Daley To Add Hundreds Of Police Officers
UPDATED October 12, 2010 5:56 p.m.
CHICAGO (CBS) - Mayor Richard M. Daley announced Tuesday that he plans to return hundreds of police officers to the streets in the coming year.
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"Our first priority remains putting more police officers on the street," said Mayor Daley at a news conference offering a sneak peek at a key item in the 2011 budget.
As CBS 2's Roseanne Tellez reports, the mayor said that greater police presence is key to fighting crime and announced Tuesday that by Fall 2011, the city will have added as many 830 officers to the street – through both reassignments of existing officers and the hiring of new Police Academy graduates.
In the past year, 212 officers have been transferred from desk to street duty. In addition, 111 will be moved from Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy community policing duties to the street within the next week.
The department also has hired 314 new officers in the past year and a half and next year, the city will conduct two more police classes, which should add 150 to 200 more new officers. The city is also seeking a new firm to administer a new entry-level police exam, the mayor's office said.
But Mark Donahue, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said the numbers don't keep pace with attrition.
"Just in the last nine months we've lost 417 (officers), they've hired 314 in the last 18 months. The figures don't lie," Donahue said. "The message he appears to be sending is 'the Calvary's on the way', when in fact there are no bodies on the horses," he said.
Police Superintendent Jody Weis said the department is trying to keep pace with attrition, but said that better deployment is another key.
"We've done really well with the numbers. Look at our homicide rates. We're below 2007 pace, that's the lowest year since 1965," Weis said.
Daley said the city budget, to be unveiled Wednesday, requires creativity and fiscal responsibility. "People are suffering it's a very tough economy. You have to do more with less," he said.
Rank-and-file police officers have been complaining for many months about low manpower. The anonymous officer behind the popular Second City Cop Chicago Police blog regularly vents about how officers are asked to do more with less.
For one example, the blog reported that several North and Northwest side police districts were losing beat cars on the night watch to the Grand Central District on the West Side due to lack of manpower in that district.
