A measure that would force the Daley administration to hire 100 traffic cops won preliminary approval Tuesday from aldermen concerned about renegade drivers who disregard speed limits and blow through stop signs.
The action comes after the hit-and-run death of a child near Lincoln Park Zoo last month, but long after aldermen first began to complain about a blatant disregard of traffic laws in their wards.
If the measure is approved by the full City Council, the new officers would cost the city about $7.5 million a year.
Police officials who spoke at a joint meeting Tuesday of the council’s Police and Fire and Budget Committees, where the hiring order was advanced, insisted that officers now on the job enforce traffic laws. But, under questioning, they also admitted that the department has just four radar-equipped squad cars on the street at any given time.
And they revealed that the department’s Traffic Division has only 32 officers, most of whom patrol the central business district.
“New York has 1,000 [traffic officers],” said Ald. Thomas Allen (38th), sponsor of the measure. “We have 32.”
Under Allen’s measure, two full-time traffic officers would be assigned to each of the 50 wards.
The proposal, which has received an unenthusiastic response from Mayor Richard Daley, got heavy support from speakers at Tuesday’s meeting.
Maya Hirsch, 4, was struck and killed by motorist who went through a stop sign “right outside my door in Lincoln Park,” said Cathy Bell, vice president of the Mid-North Association. Within days of the accident, other motorists “were rolling through there again, a dime a dozen,” she said. Chicago has become a city where a yellow light means to speed up, Bell said.
Julie Capozzi, corporate relations manager for Allstate Insurance Co., told aldermen that Chicago ranks 178th out of 200 cities in the frequency of car collisions. The average driver in Chicago is in an accident every 7.5 years, 33 percent higher than the national average, she said.
Money to pay for the new traffic officers would come from fines collected from red-light runners caught by cameras at busy Chicago intersections.
Slightly more than $14 million is expected from that source this year, but that money is earmarked to pay for general day-to-day operating expenses, said Paul Volpe, the city’s budget director.
If some of that money were diverted to fund the salaries of 100 new traffic officers, “we would have to replace the revenue somehow,” he said.
Daley said last month that he “cannot put a police officer at every stop sign.”
But aldermen who spoke at Tuesday’s meeting insisted that new measures must be taken. Traffic enforcement appears to be a low priority in a department that is focused on fighting crime, and motorists who ignore traffic laws have become epidemic, they said.
Allen also said there is “a direct correlation with crime reduction when you have traffic enforcement.”
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gwashburn@tribune.com
