1 week Ago By Chip Mitchell
As Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson pushes a bevy of tax hikes to close a 2025 budget gap, he is following a path of previous mayors by setting aside funds for the salaries of hundreds of police officers he has no reasonable hope of hiring, a WBEZ analysis of city data has found. Johnson’s budget recommendation, scheduled for a City Council showdown on Friday, includes 1,056 vacant sworn-officer positions on top of the 11,661 cops employed by CPD as of last month. Factoring in the usual pace of retirements and resignations, actually filling all those positions would take a police hiring surge like few the city has ever seen.
Like overtime and settlement portions of Johnson’s proposed police budget, however, these officers appear to be fictional. Call them ghost cops. CPD hiring has not substantially outpaced the department’s attrition for six years.
That means most of the funds set aside by Johnson for those additional police salaries are destined to be spent on other things. “There’s certainly a transparency problem whenever we are spending money on something different than what we are saying it’s budgeted for,” Chicago Inspector General Deborah Witzburg said. Some public health advocates are pushing an alternative to the ghost cops.
This week Ald. Jessie Fuentes, 26th Ward, filed a proposed budget amendment that would shift an estimated $166 million for those salaries to city public health programs, youth jobs and a guaranteed income pilot that is on Johnson’s budget chopping block. At a City Hall news conference to support the measure this week, Ald.
Rossana Rodríguez-Sánchez, 33rd Ward, said the police positions “are just sitting there, not providing safety for anybody.” “How about we use that money [to] provide safety for people?” Rodríguez-Sánchez asked. But Johnson has shown little interest.
In that regard, he resembles his City Hall predecessors. Lori Lightfoot, mayor from 2019 to 2023, set aside funds for hundreds of ghost cops in each of her four annual budgets. The 2022 version marked a high point for those funded vacancies: 1,566.
Hundreds of ghost cops appeared in all eight of Rahm Emanuel’s city budgets and in many of Richard M. Daley’s too. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson waves beside Ald.
Jessie Fuentes, 26th Ward, during the Puerto Rican People’s Day Parade in June. Fuentes has filed a proposed budget amendment that would shift millions in funds from vacant police positions. Pat Nabong/Sun-Times Walter Katz, deputy chief of public safety under Emanuel from 2017 to 2019, said mayors spurn trimming vacancies from CPD’s budget even when the city’s budget gap is large and when crime is trending down, as they are in Chicago, “because once you’ve given up positions in a budget, it may be more difficult to get them back in the future.
” A former top CPD official who served in recent years said no politician wants headlines about cutting police personnel. That includes Johnson, who struggled in his 2023 mayoral campaign to distance himself from statements that seemed sympathetic with the “defund the police” movement. Spokespersons for Johnson’s office and the city’s Office of Budget and Management did not answer why the mayor has reserved funds for ghost cops in both his annual budgets since taking office in May 2023.
The City Council must approve a budget by Dec. 31. Chip Mitchell reports for WBEZ Chicago on policing, public safety and public health.
WBEZ politics reporter Tessa Weinberg contributed. Follow them at Bluesky: @chipmitchell1 and @tessaweinberg . Follow them at X: @ChipMitchell1 and @Tessa_Weinberg .
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