If he hadn’t seen it, Eric Hudson wouldn’t have believed it. Fifteen to 20 young men—gangbangers, he calls them—out on the street as the police cars pulled in.
The apocalyptic worldview Hudson has taken away from these experiences is echoed by a dozen or so police officers I’ve talked to over the last few weeks. They don’t want their names used because they fear retaliation, but they’re surprisingly candid about their growing sense of helplessness.
The 2009 budget accounted for 7,813 beat officers, the 2008 budget for 7,976. That was a jump over 2007, but the overall direction has been down. There were over 8,000 beat officers in 2000.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
And if there are 7,413 beat officers in the current budget, that doesn’t mean there are 7,413 beat officers on the streets. A budget is nothing more than a projection of what a department expects to pay for in the coming months. The city doesn’t guarantee that it will make good on these projections, and it hasn’t made good on it with beat cops.
(Actually, I’m making an optimistic assumption here that the money’s being spent at all. If the recent report by Chicago’s inspector general on Central Loop TIF expenditures is any indication, the money not being spent on beat cops might just be sitting unnoticed in some bank account.)
At least 700 beat cops are usually on disability or medical leave, according to the city. And at least 750 rarely, if ever, see the street. These are the cops inside the stations who answer phones, book suspects, file documents, guard the lockup, and assist the commander. Another 950 are assigned to special units, such as the vice squad, the mobile strike force, and the gang-crimes unit.
Then a high-ranking police insider showed me some documents. On a recent day shift, there were fewer than 1,100 officers actually working the streets. Compare this force of first responders with the 75,000 gang members the police estimate are out there. “We’re outmanned,” says this officer.
