CHICAGO — During the mayoral race, the evolution of Brandon Johnson’s messaging on the Chicago police budget captured interest and caused concern.
At a progressive candidates forum in September 2022, Johnson declared “absolutely yes” when asked if he’d commit to not raising the department’s budget. But by March, shortly before defeating his more conservative opponent, Paul Vallas, he vowed that if elected he “wouldn’t reduce the CPD budget one penny.”
He followed through on that promise. Johnson’s recently passed first budget allocates a record $2 billion to the Chicago Police Department, a slight uptick from this year’s total that the mayor attributed to scheduled pay raises.
Perhaps more revealing of Johnson’s policing philosophy than that top-line number, however, is his reshuffling of jobs within what has historically been the city’s most expensive department.
His budget eliminates more than 800 vacant street cop positions and creates almost 400 new civilian positions, which his administration said will free up more officers to patrol the streets. The budget also beefs up training and supervisory roles that could help bring the department in line with the federal consent decree.
“I’ve said this repeatedly: The system that we inherited will not likely be the system that we pass on. It’s just different, you all,” Johnson told reporters after unveiling his budget proposal last month.
The final police budget earned accolades from a broad coalition of aldermen and fiscal watchdog groups who applauded changes including the addition of more civilian jobs.
But a contingent of dozens of grassroots organizations that supported Johnson’s candidacy argued his budget falls short of his campaign promise to transform public safety.
Others said Johnson’s approach to policing can’t be judged by his first budget, especially given the constraints of an enormous $538 million fiscal shortfall that had to be filled.
“The biggest change is the civilianization, right?” Susan Lee, deputy mayor for public safety under Johnson’s predecessor, Lori Lightfoot, said. “I think he’s signaling that he cares about reforming the department, but there’s not enough there right now to make some definitive statement.”
Of the 398 new civilian positions, 100 will be non-sworn training officer roles within the Office of Constitution Policing and Reform, and another 22 will be domestic violence advocate jobs in the community policing office.
Other civilian jobs include 31 investigators in the Bureau of Internal Affairs to assist sergeants with gathering evidence; 22 crime victim advocates; and 21 members of a review unit made up of “retired law enforcement hired to review use of force incidents and compensated at an hourly rate of $37/hour,” according to the budget office.
As of October, Chicago police had about 570 civilian members and 250 civilian vacancies, the budget office told aldermen. The number of sworn positions hovered around 11,700, and Johnson’s budget provides for filling fewer than half of the current 1,440 vacancies.
Adding civilian positions — a strategy almost every modern Chicago mayor has toyed with — is aimed at increasing the number of cops on the street by freeing officers assigned to desk duty. It can also rein in costs because non-sworn employees typically are paid less, while more successfully matching jobs to skill sets.
Johnson touted some of those potential benefits in pitching his budget.
“People continue to ask for more police officers on the front lines,” Johnson said in October. “This budget actually speaks to that, because we free up officers from confined positions that are more administrative or have other elements that take police officers away from actually being on the front lines.”
Both the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, created in 2021 to increase police oversight and accountability, and the Civic Federation, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog, endorsed the shift.
“The City has a very high ratio of sworn officers compared to non-sworn employees, so this move will bring the Department more in line with other cities and result in other operational and financial benefits to the City,” the Civic Federation said in its analysis of Johnson’s 2024 budget.
The challenge will be filling those roles expeditiously. In a 2013 report, Joe Ferguson, the city’s former inspector general, recommended the police and fire departments cut spending by increasing civilian jobs. But he said his call was never fully taken up.
“There were some positions civilianized, but it was truly at the margin. There was no large-scale undertaking,” Ferguson said. “There’s lip service to it being an opportunity. There’s never really the follow-through.”
Anthony Driver, president of the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, said one of his agency’s priorities next year will be ensuring initiatives like the move to more civilian roles are carried out through quarterly check-ins and concrete hiring goals.
“I think it definitely reflects the mayor’s values, 100%,” Driver said of Johnson’s first CPD budget. “I think he’s also said that this is a step in that direction, and it won’t happen overnight.”
Some of the success of civilianization will be out of the Police Department’s control. The city’s Human Resources Department handles the hiring process and the time from an initial application submission to onboarding a new employee can be several months.
“The larger issue, I think, with civilianization efforts in the past, and even today, is really just the HR processes at the city,” said Lee, the former deputy mayor. “The slowness with which the city moves will often mean that the top candidates will take other jobs before even an offer can be made.”
She summed up: “You get into this really kind of a muck, right, of just constantly trying to fill vacancies, but also trying to recruit new talent.”
Johnson, a progressive who surged ahead in this year’s mayoral race with the backing of left-leaning unions and grassroots organizations, was attacked during the mayoral campaign for his past support of the “defund the police” movement. He ultimately walked back that stance while continuing to champion a nontraditional public safety vision to invest holistically in communities instead of leaning on punitive solutions.
Johnson had avoided saying how he planned to deal with police officer vacancies, but his budget answered that question — 833 unfilled street officer positions will be eliminated.
Chicago police Superintendent Larry Snelling, Johnson’s pick to lead the department, told the Tribune last month he was not concerned about those unfilled jobs being cut because he expects the impact to be offset by new supervisory roles and the addition of civilian positions.
“We’re working diligently in recruitment, and we’re going to improve upon those recruitment efforts to try to fill a lot of these positions that are vacant right now,” Snelling said.
New sworn supervisory roles include the addition of 170 field training officers, 100 sergeants, 100 detectives, 20 lieutenants and 10 captains.
Both Johnson and Snelling have said those additions will help the department comply with the federal consent decree requirements to boost officer training and the supervisor-to-officer ratio.
However, some of Johnson’s earliest backers say he needs to do more. Dozens of grassroots organizations signed a letter released Wednesday opposing the increase in the police budget, saying that “any increase to CPD’s overwhelmingly large budget continues to send a message that the police department is more important than the many other life-affirming solutions … that support the overall safety and wellness of Chicago communities.”
The letter also questioned whether adding civilian roles would truly represent change given that many of the roles will still work hand-in-glove with sworn officers. It also criticized the budget’s failure to address whether Johnson will uphold his campaign pledge to halt the city’s use of ShotSpotter, a controversial gunfire detection software. The 2024 budget sets aside funds for ShotSpotter until the end of the company’s contract in February.
Asha Ransby-Sporn, who signed the letter and is a longtime proponent of overhauling the city’s police budget, said she understands Johnson must deal with the political reality of police spending, but “at the end of the day, I do think it’s a matter of political will.”
“I do think (the budget’s) in contradiction with some of the values that the mayor and also many of our City Council members have espoused, said Ransby-Sporn, adding at the very least she hopes the police budget won’t increase again next year.
Several budget analysts and watchdogs said it’s difficult to evaluate the latest police budget without the city making good on a long-sought demand to conduct a study on police force deployment. Understanding how resources are distributed could help eliminate wasteful spending, ensure equitable 911 response times and improve community trust, they said.
“I think it all comes back to the need for a workforce allocation study,” Annie McGowan, deputy research director at the Civic Federation, said. “I think it would have been nice if the city would have taken this up previously, but better now than never.”
