The latest assessment by the independent monitor has found the Chicago Police Department continues to make incremental progress in its consent decree obligations, but those efforts are under threat because of proposed cutbacks to personnel in the department’s reform office.
CPD’s overall compliance with the consent decree — a set of reforms spurred by the 2014 killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by a former CPD officer — again ticked up in the first six months of 2024, according to the latest assessment report released Tuesday by the independent monitoring team, led by former federal prosecutor Maggie Hickey.
CPD was found to be at some level of compliance with 504 of the 552 “monitorable” paragraphs in the consent decree, Hickey and company found. The department now is at full compliance with 9% of its requirements, up from 7% in the previous monitoring period. Secondary compliance was reached in 37% of monitorable paragraphs in the first half of this year, up from 35% in the last period.
Preliminary compliance, though, fell from 46% in the last monitoring period of 2023 to 45% in the first period of 2024, the monitoring team found.
The measured progress comes as Mayor Brandon Johnson’s spending plan calls for the CPD reform management group responsible for tracking reform efforts consistent with the consent decree to shrink from 19 to 17 staff members.
“Cuts to policy development, training, officer support, and community policing not only risk slowing the already-behind pace of reform — the cuts risk undoing the progress the City and the CPD have made to date,” the monitoring team wrote. “At only about 9% Full compliance with the original Consent Decree, the City should be accelerating the pace of compliance, not just fighting to maintain it.”
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 Police Department employees would drop by about the same percentage, from 35 to 25 employees.
Johnson’s $17.3 billion spending plan for the city does include $2.1 billion for CPD, a $58.7 million increase from 2024.
But his plan 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.
Potential staffing cuts aside, CPD leaders charged with implementing the reforms say the groundwork has been laid for future efforts to succeed.
“When you think about five years (since the consent decree was entered) to get to that 5% mark … what that tells me is that we have found the right mechanisms, the right processes and the right communication lanes to work to ensure that compliance continues to grow,” Angel Novalez, CPD’s chief of constitutional policing and reform, said in an interview last week.
Staffing remains a hurdle to reaching compliance in many areas of the consent decree, especially when it comes to data retention and analysis, according to the monitoring team. CPD has recently selected a vendor to conduct a long-awaited workforce allocation study that, once completed, will allow the department to more effectively deploy resources and personnel.
During a status hearing last week, both Hickey and U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer cautioned that cuts to the CPD’s constitutional policing office could offset the department’s progress so far.
“Cutting these positions permanently could be a devastating blow to the future of CPD reforms,” Hickey said. “The proposed budget cuts would be a step backward for the CPD reform process at a pivotal point 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 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 said.
CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling told Pallmeyer, Hickey, the Illinois attorney general’s office and other involved parties that the constitutional policing spots recommended to be cut “were the positions that we fought for first.”
“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,” Snelling said last Tuesday.
The same day, Attorney General Kwame Raoul wrote to “strongly urge” Johnson against slashing unfilled CPD positions, arguing that the city risks “being held in contempt of court for failing to comply” with the consent decree.
The attorney general’s letter — which he characterized as “notice under the consent decree of my office’s intent to seek court enforcement of the city’s obligations if the currently proposed cuts to CPD’s budget are adopted” — was addressed to Johnson and also sent to city lawyers and Hickey.
“Because of where we are — and the patience and perseverance it has taken to get to this point — I must remind you that the consent decree is not optional,” Raoul wrote. “I understand that the city’s budget constraints require difficult choices to be made. But a binding, court-enforced consent decree takes certain choices off the table.”
Johnson pushed back and noted his administration’s decision to not subject CPD and the Chicago Fire Department to a hiring freeze.
“What we said we were not going to do is lay off police officers and firefighters,” Johnson said last week. “We’ve made a commitment — I did — to hire more detectives, to create better supervision. These are all elements within the consent decree that we have to adhere to. That’s what my administration has done.”
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