- Emanuel also intends to take police vacancies off the books to save money, ending the shell game where Daley and aldermen set aside money to fill Police Department vacancies but spent the money elsewhere.
"Finally, we're going to end the charade of carrying hundreds of police officer vacancies without actually hiring them. Protecting public safety requires officers on the beat, not phantom cops on the books. Yet, for years the city kept listing vacancies without ever filling them. Everybody knew what was going on, but nobody let the public in on it," according to a prepared copy of Emanuel's speech.
"Well, I'm not going to play that game any longer. We need to be honest with the people of Chicago. So those police vacancies -- and the tax dollars supposedly allocated to them -- are coming off the books," Emanuel intends to say. "My budget will pay for two classes of cadets at the Police Academy next year. They will be real officers on the beat -- not ghost officers on a budget line."
So we guess that everything we've been saying, along with our readers, other bloggers, the FOP and such has been absolutely 100% true and accurate - we were horrendously shorthanded for the better part of the past decade.
But now we're not evidently.
But now we're not evidently.