Chicago is spending around $134 million to pay for the new officers’ salaries, benefits and supervision. Emanuel is also pushing a plan to overhaul Chicago’s system for investigating police shootings and officer complaints.
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The biggest hiring surge since the mid-1980s, the department plans to bring on 970 new officers during the next two years.
The creation of these new law enforcement positions also come in the midst of Emanuel’s mass overhaul of the city’s police oversight agency after the LaQuan McDonald scandal.
Eddie Johnson, Chicago’s police superintendent, pressed Black Lives Matter and other activists to stop protesting and become officers. He said after school programs, summer jobs programs and mentors through groups like “My Brother’s Keeper” will do as much to root out crime as an expanded police force will.
But Mayor Rahm Emanuel didn’t explain how the city, which is grappling with financial woes that threaten basic services, will pay for the hiring spree.
He told reporters Wednesday that the city “will have the resources” in the next city budget and that he isn’t going to propose something “that is not paid for”. In recent days, Emanuel’s administration has announced the hiring of almost 1,000 new police officers.
The plan to hire hundreds more officers marks a departure for Emanuel, who has relied on overtime – more than $100 million annually in recent years – to combat crime, arguing that it was an effective and less expensive way to combat crime than hiring more officers.
The Chicago Police Department intends to hire 970 new police officers in an effort to combat spiking levels of violence in the city.
Johnson said at a Wednesday news conference that the additions, which includes patrol officers, training officers and sergeants, will be used to fill vacancies and strengthen leadership.
“The conversations that I’ve been hearing among police professionals, including people outside the city of Chicago, is that they’ve been understaffed for some time”, Cole said.
Chicago’s police chief is expected to announce that nearly 1,000 additional officers, detectives and command staff will be hired over the next two years, according to the reports.
In the past, when the mayor has promised to increase police pressence on the street, the reality has been a confusing pattern of rearranging officers already on the force – moving people doing desk jobs to the front lines, and shifting resources form low-crime areas to violent hot spots.
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Johnson said the new hires will help rebuild trust between the community and his department, which has long struggled with a reputation for police misconduct and brutality, especially after several recent police shootings. But he added that Emanuel assured him recently that he was confident the hiring could be done without raising taxes; the council approved new water and sewer tax increases earlier this month. “That’s in three weeks from now”, the mayor said, promising not to raise sales, property or gasoline taxes. Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson is scheduled to announce the hires Wednesday afternoon.
