“They’ve so far refused to hand over or simply can’t find any analysis they did to support that hiring,” said Tracy Siska, director of the Chicago Justice Project, a watchdog group that sued the department for not complying with a Freedom of Information Act request for the analysis.Ĭourt records show the city first said the staffing analysis was part of a more extensive report on the police department conducted by an outside law firm. The police department has yet to release a copy of the staffing analysis. “We did an overall analysis of the department … and this is what I think we need to make Chicago safer,” Johnson told the newspaper a day before Emanuel’s speech at Malcolm X. Eddie Johnson said Emanuel based his decision on a staffing analysis of the police department. When asked by the Chicago Sun-Times why the city needed so many new cops, then-Supt. (This analysis excludes rapes and arson.) The new hires would reverse the shrinking of the department that had taken place during Emanuel’s first term in office, when, in the face of a $500 million budget deficit, he allowed the number of sworn officers to dip below 12,000 for the first time since the mid-1980s.īut as the number of cops fell, so did crime: Between 20, the number of index crimes-which include murder, robbery, aggravated assault, arson, burglary, and motor vehicle theft-dropped by 30%, according to an Injustice Watch analysis of CPD data reported to the FBI. “We are infusing our police department with the manpower, technology and training to meet this challenge head-on.” Ending this string of tragedies is our top priority as a city,” Emanuel said at Malcolm X. “As big a problem as gun violence is for Chicago, it is not beyond our ability to solve. With news cameras rolling, Emanuel outlined his plan to stop the bloodshed: The city would expand its mentorship programs, continue to fund summer youth jobs, and hire an extra 516 officers, 92 field-training officers, 200 detectives, 112 sergeants, and 50 lieutenants in two years. 22, 2016, Chicago had already surpassed 500 murders for the year and was averaging 12 shootings a day-levels of gun violence the city hadn’t seen since the mid-1990s. When Emanuel took the podium at Malcolm X College on Sept. “We hired all these new cops and for what? It feels like we’re back to square one,” Butler said.įor activists and city leaders calling on Mayor Lori Lightfoot to cut the police budget, it’s clear that the money could be better spent elsewhere. Salaries and overtime pay for those officers take up almost all of the $1.65 billion earmarked for the police department in the city’s 2020 operating budget, the largest police budget on record. Today, Chicago has more sworn officers per capita than New York, Los Angeles and Houston. Emanuel’s administration defended the costly hiring spree by citing an alleged “top to bottom” analysis of the police department showing that the city needed hundreds of new cops.īut four years later, attorneys for the city say that staffing analysis is nowhere to be found. The estimated cost in salaries, benefits and supervision for the new hires was more than $130 million in the first year, or well over $1 billion in their first decade on the force. With more than 400 murders so far this year, Chicago is on track to surpass its 2016 homicide rate.Īt the time, Mayor Rahm Emanuel responded by hiring over 1,000 new cops over two years. “And guess what? Fourth of July was just as deadly.” “I’m looking around this room and these are the same leaders as last time, talking about the same ideas, and the city proposing the exact same strategy: More police on the street,” she said. It didn’t take long for Butler to realize that this year’s meeting started to sound like a rerun. As head of the Resident Association of Greater Englewood, Butler, 44, was invited to the fieldhouse by city officials to figure out, alongside prominent local clergy and other community leaders, how to stem the carnage they all feared for the upcoming holiday weekend.īutler attended a similar meeting in 2016, the city’s worst year for gun violence in nearly two decades.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |