A seven-paragraph Nov. 25 press release from Mayor Brandon Johnson on 2025 budgeting for the Chicago Police Department (CPD) included this sentence:

"In recent months, CPD launched a workforce allocation study to comprehensively evaluate staffing levels across all bureaus and ranks, including sworn and civilian positions."

This was the city's first written notice that it had signed a contract for a study that aims to conclusively determine where, when, and how to deploy Chicago cops—and that includes a pledge to make the results public.

The contract—titled "Agreement to Provide Professional Consulting Services to City of Chicago"—was executed on Oct. 24 with Matrix Consulting Group of San Mateo, California. The contract "shall commence November 1, 2024 and shall conclude on October 31, 2025."

The city and its law enforcement agency inked the 50-plus page agreement six months after the date required by municipal law—a violation previously called "embarrassing" by 47th Ward Ald. Matt Martin, the law's sponsor.

Inside Chicago Government obtained the contract through a records request. Among the contract's reveals:

• The vendor, Matrix, will receive a maximum of $760,588 for the project, paid by a philanthropic consortium led by the Commercial Club Foundation.
• CPD will establish a steering committee to "oversee" the project. But the contract doesn't identify the committee's responsibilities, procedures, or scope of authority.
• The steering committee will include representatives from the Commercial Club Foundation and the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability. Regarding other committee members, CPD will "consider appointing" CPD leaders, mayor's office staff, and "community representative(s)."
• As an initial deliverable, Matrix will identify the current allocation of CPD's entire workforce, by role, both badged and civilian.
• Each of the project's six phases will include undefined "community engagement"—as well as updates for unidentified "internal and external stakeholders."

Regarding CPD's largest contingent, the Bureau of Patrol (i.e., street cops): Matrix "may" provide the "assumptions and thresholds used by peer [police] departments" to guide its staffing recommendations.

That language touches on one of the many questions that the contract elicits: What parameters or standards of service will Matrix use to decide on optimum staffing levels? That question was posed as early as last winter by 28th Ward Ald. Jason Ervin.

During a Feb. 5 meeting of the City Council's Committee on Police and Fire, Ervin urged his colleagues—as proxies for their constituents—to establish study assumptions up front.

"What if we say that burglaries are the driving factor in how we're gonna allocate staffing?" Ervin said. "But when we do the burglary allocation, we see we don't like it—and we say, well, no; we're not gonna do burglaries. Now we're gonna do carjacking."

"If we don't do that [beforehand], I don't know if the result that we're going to get is really what we want," Ervin said. "I mean, we've had staffing studies done, and they're probably sitting on somebody's library shelf somewhere."

It's not clear what input, if any, the City Council will have to the workforce study as it progresses—especially given how CPD has sidelined the council to date.

The workforce study law that the council passed in February requires CPD to send a study update to all aldermen every three months. So far, however, CPD has issued only one update, in June—which it sent only to Ald. Martin.

As of this writing CPD has not, despite requests, made staff available to answer questions about the workforce study contract.

Document: workforce allocation study contract (requires Cloutmeister or higher subscription):