By Fran Spielman
The Chicago Sun-Times
CHICAGO — The city will hire as many as 200 more police officers next year — in addition to the 120-member class that entered the police academy last month — to ease a severe manpower shortage, City Hall sources said Monday.
Mayor Daley is expected to announce today that his final budget will include funding for Chicago’s first police entrance exam in four years and the hiring of two more classes from the new list, each including 75 to 100 recruits.
A two-year hiring slowdown has left the Chicago Police Department more than 2,300 officers a day short of authorized strength, counting vacancies, medical leave and limited duty.
The shortage triggered a police protest last month and prompted Daley to propose taking scores of police officers out of community policing.
The new classes go above and beyond the 100 new officers Daley promised in July after a stunning outbreak of violence that saw three police officers gunned down in two months.
Still, Ald. Anthony Beale (9th), chairman of the City Council’s Police Committee, was unimpressed.
“This is just putting a Band-Aid on a large open wound that’s not gonna heal,” Beale said.
“It’s nowhere near enough. You probably have a couple hundred people retiring. It’s not gonna be a net gain.”
Beale has been pressuring Daley to “level the playing field” for minorities by dropping the 1997 requirement that applicants complete at least two years of college.
The alderman also wants to streamline the hiring process by grading the new police exam on the spot so applicants know where they stand when they leave the testing site.
On Sept. 1, a new class of 120 recruits entered the police academy to start their six months of training, honoring the mayor’s modest hiring promise but depleting a 2006 hiring list.
The city had three options: scrap the police entrance exam altogether; hire an outside consultant to draft a new exam or take the testing process back in-house.
Daley chose to hold a new exam, but in a way that would speed the process because time is of the essence.
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