Chicago City Wire

Last week’s disturbing tweet by the 16th and 17th District Chicago Police Scanner said that the city’s 25th District had eight police beats down one recent night, “meaning had no one assigned to patrol or respond to calls in the area…”

The 25th district borders Belmont to Division and Central Park to western city limits.

The same group also noted in a later tweet that CPD made nearly 450,000 contacts with people in 2014, but the number has since dropped off a cliff.

“That number fell to just over 45k in 2022 and I anticipate that number will be lower in 2023,” the 16th and 17 District tweet said. “This is a result of both staffing shortages and policy decisions.”

Another frequent Twitter commentator on city crime and the police, Second City Cop, told Chicago City Wire that the problem with the decreasing police complement began under Rahm Emmanuel, Chicago mayor from 2011 to 2019.

“Rahm made a B.S. promise to ‘put more officers on the street’ in reality it was just a shell game,” Second City Cop wrote in a Twitter Direct Message. “He took a small number of people who worked inside and yes, put them on the street. But the largest portion came from Units. Units that were out in neighborhoods doing good work. He disbanded those units and moved them into districts. Then claimed he 'put them on the street'."

Lightfoot worsened the problem by removing nearly 1,000 spots from the budget.

“Follow all that up w/George Floyd and the hatred of police and NOBODY wants the job that has half a brain,” he said. “The only thing they are looking for now are warm bodies to shove in a car. We are down 2k officers with bloated overpromoted upper mgmt. I'm not being dramatic when I say this... The city is really screwed.”

The shortage of police in the city has been well documented. How to sign up more recruits hasn’t, and the new, progressive mayor, Brandon Johnson, and his allies, are sending out signals that they are not interested in figuring out how. They are, in fact, suggesting moving in the other direction to fulfill an earlier Johnson pledge to defund the police.

The Action Center on Race & the Economy (ACRE), released a $12 billion tax plan, entitled, “First We Get The Money,” that calls for cutting the police budget.

"Reduce the bloated police budget: 31% of Chicago’s 2023 budget is allocated to the Chicago Police Department," the proposal said. "Mayor Johnson can redirect some of this money from the bloated police budget to the proposals in the People's Unity Platform that will bring about true public safety."

The proposal continued: "As a first step, the mayor should commit to cutting from the police department budget before cutting other services. Next, the mayor can eliminate the 1,000 vacant police positions, some of which have been vacant for years but remain in the budget. This would represent an estimated 9% cut in the city's police budget, saving the city more than $149 million. Going forth, if the mayor continues to slash the policing budget by 9% per year in each of their next four years in office, this would free up $538 million per year by 2027 that the city could put towards community services instead."

Founder of Wirepoints, Mark Glennon, noted that the proposal was co-written by Saqib Bhatti, a member of Johnson’s transition team and co-executive director of ACRE.

Between 2021 and 2022, overall crime in Chicago increased by 41 percent.