emphatically denied he was treading water with his ambitious plan to hire 970 additional police officers over the next two years over and above attrition.
Emanuel did the political dance known as the sidestep as he welcomed 100 more recruits to a police academy he promised would soon be “busting at the seams” while churning out a conveyor belt of classes.
It happened when the mayor was asked about the declining police manpower under his watch and about whether he has any regrets about his heavy use of overtime to mask the manpower shortage.
“The question is not right. So, I’ll let Eddie [Johnson] speak to that,” the mayor said, deferring to his police superintendent.
Johnson then stepped up and took the political heat for his boss.
“Overtime and things of that nature — those are strategies that we put in place. But as with any strategy, it can run its course and sometimes, you have to re-adjust what you’re doing. Right now, that’s what we’re doing,” Johnson said.
“When I became superintendent, the mayor asked me to take a top-to-bottom look at what we had in the Police Department and how we could make it more efficient and make it better. I don’t care how many police officers you have. You have to still make sure that you’re doing things as efficiently as you can be.”
Anne Kirkpatrick, chief of the Bureau of Organizational Development, was asked about the Police Department treading water under Emanuel with the hiring surge merely reclaiming ground lost over the last five years.
“I’m here to speak to you about what I can do and what my mission is,” she said.
“We have already factored in—not only all of our vacancies, but then what you’re seeing is 500 above where we were” by the end of 2017.
The Chicago Sun-Times reported in April that the Chicago Police Department spent a record $116.1 million on overtime in 2015 – up 17.2 percent from the previous year – to mask a manpower shortage that has mushroomed under Emanuel with police retirements outpacing hiring by 975 officers.
On Sunday, the newspaper reported that, even if Emanuel manages to deliver on his promise to hire 970 additional police officers over the next two years, the reinforcements would barely make up for the decline in police ranks on his watch.
Police dispatch times vary widely across the city, records show, with the department needing far more time on average to dispatch officers to high-priority crimes in more-violent districts than elsewhere.
Citywide, dispatch times to so-called Priority 1 and Priority 2 calls — the incidents that require the most urgent response from officers — have averaged about 4 minutes and 30 seconds over the past three years, according to a Sun-Times analysis of data from by the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications.
But how quickly officers are dispatched still depends greatly on where you live, the analysis shows. All of the districts with the quickest dispatch times are on the North Side, while most of the longest waits are on the South Side, in higher-crime areas.
So far this year, it has taken an average of 6 minutes and 20 seconds to dispatch officers to major crime scenes in the 8th police district, on the South Side. In contrast, the wait in the 20th District, on the North Side, was less than three minutes, on average, during the same period.
While addressing the new class of recruits on Tuesday, Emanuel told the rookies they would benefit from a “total revamp in the way we do training.” That includes a new use-of-force policy that emphasizes a sliding scale of de-escalation tactics.
“I look across this room … I see the diversity that makes up this great city. People of different races, different religions, different cultures, different backgrounds, different languages, different genders. That’s Chicago. We’re gonna be as strong as you are representing all…of Chicago,” the mayor said.
“We don’t want you just policing the community. We want you to be a part of that community you’re serving. And your backgrounds and all the diversity. … That is a strength. Our diversity as a city is a strength and having a diverse workforce in the Police Department is a strength.”
The mayor is under heavy pressure to deliver on his $60 million, first-year promise to fill 471 vacancies; keep pace with rising retirements; and still hire enough police officers in 2017 to add 250 patrol officers, 37 sergeants, 50 lieutenants, 92 field-training officers and 100 detectives next year to raise an abysmal clearance rate for homicides and shootings.
To avoid falling short will require military precision.
“I think we’ve got about 399 folks now in training. Come late January, early February, we’re gonna add even more. So this place will be busting at the seams, which is a good thing,” the mayor said.
Johnson was not quite so enamored with the diversity he saw among the new class of police recruits.
“We have to do a better job making the department more diverse. When I go out into communities, I’m always hearing, `Superintendent, we want the police that patrol our communities to look like us.’ And I get that,” he said.
“But, we can’t get that unless we have the diversity coming into the ranks. I’m just looking out right now. It’s pretty good. We can do better.”