Chicago will slow police hiring to roughly 50 recruits per month — and put no classes through the training academy again next summer — to generate the $91 million in “turnover” savings needed to help erase the city’s $1.2 billion budget shortfall, police officials told City Council members Wednesday.
Two months ago, Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling vowed to resist any attempt to eliminate 984 police vacancies — even after Mayor Brandon Johnson ordered all of his department heads to cut 3% to 5% from their 2025 budgets.
Instead, Snelling said he would meet the cost-cutting mandate by holding open those 984 police positions, but budgeting less money for those vacancies he knew the city would not be able to fill.
On Wednesday, Snelling told the Council’s Budget Committee that the $2.1 billion that Johnson’s 2026 budget allocates for the Chicago Police Department would do just that. It includes no “reductions in sworn staffing,” nor would any vacancies be eliminated.
But Ryan Fitzsimons, deputy director for oversight coordination, said police hiring will be “staggered” throughout the year.
“We will be pausing some of our recruit classes over the summer, which we did this year, to allow us to better allocate resources out into the field and also tamp down those overtime expenses,” Fitzsimons said.
If police hiring needs to slow down, Snelling said the “best time for that to happen was during the summer.”
“We have less recruits in the academy during the summer. That’s when we have most of our [special] events. We have sworn officers working in the academy. Those people we could use now to go out to some of these events. It reduces overtime,” the superintendent said.
When Far Southwest Side Ald. Matt O’Shea (19th) said the police department will “never get back to the numbers of manpower that we had five years ago,” Snelling agreed.
“This is why it’s important to work smarter. You’re 100% right. Technology is the key,” Snelling said, pointing to helicopter pursuits that have allowed his officers to “solve a crime and immediately take people into custody.”
Southwest Side Ald. Marty Quinn (13th) said he has “concerns about pausing police hiring for three months” at a time when the Chicago Lawn District is struggling to serve the second-largest geographic area in Chicago with a “dangerously low” 249 officers, the fewest number of officers per capita in a city police district.
He’s hoping that a long-awaited workforce allocation study expected to be completed early next year will give him the political ammunition he needs to justify a new station with $6 million in state funding already secured for it.
“I look forward to that deployment analysis because I think it’s gonna tell a story. … I know you know that, sir. And I know that your hands are tied. But what’s happening in the 8th District is dangerous,” Quinn told Snelling.
For years, the city has allocated $100 million for police overtime, only to blow through it — to the tune of $282.8 million in 2023 and $238 million last year.
Johnson’s budget caps police overtime at $200 million and requires Council approval for spending that exceeds the cap.
“You won’t be coming back to us every month?” asked Finance Chair Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd).
“Oh, no ma’am. I hope to stay within the budget,” Snelling replied. “If anything comes up that drives us over, we’ll be ready to talk about that. But right now I’m confident we’re going to work within the confines of that budget.”
Large reductions already achieved support Snelling’s assertion.
Through Sept. 30, Chicago police officers have wracked up just over 2 million overtime hours. That’s down from 2.7 million overtime hours in 2023, and 2.3 million hours last year.
Overtime dashboards have helped command staff keep track of overtime spending and ride herd over their chiefs during monthly crime statistics meetings, Fitzsimons said.
In its own analysis of the police budget, the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability questioned Johnson’s decision to use the so-called Community Safety Fund bankrolled by a proposed, $21 a month per-employee head tax to support the 31 full-time employees assigned to the police department’s Professional Counseling Division.
With more than half the Council opposed to either the tax itself or the size of it, the police department will “need another way to pay” for professional counseling that’s critical to maintaining officer wellness, the commission said.
The civilian oversight panel questioned how a “net loss of nine budgeted positions” in the police department’s training division would impact the department’s slow march toward compliance with the consent decree outlining the terms of federal court oversight of the police department.