Chicago Police Department Staffing Analysis

July 08, 2022

This blog post provides a high-level overview of personnel within the Chicago Police Department (CPD). The information presented includes both budgeted data based on the City of Chicago’s annual FY2022 budget and active, assigned sworn officer data based on public safety data dashboards available on the Office of Inspector General website.

Budgeted CPD Personnel

The Chicago Police Department has a total of 14,058 personnel positions budgeted across all funds in FY2022, including both sworn officers and civilian employees. This total includes:

• 13,640 positions budgeted within the Corporate Fund (the City’s general operating fund);
• 293 positions budgeted within the O’Hare and Midway Airport Funds; and
• 125 positions budgeted within grant funds. The Majority of grant-funded positions are for the COPS Hiring Program (75 positions) and Transit Security (43 positions).

Budgeted Sworn vs. Civilian Positions

The majority of positions budgeted within the Chicago Police Department are sworn officer positions. In FY2022, the City budgeted for 13,108 sworn officer positions across all funds and all job classifications (including police officers and supervisor-level positions).[1] The CPD budget includes 950 non-sworn positions. Therefore, 93.2% of the Police Department budgeted positions are sworn personnel, while 6.8% are non-sworn. This is a ratio of 13.8 sworn officers per 1 civilian employee. This ratio is extraordinarily high when compared to other jurisdictions across the U.S. Based on data from 10,247 law enforcement agencies in cities across the U.S. that reported data to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program in 2019, the ratio of officers to civilian employees was approximately to 3.5 sworn officers per civilian employee. On average, civilians made up 22.2% of total law enforcement agency employees.

Prior to FY2020, the number of civilian positions in the Chicago Police Department budget was slightly higher. In FY2020, the City of Chicago created an Office of Public Safety Administration to consolidate administrative functions including finance, human resources and technology services of the Police Department, Fire Department and Office of Emergency Management and Communications. This resulted in 250 civilian positions being moved from the Police Department budget to the Office of Public Safety Administration in FY2020. However, even when factoring in these additional civilian positions, the ratio of sworn to non-sworn personnel is still very high—a ratio of 10 to 1.

Police Officers Per Capita

Another commonly used measure is the ratio of police force size to population served. Based on data reported to the FBI in 2020 by 15,875 law enforcement agencies across the country, the national ratio of police officers to population is 2.4 officers per 1,000 people. By comparison, and according to this same data set, the Chicago Police Department had 4.7 police officers per 1,000 people in 2020.

Active CPD Employees

The City of Chicago budget documents do not provide information about the number actual employees, which are often less than budgeted due to vacant positions. However, the Office of the Chicago Inspector General provides public data dashboards with the number of active City of Chicago employees. Based on this data, the Chicago Police Department has 12,261 active employees as of July 6, 2022. Compared to the CPD’s total budgeted personnel of 14,058, this indicates that 87.2% of all CPD positions are currently filled.

Active Sworn Officers

The Office of the Chicago Inspector General also publishes public data on the number of active sworn CPD members, which provides important insight into the number of actual filled positions among sworn officers at all ranks. This excludes civilian employees of CPD.

While the CPD has budgeted for 13,108 sworn officer positions this year, the number of active sworn officers was actually 11,638 as of June 1, 2022. Based on these figures, it can be assumed that approximately 90% of CPD sworn officer positions are currently filled.

The chart below shows the number of active sworn members of the Chicago Police Department (including all ranks and position titles) in CPD from August 2017 through June 2022 based on active officer assignments data made available on the Office of the Inspector General “Sworn CPD Members by Unit and Month” data dashboard. The Inspector General began collecting data from the Chicago Police Department in August 2017.

Over this nearly five-year period, the number of active sworn CPD members has decreased by 4.2%. Sworn officer levels reached their highest level during this period in January 2019, with 13,353 assigned officers. Since that point, the current number of active sworn officers represents a decrease of 12.8%, or approximately 1,700 sworn members.

 

Organization of the CPD Budget

The charts below demonstrate how the CPD budget and budgeted positions are organized, as presented in the City of Chicago FY2022 annual budget appropriation. Red boxes represent divisions, blue represents sections and green represents sub-sections.

One major limitation to the organization of CPD budget is that it is not directly comparable to the CPD’s Organization of Command, which makes it hard to follow staffing assignments. Likewise, the CPD budget is not directly comparable to the active sworn CPD member data on the Inspector General’s data dashboards because the active sworn member data is based on the City’s human resources system (the Chicago Integrated Personnel and Payroll Systems).

The following are a few key takeaways:

• There are a total of 14,058 positions budgeted in FY2022. The vast majority, or 13,640 positions, are budgeted within the Corporate Fund, while 293 positions are budgeted in the Midway and O’Hare Airport Funds, and 125 are grant-funded positions.

• The majority of police department positions, 10,769, are lumped together as “Patrol Services.” Within Patrol Services, 1,070 positions are listed under Area Detectives and 9,688 are listed under Area Districts. However, there is no further breakdown by area or police district, making it impossible to ascertain how many police officers are budgeted for each individual police district.
• Based on the data presented in the budget, a small number of personnel are assigned to public transit: 153 positions are budgeted to the Public Transportation Division (within the Bureau of Counter-Terrorism), and another 43 officers are budgeted within the Public Transit grant fund.
• The Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform is budgeted for 498 positions. This Office oversees implementation of the Chicago Police Department Consent Decree and was created in the FY2021 budget. Prior to the creation of the office, the City established an Office of Reform Management in FY2020 in order to begin implementing the Consent Decree, which the City entered into in 2019. Within the Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform, a Training Division budgeted which is allocated 312 positions.

Related Links:

What is the Chicago Police Department Budget?

How Flexible is the Chicago Police Department Budget?

City of Chicago Public Safety Spending

Civic Federation/Governmental Research Association 2021 Conference: What We Learned about Bail Reform and Police Budgeting Reform from Two Expert Panel Discussions and Reforming Police Budgets Roundtable Materials