{"id":308870,"date":"2010-02-11T11:28:27","date_gmt":"2010-02-11T16:28:27","guid":{"rendered":"tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c60fd53ef0120a88d6f87970b"},"modified":"2010-02-11T12:38:42","modified_gmt":"2010-02-11T17:38:42","slug":"daley-orders-police-management-review-to-put-more-officers-on-street","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/308870","title":{"rendered":"Daley orders police management review to put more officers on street"},"content":{"rendered":"

Posted by John Byrne and Hal Dardick<\/em> at 10:27 a.m.; last updated at 11:39 a.m.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mayor Richard Daley today ordered a review of Chicago Police Department management that he said is designed to ensure more officers are returned to street duty.<\/p>\n

"There’s a variety of things we’re looking at in terms of management, but the key is police officers on the street," the mayor said at City Hall news conference.<\/p>\n

The police review came as the mayor announced a 6 percent budget cut for city departments, except for those dealing with \u201ccritical safety operations.\u201d The cuts also will not affect \u201cservice delivery,\u201d Daley said.\n<\/p>\n

When pressed, however, Daley did not explain exactly what would be cut. \u201cEverything, a variety of things we will look at,\u201d he said. \u201cEach department will have to look at that and figure that out.\u201d<\/p>\n

"As part of my commitment to get more for every taxpayer dollar, I have ordered a comprehensive management review of Chicago Police Department headquarters to assure that we are using every possible dollar to prevent and fight crime in our streets and in our neighborhoods,\u201d Daley said. \u201cThis will include returning as many police officers as possible to street duty."\u00a0<\/p>\n

"This builds on our efforts last year to re-tune our crime fighting efforts and return 154 officers to neighborhood street duty," Daley said.<\/p>\n

While Daley’s cost-cutting mandate will hit non-personnel expenses in the city budget, the mayor also said the city will need to rein in spending on employee pension obligations in order to cut its budget deficit going forward.
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<\/br>"How can we better control personnel spending, including the growing cost of pensions? Remember, the growing cost of personnel drives our structural budget deficit. Every year we spend more than 80 percent — I want to underline that, 80 percent — of the operation budget on personnel costs," Daley said.
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<\/br>"Pensions have to be — everybody knows this. We have been sitting with the unions and telling them the problem will not go away. You wish it could go away. It will not go away," he said. "The Civic Committee has issued reports on this. This will not go away. You’re better off to deal with it as immediately as possible, because every day, every month, every year, it’s going to get worse. And you can see what the state is going through, unfortunately. And all pension funds in the country are in the same position. Local, county, state pension funds are in the same position."
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<\/br>The mayor would not discuss specifics, but said pension payments have to be retooled.
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<\/br>"There’s a number of items they have talked about — I can’t go into them — dealing, sitting down with all the contractual employees, and telling them that otherwise these pension funds are going to be in jeopardy. They cannot earn their earnings off their pension investments. People are living longer, so it’s undo costs for pension funds, so that’s what you have to look at," he said.<\/p>\n

The 6 percent cuts, which won’t include personnel reductions, will save about $11 million, the administration estimates. The latest cost-cutting measures come on top of unpaid days off and other concessions faced by both union and non-union city workers.<\/p>\n

Daley said there\u2019s no sign that \u201cconservative revenue projections\u201d for the 2010 budget are not on target, but added, \u201cWe know that we continue to face large deficits this year and the next few years as the economy slowly, slowly recovers.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Posted by John Byrne and Hal Dardick at 10:27 a.m.; last updated at 11:39 a.m. Mayor Richard Daley today ordered a review of Chicago Police Department management that he said is designed to ensure more officers are returned to street duty. "There’s a variety of things we’re looking at in terms of management, but the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3992,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-308870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3992"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308870"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308870\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}