CHICAGO — Mayor Brandon Johnson’s 2025 budget plan for Chicago police slashes several offices that are critical to the ongoing federal consent decree, sparking alarm from policing experts who say now is not the time to take the foot off the gas with reform.

Johnson’s $17.3 billion spending plan for the city carves out $2.1 billion for the Chicago Police Department, a $58.7 million increase from this year’s allocation. However, it also includes 456 vacant positions being cut — 98 of them sworn and 358 civilian — saving more than $50 million in salary and other costs.

The mayor’s budget recommendation would cut staffing for the Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform by 57%, from 65 to 28. Established by interim CPD Superintendent Charlie Beck in 2020, the office was meant to combine all of the functions tied to consent decree efforts under one office, including training, professional counseling, and reform management.

CPD’s training division, which trains new recruits for service and current employees for promotions, would shrink by about 27% under Johnson’s proposal, from 327 to 237 employees.

The professional counseling division that offers mental health care and other assessments for CPD employees would drop by the same percentage, from 35 to 25 employees. The reform management group responsible for tracking reform efforts consistent with the consent decree would shrink by about 10%, from 19 to 17 employees.

The Office of Community Policing would see its staffing dip from 141 down to 55 employees, a decrease of 61%, under Johnson’s proposal. The office coordinates with other city departments to “create a more cohesive partnership” between CPD and the neighborhoods they serve, according to CPD’s 2023 annual report.

Transparency efforts might also be affected under Johnson’s budget proposal: The records inquiry section that processes and stores field reports and responds to public requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act is slated to shrink by 43%, from 83 to 47 employees.

Robert Boik, former executive director of the Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform, told the Tribune that eliminating those positions would hobble the massive reforms needed in the department. The situation resembled one that led to his own ouster in 2022, when then-Superintendent David Brown fired him after he sent an email asking for a reversal of a decision to distribute his staff to patrol instead of officer training, though those were not vacant positions.

“We have to make a decision about what our priority is,” Boik said. “If we want police reform to happen in Chicago, we have to invest in it. That is one of the offices that requires investment. … Hundreds of check boxes of compliance do not happen without the backbone to make it happen.”

The city has been subject to the consent decree for more than five years. But the most recent report from independent monitor Maggie Hickey measuring the city’s progress found CPD was in full compliance with just 7% of the decree’s requirements by the end of 2023. That was an increase of 1 percentage point from the previous reporting period. The city achieved “incremental progress,” the report found, in developing a community policing strategy and a data-driven staffing study to figure out how to best allocate people and resources.

The Civic Federation’s Joe Ferguson said the cuts to community policing, constitutional policing and training represented a “retrenchment bordering on a reversal of what appeared to be the commitment last year” to civilianizing more roles in the department and driving reform. “In some respects, it is not merely a reversal, it’s a gutting.”

The department’s Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform was already “a very, very small number to begin with,” said Ferguson, the city’s former inspector general.

“Sixty-five was known to be inadequate. Cutting it down to 28 basically reduces it to the low watermark that it was at the time that Bob Boik was fired,” Ferguson said, rendering it “all but ineffectual.”

Los Angeles, a smaller department with a less complicated consent decree, dedicated approximately 300 people to its equivalent reform department.

At an unrelated Thursday news conference, Johnson did not directly address a question about his CPD budget proposal but spoke broadly about his administration’s commitment to the consent decree.

“We understand that over the course of unfortunately decades in this city, that there’s been a disconnect between the needs of the community and how law enforcement can respond to those needs,” Johnson said. “So this is an ongoing process, and as the superintendent indicated, as we continue to go through the budget discussion, all of that will come to light.”

His proposal also adds two new initiatives: an Office of Crime Victim Services with 59 employees and an Office of Equity and Engagement, with seven employees.

At the same news conference, Snelling did not comment on the proposed cuts, instead saying his department will forge ahead regardless of “roadblocks.”

“When it comes to the consent decree, I am 100% — and the Chicago Police Department, 100% — dedicated to getting to the bottom of the consent decree,” Snelling said, adding that more questions would be answered during CPD’s budget hearing with aldermen. “We’re going to continue to work in that direction. It doesn’t matter what the roadblocks are that we may see.”

A year ago, the mayor earned plaudits from fiscal watchdogs and policing experts for pledging to create 398 civilian positions in his budget plan for 2024. It was part of a bid to shift desk duty roles away from sworn personnel, thereby freeing up them to do police work while cutting costs.

But a September Tribune story noted the city has made little progress in hiring civilians to the new administrative positions — 100 of them being in Boik’s old constitutional policing office that is now seeing 37 cuts.

Boik noted that one of the biggest impediments to hiring on the civilian side are internal issues with Chicago government.

The steps required to bring on a civilian employee at the Police Department start with the budget office approving the position to be filled. Then, the Police Department’s hiring manager must finalize the job description and clear it with the Office of Public Safety Administration and the Department of Human Resources. From there, the posting goes live and DHR oversees minimum screening qualifications before handing a batch of applicants back to the Police Department to conduct interviews.

That process has at times averaged half a year but can blow past nine months.

Faced with a nearly $1 billion projected budget deficit next year, Johnson was surely turning over every rock looking for fat to trim. And as a progressive mayor who faced attacks for his previous support of the “defund the police” movement, touching sworn positions would have enraged pro-law enforcement critics, with or without a budget crunch.

Ferguson still said Johnson could have been served just as well by eliminating empty slots in the patrol division, especially given that the department’s hiring of new officers remains slow, and a workforce allocation study that would help determine where cops are put to their best use is still pending.

Johnson this week did tout that he will fulfill his campaign promise to hire 200 detectives by the end of this year. But as of last month, the department’s net detective headcount has not budged: There were 1,102 total detectives as of May 2023, and 1,104 as of September. His budget office did not respond to an inquiry on what progress has been made as of this week.

On the pro-police side, the mayor’s CPD budget is also catching flak from aldermen who say that the sluggish civilianization effort this year, coupled with next year’s slashed civilian positions, amounts to de facto defunding of the police.

“We reduced sworn positions and then increased nonsworn positions, and now we’re eliminating nonsworn positions and saying, ‘Don’t worry about it. These are not police,’” Ald. Brian Hopkins, 2nd, told the Tribune. “It’s a backdoor way to reduce police staffing, and that is another concern I have.”

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