Better policing requires more officers. Here’s how to hire them.

Let's make Chicago safer and strengthen constitutional policing

Source: Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability

As we’ve discussed before, Chicago gets a bad rap when it comes to violent crime. But even if our homicide rate isn’t as high as you might expect, we are still a clear outlier relative to our largest big-city peers – and violent crime remains the city’s single greatest challenge.

It’s good that the City’s homicide rate fell by 7.6% in 2024. But that number isn’t all that impressive in context. Nationwide, the homicide rate fell more than twice as fast—down by 15.6% as of October. We’re also underperforming other big cities. Murders were down 11.5% in New York, and 10.2% in Los Angeles.[1]

And even as violence remains the city’s greatest challenge, the Chicago Police Department is shrinking. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting database, the number of sworn officers (i.e. carrying a gun and badge, with the power to make arrests) peaked in 2007 at 13,671. Since then, we’re down 2,000 officers – in November 2024, the Office of the Inspector General’s (IG) dashboard reported that CPD had 11,661 sworn officers.[2]

Worryingly, the department is also on track to get less representative of the communities it polices. In 2021 the IG noted that more than half of black officers were nearing retirement age – 54% were 45 or older, and 39% were 50 or older.

More officers mean less crime

There’s a great deal of high-quality research underlining the benefits of more police officers. In a widely cited 2020 study, Chalfin et al find that for every ten additional officers a city hires, it can expect one fewer homicide. Because black communities suffer from disproportionately high levels of violence, they benefit disproportionately from greater safety. On a per capita basis, the authors find that additional officers translate into twice as many avoided homicides for black residents as they do for white ones.

Crucially, that’s because more officers deter crime from happening in the first place. This creates a ‘double dividend’ of fewer violent crimes and lower arrest/incarceration rates. Again, black communities disproportionately benefit – the decline in index crime[3] arrests is 4-6 times greater for black suspects than white ones.[4]

The Chalfin study isn’t an outlier. As the authors observe, “there is now a strong consensus in the academic literature that the number of police officers combined with their presence and visibility reduces crime.” A wide range of studies using different research methods that all point to the benefits of hiring more officers:

• Cities that just barely meet the threshold for federal funding to hire new police see crime declines relative to similar cities that barely miss out on federal funds. Steven Mello finds that each additional officer hired resulted in roughly 3 fewer violent crimes and 15 fewer property crimes per year.

• Studies of ‘hotspot’ or ‘problem-oriented policing’ find that the visible presence of officers in high-crime areas reduces the number of reported crimes by up to 75% in the most extreme cases. A literature review by Anthony Braga, Andrew Papachristos, and David Hureau finds that these benefits result in net decreases in crime, rather than simply displacing crime to nearby blocks.

• Mayors recognize the value of additional officers and increase police headcount in the run-up to elections. These efforts work – University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt finds that police forces tend to be disproportionately larger in election years, and each additional officer translates into 3 to 7 fewer violent crimes per year.

As these studies show, the greatest benefits of more police come from preventing crimes from happening in the first place. But more officers can also increase arrest rates when crimes do occur. Fatal and non-fatal shootings are crimes with similar intent – the only difference is that the victim gets lucky. But in most cities (including Chicago), police are much less likely to make arrests when the victim survives. That seems backwards – after all, non-fatal shootings have a potentially-cooperative live witness. But detective resources are limited, and so attempted murders get short shrift.[5]

When Denver created a dedicated unit to pursue non-fatal shootings, clearance rates soared – boosting trust in communities, and likely catching would-be murders before they had a chance to commit even more serious crimes. Other cities have attempted to replicate the strategy but have struggled due to detective shortages. In 2022, guess which big city had the lowest clearance rate for non-fatal shootings?

Source: Marshall Project

So how does Chicago have one of the country’s largest police forces *and* the highest murder total? Well, police don’t just reduce violence. Violence also increases the number of police communities hire. In Chicago, high levels of violence driven by disinvestment, extreme segregation, and easy access to firearms cause the public (and most of their elected officials) to demand more officers. That’s part of the explanation for the city’s high rates of police overtime—the city is willing to pay a premium for more officers above and beyond our current staffing levels.[6]

More officers are necessary for structural reforms

Of course, even if more officers reduce violence in the short term, a militarized and abusive police department can inflict long-term harm on the communities it ostensibly protects. And egregious officer misconduct, such as in the case of the murder of Laquan MacDonald, is both a travesty on its own account and can spark breakdowns in public safety and spikes in violence.

