Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposal to cut 456 police vacancies would decimate spending and staff within the office leading the Chicago Police Department’s court-ordered reform push, raising renewed questions about his commitment to getting out from under a slow-moving federal consent decree.
Johnson’s $17.3 billion 2025 budget increased CPD’s annual budget slightly, to $2.1 billion, but only to cover the 5% raises Johnson gave rank-and-file officers when he extended and sweetened the deal negotiated by his predecessor, Lori Lightfoot.
The vacant CPD positions proposed for elimination are more than half of the 743 vacant positions Johnson wants to cut citywide to chip away at a nearly $1 billion budget shortfall next year. It’s the second straight year Johnson has eliminated hundreds of police vacancies. The mayor’s budget also includes a $300 million property tax increase facing stiff headwinds in an emboldened City Council.
The Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform would take a major hit, with its budget shrinking by 45% — to about $3.7 million, down from about $6.7 million this year. The staff would be cut from 65 budgeted employees to 28 next year.
Robert Boik was fired as the office’s executive director in August 2022 after he criticized then-Police Supt. David Brown’s decision to reassign 46 officers under his supervision. Johnson’s cuts would be equally devastating and could slow to a crawl what has already been a painfully slow march toward police reform.
“Reform doesn’t happen without investment,” Boik, now senior vice president of public safety for the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, warned Thursday. CPD’s overhaul, he added, hinges on technological advancements and hiring project managers and data specialists who can lead the department through the consent decree and track its compliance.
“It doesn’t appear that the pace of compliance is increasing at all,” he said. “And that’s not surprising given that the department hasn’t yet received the type of investment necessary, both from a technology and systems standpoint nor the civilian resources necessary to drive some of these massive structural changes forward.”
Robert Boik, former director of CPD’s Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform. He was fired after complaining about cuts in the office under then-Supt. David Brown.
Chicago police
The consent decree outlining federal court oversight was triggered by the furor after the court-ordered release of the Laquan McDonald shooting video. CPD has been under the decree’s costly constraints since a U.S. Justice Department investigation concluded in 2019. By 2022, a few months before Boik was fired, the city had been granted a three-year extension to comply with the court-ordered reforms by 2027.
The latest report issued by the team monitoring the department’s progress found it had fully complied with only 7% of consent decree provisions by the end of 2023. To reach full compliance, CPD first must create policy, then train officers on the policy and implement the changes.
Other major cities, including Los Angeles and Detroit, have taken more than a decade to reach full operational compliance with similar court orders.
Many key offices across the department now face staffing cuts — from recruitment to patrol to the internal affairs bureau. Joe Ferguson, president of the Civic Federation, said Johnson’s budget proposal effectively “constitutes a cut.”
“There is a big question here as to whether this was something that was imposed on the department or negotiated with the department,” Ferguson said. “And if it was imposed on the department, then it raises questions of whether there actually is a vision and a set of clear objectives about what we want the Chicago Police Department to become.”
It also “raises questions about whether they are truly, truly interested in and seeking to promote reform, rather than some form of defunding of the office.”
A spokesperson for Police Supt. Larry Snelling didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Ald. Anthony Beale (9th), one of the police union’s staunchest Council supporters, accused Johnson of “defunding the police incrementally.”
‘No cutting corners’
At a news conference after Wednesday’s budget address, Johnson said he was confident the cuts wouldn’t impede compliance with the consent decree.
“We do have to continue to show up for the people around constitutional policing so we can continue to build the trust we are building over the last couple of years,” he said.
He’d rather fill all the targeted vacancies, he said, but the financial reality required all city departments — including CPD — to cut spending by 3%.
“People believe that the only way you can keep a community safe is just policing alone. That is not our approach,” he said, pointing to the alternate response program that will free up police officers to respond to more serious crimes by sending mental health professional to those calls.
“There’s no cutting corners here.”
Johnson argued his holistic approach to fighting crime with social programs is working. Homicides, shootings, vehicular hijackings and robberies are down. So are criminal sexual assaults.
“Parts of Garfield Park have been described as a developing nation. That’s why we’re building affordable homes in the 28th Ward. We’re showing up for our young people. We’re investing in our education system,” he said.
“There’s been a very raggedy, unfortunate presentation that the only thing that Black and Brown people deserve are badges and guns. … They deserve jobs and housing and health care. That’s how we keep communities safe.”
‘I’m not going to defund the police’
Johnson once said it was a “political goal” to “defund” the police — a call that grew in popularity across the country during the racial justice protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd.
He tried to walk that comment back as a mayoral candidate, insisting that it wasn’t his personal goal to slash the police budget.
But Johnson has since hired top aides — Kennedy Bartley and Alyxandra Goodwin — who have pushed to do just that.
“Police, and in this case the Chicago Police Department, are wholly ineffective because they are historically and inherently violent,” Goodwin said in a Zoom call posted to YouTube in 2021. “And when we make demands to defund and eventually abolish policing, we must also consider the role that Wall Street has played in sustaining police power in the first place.”
Perhaps most glaringly, Johnson’s proposed budget targets the Office of Community Policing — undercutting his own commitment to bolstering relations between CPD and residents.
The office’s budget would be slashed by nearly half, dropping from about $10.94 million this year to about $5.57 million in 2025. Staffing would fall from 141 employees to 55.
Ferguson said he views Johnson’s decision to target police spending as “a matter of intention.”
“The administration projected a deficit of this magnitude a year ago,” Ferguson said. “What this reflects is, there really wasn’t meaningful work done in that year to plan for and meet this moment.”
Council member ‘very concerned’
Ald. Chris Taliaferro (29th), a former CPD sergeant now chairing the Council’s Police and Fire Committee, said he’s determined to restore nearly all targeted police vacancies.
But the mayor’s decision to gut the Office of Constitutional Policing is most devastating. So is a planned 10-job cut to CPD’s counseling division.
“I’m very concerned that our first-responder budgets are being cut to the point where it may impact their ability to respond to emergency calls as well as respond to what’s required of us by way of the consent decree,” Taliaferro said.
“When we saw that the Los Angeles Police Department had made significant strides toward reducing the number of police suicides, they attributed a lot of that to their ability to have counseling services available to officers 24/7 and in each district. We fought hard to bring Chicago to that same standard. I certainly don’t want to see that lost. If anything, we need to increase counseling services to our officers.”
Johnson’s plan to cut 28% and 90 jobs from CPD’s Training and Support Group and eviscerate the community policing section is equally troubling, Taliaferro said. “We’re gonna see a tremendous decrease in the ability of our residents and our police to work together.”
“When I look at the budget of 2007 that cut CAPS in a significant way, our department hasn’t recovered since then,” he said, referring to a longstanding community policing initiative.
“We had done such a great job in building trust between our community and our police and when CAPS was cut, we’ve seen those strides dissipate. Now, there’s such a wide gap between our community involvement and community trust because we cut funding.”