The city of Chicago spent about $367 million on overtime for city workers in 2020, more than double what Mayor Lori Lightfoot budgeted for the year.
Lightfoot’s budget department attributed the spike to the COVID-19 response, civil unrest stemming from the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd and enhanced security due to the 2020 presidential election.
“Without these unpredictable and unplanned events, the city’s 2020 overtime spend would be more aligned with budgeted cost,” spokeswoman Kristen Cabanban said in a statement.
Ald. Raymond Lopez, 15th, questioned whether the city’s spending was effective, citing a major spike in Chicago violent crime.
“I don’t think they got their money’s worth. I think most of our statistics, particularly those related to crime show that doling out overtime like drunken sailors didn’t make our city safer. As we’ve seen twofold increases in carjackings, violent crime … significantly higher than the year previous and in some cases the highest it’s been in five years, all that extra money was spent with nothing to show for it,” Lopez said.
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Asked about Lopez’s criticism, Lightfoot budget director Susie Park referred questions about crime to police but said, “a lot of this year was everything coming together.
“Given all of that, for a lot of these unplanned events, overtime is one part of the solution,” Park said.
Police officials are working with the administration to review overtime budgets and implement spending limits, CPD said in a statement.
“Ensuring public safety is the foremost duty of CPD. We are also keenly aware that we have a critical responsibility to be judicious with the taxpayer resources,” the statement said. “To that end, the Department is continuously working to find the most efficient and effective ways to deploy our resources and coordinate our response.”
Lightfoot has said she wants to curb Chicago police overtime, which she said is an overused crime strategy. But so far, the city has not been able to reverse a yearslong trend in overtime cost spikes.
Records show the city spent $177,486,176 on police overtime in 2020. Lightfoot set aside nearly $96 million for police overtime in her budget.
Chicago spent roughly $140 million on police overtime in 2019, records show.
The Police Department in recent years has stepped up its overtime spending in the face of national headlines highlighting Chicago’s violence problem, and the expense keeps mounting.
In 2012, the city spent $53 million on police overtime, a year in which there were more than 500 homicides in Chicago. At that time, the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents rank-and-file Chicago cops, decried overtime spending as a “Band-Aid approach,” calling for the city to instead hire more officers.
The following year, the department started an overtime initiative that called for 400 extra cops each day to work in 20 “impact zones” within the most dangerous neighborhoods on the South and West sides. By the end of November 2013, overtime costs totaled about $96 million — triple the $32 million budgeted for the year.
In 2017, the city’s inspector general found that the department had failed to closely monitor overtime and had not taken measures to prevent officers from abusing the system to pile up additional pay. The report found the city had spent a combined $575 million on officer overtime over the previous six years.
The Chicago Fire Department spent $95,352,235 on overtime, compared with roughly $39 million that the city budgeted for the year.
Last year, the city experienced two waves of looting that devastated downtown and Chicago neighborhoods. Responding to that, the mayor created a plan to call garbage trucks and other city vehicles into service to be what one worker described as a “blockade on wheels.”
That’s been costly too as the Department of Streets and Sanitation budgeted roughly $7 million for overtime but spent $20,562,895.
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