That’s a key part of the thesis of Patrick Sharkey’s prescient book Uneasy Peace. Writing in 2018, Sharkey credited the long-run decrease in violence to more focused police work and the emergence of a stronger set of civil society groups. But he warned that a resurgence in violence was possible without a longer-term effort to shift departments from a ‘warrior policing’ mentality into one that emphasized stronger community partnerships.

But if we want to truly reform CPD, we’ll need more officers, not fewer. CPD’s Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform, which is tasked with implementing the consent decree (which includes setting and training the department on a wide set of new policies) had 537 positions in 2023 budget. That’s a lot of officers who aren’t available for patrol or investigative work.

When violence spikes or budgets tighten, long-term reforms are the first thing to get cut. During the Lightfoot Administration, CPD Superintendent David Brown pulled officers out of consent decree positions in 2022. And in November, Mayor Johnson proposed cutting vacant consent decree positions as part of the budget negotiations (the positions were eventually reinstated).

Budget cuts and officer shortages have derailed reforms before. Northwestern Professor Wesley Skogan notes that the City’s well-regarded community policing effort was gutted by budget cuts following the 2008 financial crisis:

“Community policing—done right—can be expensive. It involves spending a great deal of time in face-to-face contact and relationship building with the public. Officers must be trained— and retrained—in how to do this... The beat officers needed to be spared time away from their radio in order to work with the public. Other officers assigned to rapid-response cars needed to be on duty to pick up the slack. CAPS was one victim of budget cutbacks that inevitably hit the police department... In response to the downturn, the mayor, in 2010, slashed the CAPS budget from a still-healthy $9 million annually to about $4.8 million. About two hundred officers were reassigned from CAPS to other duties.”

It's not a coincidence that officer headcount peaked in 2007. Consent decree or not, if the city doesn’t have enough officers to address both short term crises and long-term reforms, the short term will win every time. The public will demand it.

A better staffed department would help in other ways too. In 2022, the IG found that more than 1,200 officers worked 11 straight days.[7] Officers working long shifts with cancelled days off are more likely to make mistakes or lash out at residents that they are supposed to protect. A better staffed department could also afford to hold officers to a higher standard. I can’t imagine that the Johnson administration wants to hold on to officers linked to right-wing groups like the Proud Boys. But it would be a lot easier to fire them if the department didn’t face a desperate manpower shortage.

Other public safety strategies aren’t a replacement for police

Sometimes, opponents of CPD argue that there are other, better ways to solve this problem. They point to strategies like community violence intervention efforts, improving lighting, or clearing vacant lots as tools to increase public safety.

I think there’s a lot of merit in those approaches, and we should be eager to embrace a wide range of non-police efforts to improve public safety. In particular, I’d highlight the Mayor’s efforts to increase youth summer employment – which research has shown to been an effective and scalable way of reducing violence.

But many of these alternative strategies are also more likely to succeed with a capable and well-staffed police force. Stronger coordination with police is an important part of renewed CVI efforts. And efforts to improve lighting or increase the number of eyeballs on the street are predicated on the idea that potential wrongdoers will be deterred by the threat of being seen and caught. If police officers aren’t available to respond to 911 calls, that’s not much of a deterrent at all.

Strategies to reverse our downward slide

The City is certainly trying to hire more officers – we’ve been budgeting for thousands more positions in recent years than we’ve been able to hire. But we can get more creative and thoughtful about how we do so. Here are some ideas to turn those numbers around:

Speed up the hiring process: I’ve written previously about potential reforms to the city’s standard hiring process, which could help fill desk jobs with civilians (often at lower cost), and get more officers back on the beat. But, as an 2021 IG investigation notes, CPD’s hiring process is even worse—it takes 16 months, on average, from application to entry into the academy.

This is one of those places where a broken process is likely inefficient and inequitable. Applicants of all kinds fall off (or can’t afford to wait) through a 16-month process. But it’s likely much harder to navigate the process if you’re already trying to support a family, can’t take time off another job, or don’t have friends or relatives who already work at CPD.

This slow-moving effort is also expensive. To minimize those costs, the Department makes the process even longer – adding requirements upfront to weed out applicants with low likelihood of success “before investing more resources in them” (the IG’s words).

One example of that is the POWER test, or physical fitness test administered to applicants. According to the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board, candidates should pass this test either in their first week at the police academy, or prior to admission. But as of 2021, CPD required candidates to take and pass it twice before going to the academy – once to screen out low quality candidates early in the process, and then again closer to starting.

Source: Office of the Inspector General. Since 2021, the college hours requirement has been eliminated.

CPD is trying to make improvements here, but more can be done to eliminate or condense steps in the process. One obvious action would be to allow candidates who pass the POWER test the first time to skip having to take it a second time. That sounds obvious, but as of 2021, the second test had a 9% attrition rate – a third of which was driven by no-shows.

