By Sam Charles
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — A long-awaited analysis of the Chicago Police Department’s staffing and deployment calls for the hiring of hundreds more officers while urging scores of other positions be shifted to civilians.
Citing “real and uneven staffing pressures,” the study and model developed by California-based Matrix Consulting Group found that “while overall staffing levels may appear stable, workload analysis shows significant variation by geography, unit, and function, resulting in inconsistent service levels, constrained proactive time, and limited supervisory capacity in high-demand areas.”
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Allyson Clark Henson, executive director of CPD’s Office of Constitutional Policing and Reform, told the Tribune that the study recommended CPD shift about 600 positions from sworn officers to civilians, while hiring an additional 270 officers and creating 90 new sergeant positions.
Clark Henson noted, too, that the Matrix model can serve as the department’s North Star for years to come.
“The results of this (study) provide for us a foundational analytical framework that’s going to be able to guide a multiyear initiative that’s replicable, it’s data-driven and it allows us to evaluate staffing,” Henson said. “This isn’t a static report. This is something that will allow us to evaluate staffing needs as conditions change on an ongoing basis.”
CPD released an executive summary of the report Wednesday, and the full report is expected to be published in the coming weeks.
CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling said he was not surprised by the study’s takeaways, but praised its comprehensiveness.
“There are a lot of suggestions in here that I expected, like (hiring) more police officers (and) more supervisors. That was the expectation,” Snelling told the Tribune. “But as we go through and we see the final product, it’ll shed a little more light on what we’re doing right now, so I’m very optimistic about what we’re seeing.”
The study is the first of its kind since 2021. That analysis, conducted by the University of Chicago Crime Lab, found deployment levels decline during the weekend overnight time periods when shootings are most common.
However, a year later, former police Superintendent David Brown called the study lacking. He announced plans to seek his own officer deployment evaluation — plans that never came together before he left his post in March 2023.
Matrix found CPD places sworn officers into administrative and supportive roles at a far greater rate than other comparable police departments, and reassigning those officers to street work — where their training and skills would be of most use — would have widespread benefits.
“Civilianization is not a workforce reduction strategy; rather, it is a redeployment strategy intended to ensure sworn officers are assigned where police authority and training are most needed,” the study’s summary reads.
City employment data shows that of CPD’s 12,200 employees, about 11,500 are sworn police officers.
The prospect of reassigning hundreds of officers and sergeants — all of whom are represented by collective bargaining units — will require CPD leaders to carefully assess each position considered for change.
“CPD recognizes that civilianization recommendations cannot be implemented wholesale,” the study summary says. “Each recommendation must be evaluated through the lenses of collective bargaining obligations, historical role classifications, operational risk, and budget feasibility. As a result, CPD is undertaking a structured validation process … to determine which civilianization recommendations can be advanced in the near term and which require longer-range planning or modification.”
John Catanzara, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, which represents rank-and-file CPD officers and detectives, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In January, during a status hearing in the city’s federal consent decree, CPD officials said increased civilian hiring efforts were already underway. By the end of 2026, they said, the Police Department hopes to hire 25 civilian investigators to be assigned to the Bureau of Internal Affairs.
The study — mandated by the consent decree — has remained an elusive target for the Police Department. Snelling previously blamed “red tape” for the repeated delays in producing it.
“The answer that many workforce allocation studies say — they usually say — is, ‘You need more police,’” Tim Daly, director of the Gun Violence Prevention & Justice Reform Program at the Joyce Foundation, one of the study’s funders, told the Chicago Police Board in November 2024. “And that’s where I think it could lead to some tough decisions.”
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