RESOLUTION
WHEREAS, The Chicago Police Department has long struggled with adequate response times for Chicago residents that dial 911 due to the high volume of calls for assistance and inadequate number of police to respond; and,
WHEREAS, This common practice also includes critical situations in which the department's own policy calls for an "immediate" or "high-priority" response; and,
WHEREAS, The Chicago Tribune's (2023) analysis of the 2022 city data on CPD response times highlight that the wait times for police are particularly long in several South and West Side districts where the majority of residents are Black; and,
WHEREAS, The data indicates that the wait time for an officer to be dispatched for high-priority calls was over an hour for nearly 1 out of every 24 citywide high-priority calls; and,
WHEREAS, The wait times for dispatch are even more likely to exceed an hour for lower-priority calls known as "rapid" and "routine" dispatches; and,
WHEREAS, The department's calculations excluded a third of the calls from the data in instances where the arrival time was never logged; and,
WHEREAS, The city data in the Tribune report indicates that in District 3 on the South Side, nearly 1 out of every 7 high-priority calls had a wait time of over an hour. In comparison to District 20, on the North Side, where only 1 in every 540 high-priority calls had a response time over an hour; and,
WHEREAS, The City of Chicago must reconceptualize trie-process and policies in place regarding the alarming response times for dispatching the police that city data released for 2022 indicates, and particularly in the South and West Sides where the response times routinely exceed the response times seen in other parts of the city; now, therefore,
BE IT RESOLVED BY THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF CHICAGO, That we, the members of the City Council of the City of Chicago, call upon the Committee on Public Safety to convene a hearing to examine the failure of maintaining adequate...
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