Police district councilors’ efforts to explore alternatives to having police and 911 handle parking violation complaints hit a snag this week when a City Council hearing on the matter was abruptly canceled.
Members of the 19th Police District Council (PDC) who have been pushing for the subject-matter hearing laid the blame squarely on the Fifth Floor of City Hall in an email to constituents. It said the meeting was canceled after the mayor prevented department heads from attending, a charge the Mayor’s Office denied.
“Unfortunately, we recently learned that Mayor Johnson’s office declined to allow representatives from key City departments—such as the Department of Finance, Police Department, and the Office of Emergency Management and Communications—to attend the hearing to discuss the proposal,” the email read. Ald. Matt Martin (47th Ward), a member of the public safety committee, told the Weekly he agreed with the email’s characterization of events.
A spokesperson said the Mayor’s Office never objected to the subject-matter hearing or the participation of department representatives. According to the spokesperson, the departments “expressed that it would not be productive” to attend the hearing without first reviewing the proposal. “To have a more informed, substantial, and productive dialogue around these ideas for reform, City Departments felt that more time and discussion is needed.”
Emails reviewed by the Weekly show that on March 25 the Mayor’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs declined Ald. Martin’s invitation to the hearing on behalf of representatives from CPD, the Office of Emergency Management and Communications, and Department of Finance. The email invited Martin to “connect directly” with departmental representatives copied on the email instead. Martin’s reply noted that those departments had previously ignored or denied requests to meet. The staffer wrote back to say they’d asked the representatives to follow up with him.
“To have the mayor’s office, at the eleventh hour, decline to make the departments available publicly is a profound disappointment and not the first time that something like this has happened,” Martin told the Weekly. “I think we’re aware of many instances in which the mayor’s office has slow-walked common-sense public safety reforms.”
19th PDC Chair Maurilio Garcia said effectively removing parking enforcement from CPD’s duties is his council’s priority and that he and other district councilors have already had “productive conversations” with various department representatives about it. According to Garcia, a mayoral staffer told district councilors that their efforts overlapped with Johnson’s “People’s Plan for Community Safety,” which includes an analysis of 911 calls and “potential opportunities for alternative (non-police) response that would supplement existing alternate response programs such as CARE (Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement).”
As CPD struggles with limited resources and manpower, police district councilors from the 19th and 8th districts have argued that officers could shift parking enforcement, typically a lower priority 911 call, to another City department or even civilians. In an analysis of more than 5.6 million 911 calls spanning three years, the 19th district councilors discovered that parking violations ranked sixth among the most common reasons Chicagoans called police. A separate Office of the Inspector General analysis found that parking violations made up nearly 8 percent of 911 calls between 2022 and February 2025.
The percentage of 911 calls prompted by parking violations also fluctuates depending on the police district. In some districts, parking violations can account for as much as 15 percent of 911 calls, Garcia said.
“If you then think about each parking violation taking fifteen minutes, that’s fifteen minutes away from them walking the beat or being available to interact with the community,” Garcia said. “Why do we have police doing all these things, that quite frankly, they didn’t sign up to do?”
In both the 8th and 19th police districts, councilors have found that residents either experience long response times or no police response to parking-violation calls, said Jason Huff, the chair of the 8th district council, which encompasses eight Southwest Side wards. Huff said that during a recent meeting with Department of Finance leadership, officials expressed interest in an alternative response but said developing one would require staff increases.
In response to emailed questions from the 19th PDC, the Department of Finance said about fifty employees are contracted to do parking enforcement and that they do not respond to 911 calls about parking violations.
“At this time, the Department of Finance has not finalized any cost estimates for a pilot program to expand staffing related to parking violation processing,” spokesperson LaKesha Gage-Woodard said in an email to the Weekly.
Martin pointed to CPD’s slow pace of compliance with the federal consent decree the department was placed under after the 2014 police murder of Laquan McDonald and a workforce allocation study that is expected to help determine where police should place officers around the city. After missing a deadline imposed by the City Council late last year, CPD finally initiated the study this January. It won’t be completed until the end of the year, which means it won’t impact the council’s fall budget season.
Meanwhile, the police district councilors have undertaken their own CPD workforce analysis using FBI data. Their study found that compared to peer cities like Los Angeles and New York, Chicago has a smaller proportion of non-sworn personnel. Non-officers make up just 5 percent of CPD while New York has 30 percent and LA counts 28 percent.
“That means that we have a lot of officers probably doing low administrative tasks that don’t require a sworn officer,” Garcia said. “So when we talk about under-resourced districts and we have a low civilianization rate, that to me seems to be a really good indication that we don’t have our officers deployed where they need to be most.”
Until another hearing is scheduled, the police district councilors say they’ll continue reaching out to residents and alderpersons. They are also trying to identify which labor unions could be affected by potential changes in parking violation responsibilities. Those groups could include SEIU, Teamsters, or the Fraternal Order of Police, Garcia said.
“We urge the mayor to support these common sense efforts, including by encouraging these relevant departments to participate in a hearing when it’s rescheduled soon,” Garcia said in an email to the Weekly on Wednesday. “Having this conversation publicly, with all decision makers across these departments present, would serve the community best.”
Leigh Giangreco is a freelance reporter based in Chicago. You can follow her work on Twitter @LeighGiangreco and at leighgiangreco.com.
