Addition By Subtraction?

What the...?!!!

• In the Police Department, the elimination of detention aides may mean increased officer time in the district lockup facilities. But with the addition of 21 new sergeants, deployment on the streets should be improved. There will be civilian layoffs relating to data entry but those efforts will be supplemented with an existing city contract, so there will be no impact on public safety.

That's from the City's own press release. Let's just dissect that paragraph a little bit:

• elimination of detention aides - that means upwards of 50 or more police officers off the streets on all three watches. Officer safety necessitates a minimum staffing of District lockups. Some Districts run with one PO and two DAs, others one PO and one DA. Area lockups have male and female DAs. Central Detention is a whole other combination of POs and DAs;
• increased officer time in the district lockup facilities - no shit. And that means less officer time on the streets, where they really ought to be;
• the addition of 21 new sergeants, deployment on the streets should be improved - um...how? that's at least 21 less officers on the street;
• civilian layoffs relating to data entry - is this the contact card debacle? Because we're getting all sorts of stories about entire Tactical teams being held down to enter their contact cards already and two extra officers being added to the desk crews who's sole purpose is to enter contact cards that are months old...the contact cards that are supposed to be purged after 90 days or so.

And then the "promise" of 200 hires next year:

• Of the 1,346 vacant jobs that Daley plans to eliminate, none are sworn police officers. But Fraternal Order of Police President Mark Donahue called that a “shell game.”

  That’s because Daley is counting on saving $10 million by slowing police hiring to a crawl — with only 200 officers hired during all of 2009.

  With 450 sworn vacancies by Dec. 31, and an annual attrition rate of 600, Chicago could be “down 850 police officers by the end of 2009,” Donahue said.

And that's not even counting the possibility of a Detective promotion class or something larger than 21 Sergeants that will short every arm of the Department another few bodies. Even Ike Carothers sees a problem:

• “There’s going to be less police on the street. No doubt about it….Crime is going up every day. It’ll have an impact. No doubt about it,” Carothers said.

It certainly will.