Police officers stop and search a man on North Campbell Avenue. Jose More/Chicago News Cooperative
As city elections approach, Superintendent Jody Weis’s proposal to shift more police officers to crime-ridden areas has reignited an intense debate among aldermen.
Black aldermen, many of whom represent high-crime wards, said the extra help was long overdue, while most white aldermen vowed to fight any plan to shift officers, fearing an uptick in crime in their communities. It is an emotional political fight that has recurred repeatedly when the city has been faced with both high-profile crime and static, or even shrinking, police resources.
“This is common sense,” said Alderman Anthony Beale, chairman of the Police and Fire Committee. “When you have rapes, murders and assaults, you have to move resources.”
Alderman Margaret Laurino (39th Ward) said she was “going to fight to keep police.” A resident of her ward was recently beaten to death during a home burglary, Ms. Laurino said, and “that just reinforces it for me.”
Aldermen say they know little about where the new deployments will be — or what the staffing is now — because the Police Department refuses to share the information with them.
Police officials reported last week that overall crime in the city had dropped for the last 22 months, but a flare-up of violence — including the killings of three police officers — shook the city over the summer. Mr. Weis has been under pressure to undo the city’s bloody image, a task Chicago police chiefs have been burdened with since the days of Al Capone.
Mr. Weis must navigate these challenges with an ever-leaner department. As of mid-October, there were 11,187 police officers, a drop of more than 400 since 2005, according to city records. Budget officials have said that police hiring will probably not keep up with retirements next year.
Staffing is typically based on finding the right number of officers to respond to calls while maintaining a visible presence and sticking to a budget.
It is not simple. One problem is measuring the relationship between police visibility and crime prevention, said William Stenzel, who led the Center for Public Safety at Northwestern University for 26 years and now consults on staffing for police agencies. “What you want to have happen is nothing,” Mr. Stenzel said, “but how do you prove later that it was because of police presence?”
In addition, Mr. Stenzel said, it is prohibitively expensive to hire enough officers to respond to every call immediately. The Police Department still accounts for nearly a quarter of Chicago’s $6.2 billion annual budget.
“If you want to lower your expense, which means lowering your staffing levels, you’re talking about less reactive policing, which means longer response times,” Mr. Stenzel said.
Police officials said the department last made major alterations to its deployment strategy in 1978, when some beats were redrawn to reflect crime and demographic trends. In general, a beat is the area patrolled by one squad car. The beats were drawn smaller in higher-crime areas.
Police officials have announced plans to redraw the beat map significantly at least six times since the late 1970s — most recently last year — but each time the plans were dropped.
“We looked at beat realignment, and we decided it wasn’t worth the trouble,” said Phil Cline, the police superintendent from 2003 to 2007. “Beat realignment is just about politics.”
Mr. Cline said the department had other ways to send officers to areas in need.
“The best approach to urban policing,” he said, “is to layer your resources,” with the beat as the first layer. Additional cars patrol groups of beats as needed. Other officers work across beat boundaries in gang or tactical units. Still more are assigned to mobile teams that can flood “hot” areas.
Mr. Cline said that the layering strategy worked and that homicides and other crimes dropped sharply on his watch. But he was forced to retire after officers in one of the mobile units — the Special Operations Section — were implicated in a series of crimes, including a murder plot. The unit was disbanded in 2007, though the next year Mr. Weis created a similar one with a new name, the Mobile Strike Force.
The Police Department continues to rely on mobile units, and other officers are frequently moved from their regular assignments to help out elsewhere. For example, patrol cars are regularly sent from the Northwest Side to hot spots on the West Side.
Mark Donahue, president of the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, said he was not sure what Mr. Weis meant by resource reallocation. “They don’t want to call it beat realignment because the aldermen will get their shorts in a knot,” Mr. Donahue said.
Mr. Weis did not give the Council details last month, saying, “We anticipate in the very near future having a resource reallocation that will better balance the workload of our officers throughout the entire city.”
Maureen Biggane, the superintendent’s spokeswoman, emphasized that Mr. Weis was not considering drawing new police beats. She said he hoped to announce specifics of the reallocation plan by the first of the year.
Mr. Beale, the police committee chairman, said Mr. Weis had good reason for permanently shifting some officers. “In some areas,” he said, “officers are averaging one call in an eight-hour shift when you have officers responding to 25 calls in an eight-hour shift in other areas.”
Still, the idea of reallocation troubles aldermen from lower-crime communities.
“I can see a car or two being pulled to help for a special event — let’s say if the Cubs win the World Series and they need some extra police over at Wrigley Field,” said Alderman Pat Levar (45th Ward). “But our community pays taxes, and they deserve police protection, too.”
Clouding the debate is the department’s reluctance to reveal even basic information about police deployment. Department officials denied a request for current data on the grounds that disclosure could pose a security risk. They also denied a request for deployment data from 2008, saying they do not keep such records because officers are shifted too often.
Mayor Richard M. Daley and Mr. Weis have said they moved hundreds of officers to street duty from desk jobs in the past year after commissioning an efficiency study. But department officials will not say where the officers were assigned. They also declined a request for the study.
Council members say their access to department information is not much better. “Everything is a secret, and I don’t understand it,” said Alderman Walter Burnett Jr. (27th Ward).
Ms. Biggane said aldermen had not been kept in the dark.
“The superintendent attends meetings regularly with aldermen to listen to their concerns and to keep them apprised of developments and strategies in the department,” she said. “Once a firm plan is outlined regarding resource allocation, it will be addressed with aldermen.”
It is most likely to be a tough sell to members representing the North and Northwest Sides. Mr. Levar said he would not support any major change to deployments until he had current data.
Until then, he will continue to use his own means of estimating staffing levels in his ward.
“I drive around and see on a Sunday night, for instance, that there are a lot of squad cars in the parking lot of the police station,” he said. “That tells me we don’t have enough manpower here.”
