This campaign season, some Chicago politicians are returning to an old refrain: Hire 1,000 police officers.
According to a recent Tribune report, four Chicago mayoral candidates are calling to add at least that many officers if elected.
While “hire 1,000 cops” may be an easy line for candidates to resurrect, Chicago voters deserve facts, not slogans. And the truth is that hiring 1,000 officers is neither a realistic or a necessary solution to the public safety challenges facing Chicago today.
We must acknowledge a basic reality: For at least five years, the Chicago Police Department has had hundreds of vacancies it cannot fill, as fewer people are choosing policing as a career. At the same time, we should not lower our hiring standards simply to fill those vacancies. We cannot build our public safety strategy around the assumption that we will suddenly be able to recruit a thousand additional qualified officers.
In our experience as elected police district councilors, when our neighbors ask for more police, they actually want more officers patrolling their communities. Of CPD’s more than 11,500 sworn members, only about 3,950 — just under 35% — are assigned to regular patrol units. But residents want to see officers out on the beat. They want to know that an officer will be available to respond when they call 911. And they want to see officers out of their squad cars and building relationships in the community.
Those are reasonable expectations from a police department. But we don’t need to hire a thousand new officers to meet them.
Instead, we need to allocate our resources more appropriately. We know this because a comprehensive, data-driven workforce allocation study recently completed for CPD lays out how to do that: by moving hundreds of officers already employed by CPD out of desk jobs and into active police work.
The workforce analysis conducted for CPD by Matrix Consulting Group identified Chicago as an outlier among the nation’s largest cities in how few civilians work within its police department. Only about 8% of CPD’s workforce is civilian, compared with roughly 24% in Los Angeles and more than 31% in New York.
These findings point to a different way forward. Rather than hiring additional officers, we need to make better use of the officers we already have, in the role Chicagoans want and need most: patrolling neighborhoods.
The study identified hundreds of specific roles currently assigned to sworn CPD officers that should instead be filled by civilians.
For instance, around 40 CPD officers work exclusively as timekeepers, or keeping track of the hours other officers worked. This purely clerical task, and others such as administrative support and watch secretary, requires no police powers and should be civilianized. Additionally, technical roles such as crime analyst are better suited for civilian specialists rather than officers without specialized training.
All told, the study recommends more than 600 sworn officer positions across 170 job titles that should be considered for civilianization. Moving qualified civilians into these roles would allow sworn officers to focus on the core policing responsibilities that communities want from their officers, including being present and responsive on neighborhood beats.
Does the workforce allocation study recommend adding new police officers even if all possible positions are civilianized? Yes, but only about 53 total — a small fraction of the 1,000 several mayoral candidates have called for.
Implementing these reforms won’t happen overnight. Civilianizing hundreds of positions means new job classifications, union negotiations, and hiring and training civilian staff. It will also cost money, although likely far less than the cost of additional officers. But these growing pains are worth it to make our police department as efficient and effective as possible.
Another important way to ensure we deploy officers efficiently is to stop sending them to calls that do not require armed law enforcement. Other municipalities have taken many calls off police officers’ plates by analyzing which calls actually require a police response and allowing other qualified responders to handle calls they are better equipped to address. Here in Chicago, that means investing in ideas such as expanding the Crisis Assistance Response & Engagement Program, better known as CARE, which deploys mental health crisis response teams and other alternative first responders
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to send the right professional to each call.Many Chicagoans are rightly asking for more officers on their neighborhood beats. To do that, candidates should focus on how they will implement the workforce allocation study and expand alternative responses to properly use the officers we already have, rather than promising to hire a thousand more.
It may make for a less flashy campaign promise, but it is a more thoughtful, realistic and lasting way to deliver the public safety Chicagoans want and deserve.
Jenny Schaffer, Sam Schoenburg and Maurilio Garcia have served as police district council members for the 19th Police District since 2023.
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