Jessica Villagomez
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — Weeks after being told it must overhaul the way it investigates violent crime, the Chicago Police Department announced Tuesday it is reorganizing and expanding its detective divisions so investigators can respond more quickly to crime scenes and be more available to witnesses and families of victims.
The change — increasing the number of divisions from three to five across the city — was at the top of a long list of recommendations released in October by a police research firm that spent a year reviewing how the department could improve its dismal clearance rate.
The move will headquarter more detectives on the West and Northwest sides and is expected to be completed by April.
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“Our best improvement would be making detectives more responsive,” interim Chicago Police Superintendent Charlie Beck said at a news conference. “My goal in the time I’m here is to make CPD as effective as I can and some of that is about reorganization.”
In 2012, the city closed the Harrison and Grand Central detective divisions as part of then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to ease a budget gap that amounted to $636 million. Then-police Superintendent Garry McCarthy at the time said the changes would save the city millions, though specialized police units still used the area facilities.
The 341 detectives who worked there were moved to other stations on the North, South and Far South sides. The divisions were renamed Area North, Area Central and Area South. Detectives housed in these areas investigate serious crime, including homicides, shootings and sexual assaults.
Detectives assigned to Area North cover nine of the city’s 22 patrol districts. The nine districts are on the North, Northwest and West sides. Those working out of Area Central cover eight districts on the South and Southwest sides, parts of the West Side, the downtown area and the Near North Side. Detectives in Area South cover five districts in other parts of the South Side, including those bordering northwest Indiana and the south suburbs.
The Fraternal Order of Police, which represents detectives and other rank-and-file officers, criticized the closing of the Harrison and Grand Central areas, predicting it would mean take longer for detectives to get to crime scenes.
In 2016, then-Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson floated the idea of moving detectives back to the Harrison and Grand Central areas. Johnson was once a detective sergeant assigned to the Harrison Area on the West Side.
Then in October, the Police Executive Research Forum released a 116-page report concluding the department needed to tackle deep-rooted problems with how detectives are trained, promoted and deployed.
The department’s clearance rate on homicides has been lagging in recent years, falling some 20 percentage points behind other major cities by the end of 2018. While it has improved over the last year or so, the rate remains below 50% and is far behind New York City and Los Angeles, which both have more detectives.
In Chicago, 8.4% of the department is made up of detectives compared to 11.4% in New York City and 15.4% in Los Angeles, according to the report.
Chuck Wexler, executive director of the research forum, zeroed in on the decision to close two of the department’s five detective divisions.
“When you went from five to three, there wasn’t much planning when that happened,” Wexler said. “You had detectives pushed into three (areas). Some of them didn’t have desks, didn’t have computers. ... Detectives would have to travel almost an hour to get to certain parts of the city.”
The report called for those two divisions to be restored — something Mayor Lori Lightfoot had already proposed.
Many of the issues in the report were examined in a series of Tribune articles last year that looked at a particularly violent weekend over the summer and weighed the challenges police face in solving crimes. In the middle of the series, Johnson announced that the Police Executive Research Forum would evaluate the department.
On Tuesday, Deputy Chief of Detectives Brendan Deenihan acknowledged that victims of crime on the West Side have had to travel long distances to meet with detectives and reopening the two areas will close that gap.
Under the current arrangement, for example, detectives working the Area North bureau in the Lakeview neighborhood have to travel 8 or 9 miles to get to violent crime scenes in some parts of the West Side, which routinely tally among the highest numbers of shootings and homicides in the city each year.
“By then many witnesses are gone and evidence may have been contaminated,” Deenihan said.
The five redrawn areas will be known by numbers. The new Area 4 will be headquartered at 3151 W. Harrison Ave. and the new Area 5 will be at 5555 W. Grand Ave. Areas 4 and 5 will have technology centers to access video from surveillance systems.
The department plans to use existing resources as a part of the “reincarnation” of the divisions, Beck said. Currently there are 1,100-1,200 detectives that will be assigned across the city based on the case volume of the areas.
“Spreading resources more widely in order to facilitate building relationships is important one of the thing we’re looking at is making the districts more involved in detective work, building relationships is key,” Beck said.