Manpower Down Again

(This is from a Tribune Digital Plus story - you may need a password to read the connected article)

Evidently, Rahm lied....again:

• By fall 2011, months after taking office, Mayor Rahm Emanuel said he had fulfilled a campaign pledge to move some 1,000 cops to beat patrols to beef up the Police Department's front lines in the fight on crime.
  
  But in the more than two years since then, those numbers have plunged by hundreds of cops, the city's own data show.
  
  In spite of a renewed hiring push over the past two years, the department has struggled to keep up with retirements, in part because of sweetened medical benefits for police retirees as part of a cost-saving move a few years ago.
  
  According to the data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, the department had 7,078 rank-and-file officers and supervisors assigned to work in its 22 patrol districts as of Dec. 8, a decline of 10 percent, or 779 beat officers, since fall 2011.

The article goes on to point out pretty much everything that we've covered here for the past few years via our own observations and those of our readers - actual cops on the front lines who see the plain unvarnished truth behind the political smoke, including:

• hiring not keeping pace with retirement attrition;
• disbanding of various citywide teams and then counting them as "officers back on patrol" when they were already on patrol, just under a different name;
• staffing declines across the "safer" north side districts;
• the spike in robberies in formerly "safer"districts, including the notorious beat 1924, which ranked 6th in the city and led to the "Crime in Boystown" blog being created;
• near constant Radio Assignments Pending (RAPs or backlogs) where manpower has been severely cut;
• the closing of districts that supposedly led to "surpluses" of officers but was actually fewer officers patrolling vastly expanded boundaries;
• the $100 million in overtime - a bandaid on a gaping wound.

 Glad to see the media is finally catching up, but we doubt it will affact anything Rahm does.