In an event with hundreds of police in attendance, as much pep rally as news conference, Johnson said the department will add 970 additional net, sworn personnel over the next two years, a lot of them street officers.
Advertisement
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel will deliver his new, more comprehensive plan for addressing public safety in the nation’s third-largest city. Johnson spoke at a 2 p.m. press conference inside police headquarters to announce the hiring blitz, which includes 200 new detectives, 516 officers, 112 sergeants and 50 lieutenants.
Johnson said that these new officers would result in an overall increase of sworn officer positions from around 12,500 to around 13,500. “I think this is one of the ways we could do it”, Johnson said. Trump also endorsed a stop-and-frisk policing method for the city, which a federal judge said New York City used unconstitutionally because of its overwhelming impact on minority residents. “We’ll train and mentor officers who make honest mistakes, but I will not tolerate intentional misconduct”, he said. But he says that Emanuel has assured him that it could be done without raising taxes.
Superintendent Eddie Johnson on the force’s largest hiring effort in years and the one big question is how the cash strapped city will pay for it.
Some aldermen are confident that the money can be found if the department reduces the more-than $100 million it spends on overtime costs; others say taxpayers have had enough.
The city has already recorded more than 500 murders for 2016 – a rate not seen since the 1990s, according to an analysis by the Chicago Tribune. Though overtime will certainly not disappear, Brookins said he expected it to decrease significantly.
Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson says it’s a hard time to be a police officer with added pressures and cellphone videos.
“I am a firm believer that if people are exhausted and overworked they start making bad decisions”, he said in an interview after his news conference.
“We need more patrol officers, and we need them where we need them the most”, Johnson said. “Any move toward an increase in manpower is appreciated by us and law-abiding citizens”. The city of Chicago has long seen higher than usual levels of violence and homicides, with violence worsening compared to recent years so far in 2016. In August alone, there were 90 homicides, marking the first time in two decades there’ve been that many in a single month. That puts Chicago on pace to record well over 600 murders for the year, a threshold it has not reached since 2003.
But he said none of this is going to do a lot unless people begin seeing the police as part of the solution to street violence. “If you can raise $1 billion for a Star Wars museum, surely you can raise $1 billion to bring resources into our community”, said Pastor Greg Livingston, of the Coalition for a New Chicago.
Advertisement
“The causes of crime and intra-communal violence exist because of the conditions of poverty that Rahm Emanuel has exacerbated for Chicago”. Eddie Johnson and Emanuel spent Wednesday talking about swelling police ranks to help combat violence, Emanuel’s Thursday night speech will detail other means to fight crime, such as building up the South and West Sides and providing opportunities for kids.
