Impassioned chants echoed through City Hall at a July 16 press conference that coalesced Black elders and youth organizers around a myriad of efforts, from GoodKids Madcity’s (GKMC) Peacebook Ordinance to 20th Ward Ald. Jeanette Taylor’s Senior Bill of Rights.
Wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Public Health is Public Safety” and carrying giant cardboard cut-outs of slushie cups and machines, members of the newly launched Public Health & Safety Campaign (PHS), which includes 125 advocacy organizations, urged City Council redistribute $200 million currently budgeted for vacant police positions ,which they called a “slush fund,” to public safety and health programs.
“We cannot police our way out of public safety,” Taylor said during the press conference. “Why not spend that budget on public health? Why not spend that budget on peacekeepers? Why not spend that money on health services for everybody in our communities?”
According to a PHS analysis, CPD’s 2025 budget included more than $200 million for 1,155 positions that are vacant. $170 million of that amount was allocated by Mayor Johnson for entirely new CPD positions—despite the department losing 950 police officers who had been hired after 2016, according to a Sun-Times analysis. Ahead of a $1 billion estimated deficit for Chicago’s 2026 budget year, PHS Campaign Director Ishan Daya said that the city should ensure that every dollar allocated towards public safety be used for programs such as non-police crisis response and youth peacekeepers, instead of on so-called ghost cops.
Daya said the city can’t afford CPD’s vacancy and overtime budget, citing a 2020 Inspector General report citing CPD abuse of overtime controls following a 2017 audit.
Organizers have proposed allocating at least $200 million towards initiatives including:
- $100 million towards scaling 24/7 non-police, crisis response teams city-wide and re-opening public mental health centers
- $52 million for protecting Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) funding
- $22 million for preserving and expanding Peacebook youth violence prevention jobs and programming
- $25 million for purchasing 20 new ambulance trucks in addition to increased staffing
More than 180 community members attended Mayor Johnson’s citywide budget roundtables with PHS advocating for a shift in the police budget towards more forms of public safety.
“In the [former mayor] Rahm Emanuel years, we saw cuts to public institutions, mental health services, public schools, and privatization around a number of things that communities rely on. At the same time, the CPD budget grew,” said Asha Ransby-Sporn, an advisor to the PHS campaign. Ranspy-Sporn noted that the 2014 We Charge Genocide campaign brought heightened visibility to CPD’s operational budget.
Geoffrey Cubbage, a senior policy analyst at the Better Government Association (BGA), said he believes unfilled vacancies deserve a closer look than what the city has historically provided, citing OBM’s end-of-month updates compiling CPD’s recent, monthly vacancy data.
“The police department has more than three times as many vacancies as any other department, and still has not completed a long-overdue workforce allocation study mandated by both the department’s consent decree and city ordinance,” Cubbage said. “Long-term CPD vacancies should absolutely be identified, eliminated, and reassigned to more active priorities.”
Ald. Chris Taliaferro (29th Ward), a retired CPD Sgt. who chairs the Council’s Committee on Police and Fire, said CPD is understaffed. “We’ve not operated at full strength in quite a while,” he said. “We have always had vacancies that needed to be filled because police officers are retiring every day, and our goal should be to keep up with attrition.”
According to a 2025 report by the Office of Inspector General, 13,742—or 40 percent—of the city’s budgeted positions are in the police department.
Talieferro maintains that there are “some alternative means to policing” and said he is interested in initiatives that reduce violence in communities.
Johnson has committed millions to violence prevention and reinvestment in public health. But the police budget remains a crucial line-item, Ransby-Sporn said. “What we have yet to see is a shift in resources away from the police department,” she said. That’s critical “in a moment when Trump’s federal government is making massive cuts to public goods.”
Trump cut $11.4 billion in COVID-related grants for state and local health departments, adding to mounting concerns for already cash-strapped public health operations. In March, the CDPH announced twenty-two contracts and more than 100 staff positions were affected, according to CBS. With over 80 percent of the CDPH and Department of Family and Support Services (DFSS) funded by federal grants, depletion of COVID-19 grant funds and ongoing staffing crises threaten disease prevention measures and community health facilities, advocates say.
“Two-thirds of the hospitals in the city of Chicago rely on Medicaid funding that just got cut to operate,” Ransby-Sporn said. “We’re talking about massive cuts that are going to impact all of us.”
Organizers are also worried cuts to federal and state funding could disproportionately impact CDPH programs for epidemiology, HIV/STI testing, and behavioral and mental health services. PHS organizers say they want the city to preserve CDPH funding while expanding mental health centers and 24-hour, non-police crisis response services instead of relying on more police officers.
A December 2024 study by the University of Chicago Health Lab on the effectiveness of the non-police Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement Program (CARE) showed positive indications, citing a reduction in patient distress and a 37 percent increase in successful CARE team responses. CARE operational hours are limited to weekdays during the day; advocates say expanding those hours would allow mental health crises that occur after hours to get the service.
Daya stressed that using CPD’s overtime budget to reinvest in round-the-clock mental health services is a moral and financial investment in public safety, remarking “we don’t have a non-police crisis response to answer the 40 percent of calls that are mental health related and that don’t need to be responded to by CPD.” The campaign seeks to re-open mental health clinics in each ward for “a fraction of the cost of police overtime,” Daya said.
GKMC youth organizer and North Lawndale native Reynia Jackson facilitates intercommunal peace circles across seven wards with the highest rates of gun violence. Impacted by gun violence herself, Jackson maintains that Peacekeepers should fill the violence prevention role that CPD cannot.
Peacekeepers are “trained in restorative justice, to de-escalate situations and prevent situations [from getting] out of hand before it even happens,” Jackson said. “They have the lived experiences of gun violence, incarceration, [and] have been in traumatized communities, so they’re able to connect with people on a different level.”
Calls for the implementation of the Peacebook Ordinance have stalled in recent years, but 26th Ward Ald. Jessie Fuentes remains steadfast in its importance. “When we focus on youth employment, mental health, [and] violence prevention, that is what gets to the root causes of the issues that we face. That’s what makes the city safer,” she said.
An April 2025 Youth Impact report issued by the Mayor’s Office touted significant improvements to youth engagement through GKMC’s Peacekeeper Pilot Program employing 100 youth in public safety trainings for their respective communities. Jackson said that these efforts must continue growing.
“We need to see the full implementation of the Peacebook, and we need to use the vacancies to do that,” Jackson said. “We have to turn away a 1,000 of these young people that are willing to work […] because we don’t have the proper funding.”
The City Council will receive a preliminary budget recommendation in the fall. PHS Campaign Organizer Jimmy Rodgers said the coalition will continue petitioning the Mayor’s Office to include their demands in the initial proposal.
“We know that the biggest impact is on Black Chicagoans,” Rodger said. “That’s why we’re proud to have champions like Alderwoman Taylor, and why our outreach efforts are concentrating on the South and West sides–where our proposals have been shown to have enormous common-sense resonance.”
Khalil Dennis (they/she) is a Black trans emerging journalist, poet, and graphic artist originally from central Georgia. They are a freelance reporter and 2024 City Bureau Reporting Fellow Alumni residing on the West Side.