With a voluminous, years-in-the-making study of the Chicago Police Department’s officer deployment methods finished, CPD must now decide which changes to enact first in its effort to more effectively respond to emergencies across the city.
The 770-page study — mandated by the federal consent decree and performed by Matrix Consulting Group — was released Wednesday. It calls for hundreds of cops to be reassigned from desk jobs to street work and urges CPD to fill those new vacancies with civilians. To avoid fewer cops on the street, the department would need to hire hundreds more officers, the study found.
“We’re going to be prioritizing looking at the most important things, the things that we can do the quickest, but the things that are going to be the most efficient for the department,” CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling said in an interview this week.
“Obviously, there are things we have to take into consideration: collective bargaining, the number of people that we have, how we’re going to move, manpower needs, things of that nature,” Snelling said. “Those are things we’re assessing right now. But we want our department to be as efficient as we can possibly make it, so that’s how we’re going to prioritize.”
The new document calls for no officers to be lost in any police district, but proposes increasing manpower in the city’s high-growth areas, such as the West Loop.
The Near West District is currently part of CPD’s Area 3, a collection of patrol districts that cover the city’s North Side neighborhoods between Lake Michigan and the North Branch of the Chicago River. The study calls for the Near West District to add 70 more officers and be included in CPD’s “Central Control Group,” joining the two other districts that cover the rest of the downtown area.
“That’s something that I was thinking about even before the workforce allocation study happened,” Snelling said Tuesday. “To have three heavy business districts together and have a focus on business corridors, it helps us get to a place where we can focus on issues in those locations because they would be similar.”
The study and its recommendations touch on each aspect of CPD. It noted, too, that “a significant number of sworn officers are in roles that do not require sworn skillsets, and where there are existing fields of civilian professionals serving in these roles in other agencies.”
At 8%, CPD has the lowest percentage of civilians among the 30 largest police departments in America, the study says, noting New York has a percentage of 31 and Los Angeles 24%.
One hallmark of the study is a call to reach a 40% “proactive time” threshold for officers assigned to the bureau of patrol.
“Proactive time” refers to the time on an officer’s shift when they are not responding to calls for service. Most of CPD’s 22 patrol districts achieve 40%, but not all.
To reach 40% proactive time across all patrol districts, “without reducing patrol staffing in any district, 273 additional officers are required,” the study reads. “Patrol staffing must be allocated by district proportionally to workload to address severe inequalities in patrol service levels.”
Further, “604 positions should be civilianized across 174 different assignments. This would allow the officers currently in those roles to be placed in roles that require sworn expertise, such as field patrol.”
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Allyson Clark Henson, executive director of CPD’s Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform, said the work product from Matrix will provide real-time data and analysis for years to come.
“Each decision, as we’re digging into every single one of these recommendations, they’re interdependent,” Clark Henson said. “We’re going to have to really carefully go through all of these (recommendations) and identify, as we’re prioritizing, what interdependencies exist and how those decisions will impact other areas in terms of staffing and resources.”
The study found proactive time is lowest in the Near West (12th) and Chicago Lawn (8th) districts, which cover the West Loop and West Town neighborhoods, as well as most of the city’s Southwest Side.
The study also called for the Chicago Lawn District to receive 65 more patrol officers. Area leaders have for years urged the city and CPD to redraw the district’s boundaries as a way to better serve residents, but Snelling said this week that was not an option being considered.
“In some respects I feel the drum I’ve been beating now for three years is spot-on,” 13th Ward Ald. Marty Quinn told the Tribune this week. “An additional 65 officers, that would put us somewhere in the neighborhood of 315 officers. That is still inadequate.”
Quinn was skeptical, too, of the department’s ability to reach the 40% proactive time goal across the 22 patrol districts.
“There’s just no way, with the volume of calls, they’ll ever be able to achieve that,” Quinn added. “Unfortunately, I think this report, though headed in the right direction, is going to come up short in terms of addressing the real needs of the 8th District.”
John Catanzara, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, the union representing rank-and-file CPD officers and detectives, said the study’s takeaways didn’t come as a surprise, but he chided city and CPD leadership for not consulting more with the union.
“The department has now had this for a while now and we were supposed to, from what I understand, have conversations about the feasibility of some of these proposed changes and what that means. We have had no consultation at all with the department on any of this,” Catanzara told the Tribune Wednesday.
“Anybody that logically looks at this understands (that) for big police departments, we are significantly behind the numbers when it comes to civilian manpower within the department. But as far as the sensitivity of positions, what could be civilianized, what shouldn’t be civilianized, those are discussions that have never taken place.”
Tuesday, Snelling and other CPD leaders oversaw a department graduation and promotion ceremony at Navy Pier. The superintendent told the Tribune he expects about 500 officers to graduate from the police academy in 2026.
The study is the first of its kind since 2021. That previous analysis, conducted by the University of Chicago Crime Lab, found deployment levels decline during the weekend overnight time periods when shootings are most common.
However, a year later, then-police Superintendent David Brown called the study lacking. He announced plans to seek his own officer deployment evaluation — plans that never came together before he left his post in March 2023.
City employment data shows that of CPD’s 12,200 employees, about 11,500 are sworn police officers.
In January, during a status hearing in the city’s federal consent decree, CPD officials said increased civilian hiring efforts were already underway. By the end of 2026, they said, the Police Department hopes to hire 25 civilian investigators to be assigned to the bureau of internal affairs, for example.