Consent Decree Monitor Warns of Potential Chicago Police Budget Cuts

The independent monitor assessing the city’s compliance with a federal consent decree issued a dire warning Tuesday as proposed budget cuts once again loom over the Chicago Police Department’s Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform.

“Cutting these positions permanently could be a devastating blow to the future of CPD reforms,” Maggie Hickey, head of the independent monitoring team, told U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer during a consent decree status hearing Tuesday.

“The proposed budget cuts would be a step backward for the CPD reform process at a pivotal point,” Hickey said, “just when progress is starting to be felt.”

Pallmeyer, overseeing the consent decree’s progress, echoed Hickey, noting the progress made so far but recognizing the work that remains for CPD to reach full compliance.

“Every requirement needs to be implemented, and that means that it’s going to cost city funds in order for that to happen, to do the work and achieve the kind of change that we’re seeking,” Pallmeyer added. “There has been significant progress, and we’ve seen some, but there’s a lot of work that still is left to do. We all recognize that.”

Hickey’s and Pallmeyer’s comments came amid intense pushback from aldermen to Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposed 2025 city budget.

Johnson’s $17.3 billion spending plan for the city includes $2.1 billion for CPD, a $58.7 million increase from 2024.

But it also calls for 456 vacant positions to be cut — 98 of them sworn and 358 civilian — a move to trim more than $50 million in salary and other costs.

Johnson did not address the situation in a news conference Tuesday, but did so last week.

“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.”

The mayor’s budget recommendation would cut staffing for the Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform from 65 to 28. Established by interim 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 some 27% under Johnson’s proposal, taking it to 237 employees.

The professional counseling division that provides 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 from 19 to 17.

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

Addressing Pallmeyer, Hickey and the other parties to the consent decree, Superintendent Larry Snelling on Tuesday again said the department remains committed to consent decree compliance.

“From the very beginning when these cuts were presented to us, the number one thing we wanted to make sure is that we had people to continue to work toward the consent decree,” Snelling said at the hearing.

“Those were the positions that we fought for first,” Snelling said. “We’re going to continue to fight for them because this consent decree, the progress that I believe that we are making now, I don’t want to break that momentum and I want to make sure that we keep going in the right direction.”

Personnel challenges have been a department issue for years, and despite the ongoing consent decree, the 2025 budget proposal does not represent the first time that CPD’s Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform has been targeted in a budget pinch.

In August 2022, under the leadership of former Superintendent David Brown, the department moved nearly four dozen officers from the reform office to the bureau of patrol. The former executive director of OCPR was fired by Brown after he protested the reassignments.

Staffing levels, along with data collection and retention, continue to plague the department’s reform efforts, according to the monitoring team.

“Overall, the city’s and the CPD’s compliance efforts continue to lag and, after several reporting periods of minimal progress, bring into question the city’s and the CPD’s commitment to implementing reforms in community policing practices as required by the consent decree,” the team wrote last year.

Most recently, the monitoring team assessed CPD’s compliance with each of the 552 consent decree paragraphs that apply to the department between January and June 2023. There are three levels of compliance: Preliminary, secondary and full. Preliminary compliance signifies CPD has developed a training curriculum; secondary compliance means training has been implemented; and full compliance means that the policy is fully part of the department’s day-to-day operations.

In the first half of 2023, the monitoring team found the department to be in preliminary compliance with 279 of the decree’s 552 monitorable paragraphs. Secondary compliance was found in 160 paragraphs, while the CPD was in full compliance with 33 paragraphs. No compliance was reached in 74 paragraphs, while six more remain under assessment, according to the monitoring team.

The next assessment report from the independent monitoring team is expected to be released in the coming weeks.

Chicago Tribune’s Alice Yin and A.D. Quig contributed.

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