We ask a lot of Chicago police.
To walk into situations where people with guns want to hurt us — and to stop them.
To find our cars after they’ve been stolen.
To protect our children.
To see their colleagues get shot and killed in the line of duty. To go to work the next day and carry on like normal.
We get angry when they fail or make a mistake.
We want them to be perfect because we want to be safe, and because law enforcement is a critical part of the justice system.
So what does it take to get the job right?
We expend a lot of energy thinking and talking about external mechanisms of accountability for the police. But one of the most important forms of accountability, it turns out, comes from within.
To comply with the federal consent decree, the city of Chicago is required to complete an analysis of whether officers are deployed efficiently and effectively in neighborhoods across Chicago. The result is a 770-page workforce allocation study released in March, offering a detailed look at how the Chicago Police Department is using its personnel.
In recent weeks, we’ve discussed the report and the broader policing landscape with experts from the University of Chicago Crime Lab, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago and CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling.
The takeaway is straightforward: Chicago’s police force may be large in terms of raw numbers, but too often it isn’t deployed as effectively as it could be. The city could improve public safety without dramatically increasing the size of the force, simply by using the one it has more strategically.
Start with supervision.
Many officers don’t consistently have the same supervisor. In some cases, they may not even report to the same sergeant from one shift to the next.
Why? Because the department’s scheduling and deployment system is so complex that, as the report puts it, it “renders unity of command … infeasible.” Even when officers do have the same supervisor, that supervisor may be responsible for far too many people.
Robert Boik, who for a time oversaw CPD’s efforts to comply with the consent decree and now serves as the Civic Committee’s senior vice president of public safety, told us the profession’s recommended officer-to-sergeant ratio is 10:1. In CPD, it can be 20:1 or more. That’s not supervision, it’s crowd control.
The result? Stretching sergeants too thin to manage men and women doing difficult, dangerous jobs or to catch troubling patterns before they become bigger problems.
“The quality of supervision is No. 1,” Snelling told us, acknowledging that being a good sergeant isn’t completely dependent upon how many officers you’re supervising. “But,” he added, “the number of people you’re supervising could affect the quality of the supervisor.”
These might sound like internal management issues, but it’s not that simple.
It’s the difference between a sergeant who knows his officers well enough to spot when something is off — a pattern of complaints, a tendency to escalate, judgment calls that keep going the wrong way — and one who is managing a rotating cast of faces while trying to oversee a dozen people at once. It’s the difference between a team and a shift.
Chicagoans have seen the fallout from insufficient supervision. Complaints pile up without early intervention. Use-of-force incidents escalate instead of de-escalate. Cases drag on without resolution. Officers sometimes cycle through neighborhoods without building the familiarity that helps prevent crime in the first place. This isn’t just a management problem, it’s a public safety problem.
But the report doesn’t stop at diagnosis; it points to solutions.
For one, better deployment would allow for more proactive policing. Policing shouldn’t just be reactive.
The report highlights another problem: too little time on the beat.
It finds officers should spend about 40% of their time proactively patrolling neighborhoods, not just responding to calls. But in some districts, that isn’t happening. Officers are tied up going from one call to the next, leaving little time to build relationships, deter crime or spot trouble before it escalates.
That helps explain a reality many Chicagoans already recognize: As former New York City Police Chief Kenneth Corey, now with the University of Chicago Crime Lab, told us, the only time a squad car comes down a block is often in response to a call.
As the issues are mainly personnel-related, the fixes are to move people around — and, in some cases, make additional hires. In total, the study calls for hundreds of additional personnel, including patrol officers, sergeants and detectives, much of it achieved by filling vacancies and reallocating existing staff, another component of the workforce study we’ll cover in the future.
All of these ideas require investment from a cash-strapped city.
“There’s a cost to police reform,” Boik told us. No one to whom we spoke gave us a cost estimate, and neither does the study. But we can see how such an investment would provide a significant benefit to a city still struggling to control crime.
That’s because there’s an underappreciated cost to not fixing problems within the police force, one of which is legal settlements tied to police misconduct, Boik added. Already this year, the city has paid roughly $175 million in such settlements — more than double the $82.5 million budgeted — and last month borrowed $267 million at interest rates around 6% for settlements.
How — and whether — much of the recommended changes are implemented depends on the city’s fiscal reality, and “things like collective bargaining affect decisions,” as Snelling noted.
It has been a tough week for CPD, which is mourning the shooting death of 38-year-old Officer John Bartholomew in the line of duty.
Chicago’s challenge isn’t just how many officers it has. It’s whether the system allows them to do their jobs well, with real supervision, time on the beat and a structure that catches problems before they spiral.
Right now, it doesn’t — at least not enough of the time. This report provides some useful ideas on how to fix it.
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