Another improvement would be to eliminate the required polygraph. That adds time and eliminates candidates but isn’t particularly accurate. In 2003, a major review by the National Academies of Sciences found that polygraph accuracy was “insufficient to justify reliance on its use in employee security screening in federal agencies.”

That’s just the lowest-hanging of fruit. We could be much more ambitious about shortening the time from application to enrollment. In Maryland, the Rockville and Baltimore County police departments hold hiring events that include onsite written and physical fitness testing. That allows them to extend conditional offers to candidates the day they apply. The Rockville Police Chief described the approach as “wildly successful” and noted that the process didn’t require cutting corners or lowering hiring standards.

Raise the mandatory retirement age to 65: Officers are currently required to retire at 63. But the statewide standard is 65. CPD wants this change to help with headcount shortages and to maintain veteran leadership in the department. The union is in support as well. Plus, at 63, most officers would already be earning 50-75% of their salary in retirement, so keeping them on is a relative bargain.[8] And while maintaining physical fitness benchmarks is important, those are exactly the officers you want to hold on to—men and women who could retire at almost full salary but want to continue to serve.

Hire detectives directly: Currently, to be hired as a Detective, candidates must have already spent two years as an officer in the department – which both constrains the pool of potential candidates and means that each newly hired detective pulls an officer out of patrol. It’s important to have detectives who understand the basics of patrol activities, but there are likely lots of candidates who might be good investigators but aren’t interested in patrol positions.

London’s Metropolitan Police force has launched a Detective Direct Entry Scheme, which allows new hires to bypass patrol, but requires them to spend two years in probationary training to learn the ropes before coming on board as full detectives. In 2020 that approach brought on additional 354 detectives. It has has since been replicated by other forces across the UK. If that’s a bridge too far, we could start with civilian investigator positions, which Baltimore and Phoenix are using to supplement detective roles.

Budgets are tight. More officers are worth it

I realize that this blog has spent the last few months talking about the need to make spending cuts. The ideas in here are designed to minimize the fiscal burden, and to the extent that more officers trade off with costly overtime, the budgetary impact may be blunted.

But more officers will cost money, and that’s an investment worth making. In addition to being a human tragedy, violent crime is extremely expensive. The studies referenced above by Levitt, Chalfin and Mello all find that hiring a marginal officer generates social benefits that far exceed their costs in salary and benefits. Those benefits (like longer lifespans, and avoided healthcare and security costs), often don’t show up directly in the city budget. But spending that generates large, positive-sum public benefits is exactly the sort of thing we want government to do in the first place.

Finally, Chicago’s current violence is an albatross for the city’s long-term economic health. Today, only 27% of the country says that Chicago is a safe place to live in or visit. Violence is one of the key reasons for leaving cited by former residents of shrinking South and West side neighborhoods. A safer city will have a much easier time adding residents, amenities, and jobs – especially in the neighborhoods that need them the most.

More officers aren’t the only answer to Chicago’s public safety challenges. And they’re likely to keep getting more expensive – a problem that I’ll come back to in subsequent posts. But you don’t have to be a right winger to recognize how important CPD is to the health of this city. If we want a safer Chicago, we’re going to need more officers.

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[1] Those numbers are also as of October, and thanks to Jeff Asher and immensely valuable Real Time Crime Index. If you’re a stickler for apples-to-apples comparisons, murders were down 7.2% in Chicago as of October.

[2] In recent years, most of the decline has occurred in the years immediately following the Covid-19 pandemic. CPD has lost 1,500 officers since 2019. Numbers are effectively flat since 2022, when we had 11,678 sworn officers.

[3] Index crimes are: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, grand larceny and motor vehicle theft

[4] An important caveat: the authors find that the racial equity benefits of more police are much less prevalent in cities with large Black populations, with higher arrest rates for quality of life crimes. More police officers still reduce homicide rates, but additional reforms are required to ensure police departments don’t engage in simultaneous over- and under-policing of Black neighborhoods.

[5] You could say that we take the Sideshow Bob approach to attempted murder.

[6] This would make for an interesting extension of the Levitt paper – Mayors probably have much more discretion over overtime than they do over total officer headcount, which could make it a stronger instrumental variable for assessing the impact of officer numbers on crimes. But I bet data quality is weaker.

[7] This is an area where current Superintendent Larry Snelling has made improvements. But cancelled days off (understandably) increased again this summer as a result of the DNC.

[8] Another bonus: officers continue to pay 9% of their salary into the pension fund while they remain employed.