New Year, New Rumor

This one appeared in the comments a day or so ago. Remember, for a rumor to sound believable, it needs to have some elements of truth in it - and this one seems to:

• I’m hearing it is Dana “Big mama” O’Malley who will be the civilian Commissioner and the 1st Dept.  The plan is to streamline upper management and eliminate most exempt positions. Commissioner will be a Sworn member (Ursitti). One Chief to oversee the Dept under 1st and remainder chief positions will be eliminated. Most Deputy Chiefs eliminated with exception one for operations and one for administration and one for each Area (combining Patrol and Detectives for intelligence sharing reasons) and 3 street deputies with 10 hour shifts - 4 hour gap will be handled by day deputies. 
• One Commander per district and one commander per Area D unit. BCT will be cut down dramatically with Narcotics, Asset Forfeiture and Gangs merging. Vice gone and Intelligence scaled down focusing only on anti-terrorism efforts. All other units canine, airports, and swat etc will have one Commander, One Lt. and everything else run by Sgts.
• Lt.’s will have large screens in their offices which will show the district in real time with red dots corresponding to each gps’d squad car. If you leave your beat it will beep and immediately alert the Lt and your supervisor. This is being done for beat integrity and accountability.
• With murders at a ten year low and violent crime down with 2000+ police vacancies it showed them it can be done. Paying OT is still way cheaper than paying insurance and benefits for 2200 new hires. All the OT nonsense in the media is just smoke and mirrors. Eliminating all of those exempt spots will save millions over a several year plan, reduce larger pension payouts and will fulfill the Mayor’s original plan to “defund the police” by not hiring for attrition and in essence doing a reverse layoff and ultimately wiping/eliminating another 2K sworn positions as Rahm did. Based on the city’s population compared to others our size we still have too many officers even with eliminating the 2K.  

We did hear that Heineken sent out a letter gutting OT initiatives, and we wrote hear last month about there being only 350 hiring slots during all of 2026, with almost one-thousand potential retirees, so manpower is on a downward slope regardless.