Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling vowed Wednesday to resist any attempt to eliminate altogether 984 police vacancies — even as Mayor Brandon Johnson struggles to erase a $1.15 billion shortfall after two straight years of deficit spending.
Johnson has ordered all of his department heads to cut 3 to 5% from their 2025 budgets.
Instead of cutting vacancies, Snelling said he plans to meet that $92 million mandate through a hiring slowdown. He plans to hold open those 984 police positions, but budget less money for those vacancies he knows the city won’t be able to fill.
“We do understand… that there’s a budget crisis and everybody is going to have to take a haircut,” Snelling told the City Council’s Budget Committee Wednesday during mid-year budget hearings.
“I just want to be careful that we don’t just eliminate positions. But if those positions can sit there funded at a much lower rate and we know that we’re not going to be able to hire those people, that would be an effective way of saving dollars.”
Budget Chair Jason Ervin (28th) asked Snelling how he could possibly absorb a $92 million hit without impacting police service.
“We don’t,” the superintendent said.
Ervin agreed, adding, “I don’t know how to sugarcoat the fact that, if you cut $92 million out of your budget, your service is going to suffer for that.” Snelling replied, “This is true.”
Deputy Director for Oversight Coordination Ryan Fitzsimons noted that the department has “given up…over 1,200 positions” since 2019 and, “at this point, we don’t have a lot to give.”
Eliminating “non-sworn” administrative and record-keeping positions would only save the city between $2 million and $3 million, he said. Wiping out vacancies earmarked for sworn officers would save the city $77 million. Abolishing vacancies tied to complying with a consent decree outlining the terms of federal court oversight over the Chicago Police Department would save another $20 million.
“We were able to try and discuss some revenue ideas — especially recovering some of our costs for special events. And then, we also discussed potentially keeping positions in the budget, but budgeting those positions at a lower figure to make sure that we are keeping the structure of the Chicago Police Department intact, but maybe minimizing the amount of money that we need to raise to keep our operations ongoing,” Fitzsimons said.
“We fully realize that lean times are coming,” Fitzsimons added. “We’ve already been giving pretty dramatically over the last six years. And it’s trying to think about, what is the structure of the Chicago Police Department in the future.”
As a community activist and former paid organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, Johnson once said it was a political goal to defund the police — a call that grew in popularity across the country during the protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd.
The mayor walked that comment back as a mayoral candidate, insisting that it wasn’t his personal goal to slash the police budget. He promised not to cut “one penny” from CPD’s $2 billion-plus spending plan, but then balanced his first two budgets by eliminating hundreds of police vacancies.
During last year’s protracted budget stalemate, Johnson was forced to restore 162 police jobs tied to implementing the consent decree after Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul threatened to ask a federal judge to hold the city in contempt. Most of those jobs remain unfilled.
What Ald. Michelle Harris (8th) called the “downsizing” of the Chicago Police Department helps to explain why the department had already wracked up $128 million in overtime spending through August. That puts the department on pace to spend $192 million in 2025 — topping last year’s police overtime record of $156 million.
“We are cooking the bread with less bakers,” Harris said.