No one knows how MANY officers there should be, so "how far down" an agency is and compared to which past number depends on the predelections of the writer. Further, most would agree that what officers DO is most important, but in a age where issues like altenatives to policing and over-vs-under policing are on the table, even the doing is a subject of contention. Turning to how loud the wheels are squeeking when it comes to answering priority 1 calls, how much a city is spending on overtime, and how often it needs to squeeze overtime duty out of officers involuntarily, would be places where current staffing levels in city could be evaluated. Chicago is clearly facing an officer shortage on all three of these dimensions.
In the longer term, this site has explored (in Sept) the option of making more use of civilians, in order to carefully manage the most precious police resource, their people. More dramatic would be to use them in managerial and significant technical roles, and not just as data entry clerks and telephone answerers. CPD tried this during the 1990s, but gave it up without a stated reason or careful evaluation of its effectiveness, when the think-ahead people who pioneered it finally left and things could go back to normal.
-one of the highest law enforcement officers-per-capita rates in the nation
-one of the highest big city murder rates in the nation
That leads me to conclude that either
1. Officer density is not in and of itself a deterrent to murder without taking effectiveness into account
or
2. Officer density is a deterrent and Chicago has such an extreme level of violence over and above most US cities that even taking this high deterrent factor into account leaves us with a high murder rate.
#1 seems a lot more plausible to me than #2, especially given our low clearance rates. It seems like there's a lot more to be gained from internal reforms and efficiencies than just hiring more people.
I think this is a both/and rather than either/or situation. There are a bunch of operational reforms (and technology investments) that CPD should make. I actually intended this post to be a piece about operational reforms -- but by the time I had gotten through the evidence on headcount, I was already pushing the wordcount. Subsequent operational reform/effectiveness pieces are in the pipeline.
But the evidence that more officers reduce crime is overwhelming. I have a hard time believing those basic principles apply everywhere but Chicago. There isn't a Chicago-specific study here (for obvious reasons), but it's worth noting that rates of violence were lower in the 2000's when we had significantly more officers, and the deployment of overtime resources certainly indicates Mayors (even left-leaning ones) have evidence (or at least believe) that CPD deployments help reduce violence.
No one knows how MANY officers there should be, so "how far down" an agency is and compared to which past number depends on the predelections of the writer. Further, most would agree that what officers DO is most important, but in a age where issues like altenatives to policing and over-vs-under policing are on the table, even the doing is a subject of contention. Turning to how loud the wheels are squeeking when it comes to answering priority 1 calls, how much a city is spending on overtime, and how often it needs to squeeze overtime duty out of officers involuntarily, would be places where current staffing levels in city could be evaluated. Chicago is clearly facing an officer shortage on all three of these dimensions.
In the longer term, this site has explored (in Sept) the option of making more use of civilians, in order to carefully manage the most precious police resource, their people. More dramatic would be to use them in managerial and significant technical roles, and not just as data entry clerks and telephone answerers. CPD tried this during the 1990s, but gave it up without a stated reason or careful evaluation of its effectiveness, when the think-ahead people who pioneered it finally left and things could go back to normal.
Chicago already has
-one of the highest law enforcement officers-per-capita rates in the nation
-one of the highest big city murder rates in the nation
That leads me to conclude that either
1. Officer density is not in and of itself a deterrent to murder without taking effectiveness into account
or
2. Officer density is a deterrent and Chicago has such an extreme level of violence over and above most US cities that even taking this high deterrent factor into account leaves us with a high murder rate.
#1 seems a lot more plausible to me than #2, especially given our low clearance rates. It seems like there's a lot more to be gained from internal reforms and efficiencies than just hiring more people.
I think this is a both/and rather than either/or situation. There are a bunch of operational reforms (and technology investments) that CPD should make. I actually intended this post to be a piece about operational reforms -- but by the time I had gotten through the evidence on headcount, I was already pushing the wordcount. Subsequent operational reform/effectiveness pieces are in the pipeline.
But the evidence that more officers reduce crime is overwhelming. I have a hard time believing those basic principles apply everywhere but Chicago. There isn't a Chicago-specific study here (for obvious reasons), but it's worth noting that rates of violence were lower in the 2000's when we had significantly more officers, and the deployment of overtime resources certainly indicates Mayors (even left-leaning ones) have evidence (or at least believe) that CPD deployments help reduce violence.