A 770-page workforce study of the Chicago Police Department, years in the making and mandated by a federal consent decree, landed Wednesday with a direct assessment of what CPD needs: more officers, more supervisors, and a fundamental shift in how sworn staff are deployed across the city’s neighborhoods.
The recommendations are substantive and data-driven. Whether they can be implemented is a different question — and the answer hinges on two forces that have long shaped public safety in Chicago: the Fraternal Order of Police and the state of the city’s finances.
What the Study Found
The 770-page study, mandated by the federal consent decree and performed by Matrix Consulting Group, calls for hundreds of new officers to be hired and hundreds of existing CPD positions to be filled by new civilian employees so sworn officers can be assigned to street work.
The study recommended CPD shift about 600 positions from sworn officers to civilians, hire an additional 270 officers, and create 90 new sergeant positions. The report concluded that the department assigns sworn officers to administrative duties at higher rates than peer agencies and that moving to civilians for some positions would redeploy officers to street and supervisory functions.
At 8%, CPD has the lowest percentage of civilians among the 30 largest police departments in America. New York’s civilian rate stands at 31% and Los Angeles at 24%. The imbalance means sworn officers — trained at considerable public expense and compensated accordingly — are routinely filling roles that other large-city departments long ago assigned to non-sworn staff.
The study found “inconsistent service levels, constrained proactive time, and limited supervisory capacity in high-demand areas.” The vast majority of violent crimes and murders occur on Chicago’s South and West sides, which also have some of the highest rates of 911 calls for police service per population.
The Deployment Model and Proactive Time
One of the study’s core goals is increasing what it calls proactive time — the portion of an officer’s shift that is not consumed by responding to calls for service.
To reach 40% proactive time across all patrol districts without reducing staffing in any district, 273 additional officers would be required. The study calls for patrol staffing to be allocated by district proportionally to workload, to address what it describes as “severe inequalities in patrol service levels.”
The staffing plan also aims to ensure that officers remain in the same geographic area, spend 40% of their time on community policing, and consistently report to the same supervisor. It suggests deploying officers based on sectors — a subset of a district — instead of beats, and calls for redrawing the borders of many sectors.
The study also calls for the Near West District to add 70 more officers and be included in CPD’s Central Control Group, joining the two other districts that cover the downtown area. Superintendent Snelling noted that this reflected thinking he had developed before the study was released.
The Consent Decree Context
This study did not emerge from a routine administrative review. It exists because a federal court requires it.
The staffing analysis was required under a federal consent decree mandating sweeping reforms in the wake of the police killing of Laquan McDonald. Similar studies were commissioned in 2016 and 2019, but were never completed and preliminary results were never made public. Six funders, including the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, stepped up to fund the study, which cost $780,000.
CPD had fully complied with 22% of the consent decree’s requirements as of the most recent report from the court-appointed monitoring team, which found that officers routinely violated the constitutional rights of Black and Latino Chicagoans.
Robert Boik, senior vice president of public safety at the Civic Committee, said implementing the plan is important for getting the department out from under the federal consent decree. “If they do this with fidelity and follow this path for the next couple, few years, then I’m confident they’re going to be on the right path to achieving operational compliance,” Boik said.
The Civilianization Question and Union Contracts
The recommendation to convert 600 positions from sworn to civilian status is not a personnel reduction. The study is explicit on this point.
The study states: “Civilianization is not a workforce reduction strategy; rather, it is a redeployment strategy intended to ensure sworn officers are assigned where police authority and training are most needed.”
That framing matters because the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, which represents CPD’s rank-and-file officers and detectives, will ultimately shape what is and is not achievable. The study’s summary acknowledges this directly: “CPD recognizes that civilianization recommendations cannot be implemented wholesale. Each recommendation must be evaluated through the lenses of collective bargaining obligations, historical role classifications, operational risk, and budget feasibility.”
Superintendent Snelling said: “Obviously, there are things we have to take into consideration: collective bargaining, the number of people that we have, how we’re going to move, manpower needs, things of that nature.” FOP Lodge 7 President John Catanzara did not respond to requests for comment from media outlets covering the study’s release.
The Budget Wall
Even if labor negotiations could be navigated, the city’s fiscal position presents an equally significant obstacle.
As of last fall, the police department had already slowed hiring to 50 recruits per month and will not move new classes through the police academy this summer. Snelling has vowed to resist eliminating vacancies, even as Mayor Brandon Johnson ordered department heads to make budget cuts.
CPD employs about 12,100 workers, with more than 11,000 sworn officers. Mayor Brandon Johnson’s 2026 budget called for funding more than 13,200 full-time positions. With only around 90% of budgeted positions filled over the past few years, the city has underspent on salaries while significantly overspending on overtime.
In 2023 and 2024, the city budgeted $100 million for police overtime but spent $282.8 million and $238.0 million respectively. The FY2026 proposed budget allocates $200 million for police overtime — a step toward more realistic budgeting — but hiring and retention remain problems.
The overtime spiral is itself a consequence of understaffing. Officers who are not available force those who are to work longer, at premium cost to a city that is already carrying a structural budget deficit.
A Framework for Years to Come
Despite the obstacles ahead, CPD officials framed the study’s value as extending well beyond its immediate recommendations.
Allyson Clark Henson, executive director of CPD’s Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform, said: “The results of this study provide for us a foundational analytical framework that’s going to be able to guide a multi-year initiative that’s replicable, it’s data-driven and it allows us to evaluate staffing. This isn’t a static report. This is something that will allow us to evaluate staffing needs as conditions change on an ongoing basis.”
CPD released an executive summary of the report Wednesday, with the full 770-page report expected to be published in the coming weeks.
For Chicago’s neighborhoods — particularly those on the South and West sides that have long experienced the consequences of uneven police deployment — the study represents a formal acknowledgment that the current system is not working as it should. Whether the city’s leadership, its labor agreements, and its budget can align to act on that acknowledgment is the question that residents, aldermen, and community organizations will be watching closely in the months ahead.
