Chicago Police Department exodus: New cops are leaving in droves, Sun-Times investigation finds

Juan Navarrete was 17 when he was robbed at gunpoint as he made a delivery for his family’s restaurant on the North Side.

Another time, he saw his mother held up at knifepoint.

And he witnessed domestic violence.

Growing up in Chicago and later in the suburbs, Navarrete dreamed one day he'd be a Chicago cop. He wanted to protect people against the bullies and predators of the world.

In 2015, after serving in the Marines, his dream came true.

But his dream job soon soured. He got shot at. His days off kept getting canceled because the Chicago Police Department was short on officers. He worked in tough police districts where kids routinely would flip him off.

Then, on Aug. 7, 2021, Officer Ella French, a co-worker and friend, was shot and killed making a traffic stop.

“I walked in with her that day and left that day with her gone,” Navarrete says. “So that will definitely change you. You take a second to reanalyze life.”

In 2022, he did what many early-career Chicago cops have done over the past eight years: He quit. One of every six Chicago cops hired since 2016 is no longer on the payroll, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation has found.

Navarrete, 32, now works for the police department in Evanston. A field training officer, he introduces rookies to his dream profession.

Cops like Navarrete have been leaving Chicago in droves, including eight other young officers who've gone to work for the Evanston department, the Sun-Times found.

About 950 of the more than 5,750 people hired by the Chicago Police Department since 2016 no longer are on the job. Their average time with the department? Not even three years.

Many have moved on to other police jobs. And nearly 90 have been fired or resigned while under investigation. The Sun-Times found that another 21 have died, including seven who were killed in the line of duty and two shot to death while off duty; four who died by suicide; four killed in off-duty accidents; and four who died as a result of natural causes.

Of the officers who left the Chicago Police Department since 2016, the Sun-Times found that 320 now work for other police agencies, mostly in the suburbs. Almost 90 moved to the Chicago Fire Department, something that police veterans say rarely happened in past generations.

City and state employment figures don’t account for other Chicago cops who’ve moved to out-of-state police agencies in states like Florida, whose governor has been personally involved in recruiting officers from Illinois and New York.

“You're not capturing, obviously, the number of officers, which is probably the bulk of them, that are leaving for departments outside the state, and that was the new trend here in New York,” says Kenneth Corey, a former chief of department for the New York Police Department who now works for the University of Chicago Crime Lab and helps run its training academy for high-ranking police supervisors.

As young Chicago police officers head for the exits, more and more veterans have been retiring in recent years, often before they qualify for full pensions.

This double whammy of a high number of retirements and the low retention of young cops has compounded the department’s staffing problems, which have been blamed for many of its shortcomings.

MANY REASONS FOR LEAVING

About 13,180 sworn officers were on the city’s payroll in September 2019 — as of last month, that number had dropped by about 1,580.

Corey says plenty of officers nationwide became disenchanted with their jobs in 2020 because of the protests that followed the police killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd, demoralizing talk of “de-funding" the police and the health risks that officers faced during the coronavirus pandemic.

“All it takes is one person from a district to go to some department, and then you'll see, in short order, three or four more follow because he calls back and tells them how great it is," Corey says. "We're not just seeing this in New York and Chicago, but every big city police department is struggling with that challenge right now."

The loss of young cops is costing big cities dearly because of the expense of putting recruits through a training academy and a probationary period, he says.

“The cost of a fully trained police officer in New York was $150,000,” Corey says.

Smaller departments have hired away big-city officers by offering bonuses, higher pay, take-home cars and quality-of-life incentives. For instance, San Mateo County in northern California provides daycare for the kids of its sheriff’s officers.

With shorter staffing now the norm, cities like Chicago have regularly canceled officers’ days off, forcing them to work overtime. That’s a big turnoff for young officers with a family, Corey says.

“It's a generational difference,” he says. “Cops of my generation had this insatiable appetite for overtime. You could have told me to stand knee-deep in a sewer for my time-and-a-half. It's really a different culture. They work to live. They don't live to work. They just kind of want enough money for them to have a comfortable lifestyle, and then they want the time off to enjoy it.”

AIMING TO RETAIN COPS

Chicago police Supt. Larry Snelling says his department doesn’t actively recruit officers from other places.

“I don't really have anything negative to say about anyone who's actively recruiting," Snelling says. "Look, it's been really hard across the country since 2020 to get officers anywhere. If people are recruiting from Chicago, they know that they're probably recruiting the best and the brightest. So I take it as a compliment.”

Snelling says he thinks the exodus of young cops from his department is slowing and that the morale-killing effects of the George Floyd riots and COVID-19 are waning.

“We've stabilized the department in a way where officers are not necessarily leaving to go to other departments or smaller departments," he says. "We see a lot of the officers who have left coming back to CPD.”

The challenge is to “do more with less,” Snelling says. “We have to be more strategic than we've been in the past. We can't just throw numbers at situations."

He says the department needs to focus on reaching out to kids and giving them an understanding of what public service is and how important it is. He pointed to one program that introduces high school juniors and seniors to policing and firefighting and says, "We've seen many of those kids who are now police officers now.”

One step Snelling cites toward keeping young officers from leaving for other agencies is that retention bonuses were approved last year. He also says he’s been trying to improve the quality of life for his officers.

“We've cut way back on canceled days off for officers," the superintendent says. "We cut way back on overtime initiatives for officers and are making sure that these officers are not overworking themselves or we're not overworking them.”

LEAVING CHICAGO FOR AURORA

Of all of the suburbs that have poached cops from Chicago in recent years, Aurora is No. 1, the Sun-Times found. According to the Aurora Police Department, 20 former Chicago officers have been hired since 2020 to work in the city of 175,000 people. That year, Aurora created a formal recruiting program to encourage officers from other departments to “laterally transfer” there.

At the time, the Aurora department was seeing a rash of departures, creating a staffing shortage. The city budget called for 300 officers, but only 270 were on the payroll.

Initially, Aurora — which has the second-largest municipal police department in Illinois — offered lateral-transfer candidates a $20,000 bonus. It later did away with a bonus in favor of a higher salary. Lateral transfers now get starting pay of more than $104,000.

By comparison, the starting salary for Chicago cops is $58,842 a year, which rises to $88,746 after 18 months.

For cops moving to Aurora, the department has lessened the amount of training it requires, reasoning that they already had experience with other departments. The training program for lateral transfers is only about four months long, compared with about a year for rookies.

Aurora police Chief Keith Cross says the transfer program has paid off. Sixty-three officers have come to Aurora from other departments since 2020, he says, and only nine of them have since left. The department now has 322 officers — 22 more than were budgeted in 2020.

“We were really trying to stop the bleeding and trying to get officers out there as quickly as we possibly could,” Cross says. “While we were short on people, it wasn't a situation where we wanted to take just anybody.”

The department goes after cops from other departments by recruiting in magazines like Police1 and with a recruiting video on social media.

But its biggest recruiting tool, according to Cross, is word of mouth.

“I have a lot of respect for people who come here to work because it takes a certain level of courage to leave a known situation and go somewhere where it's unknown," he says. "You have to learn, relearn, you know, different policies, procedures."

WHY ONE COP MOVED

One of those people is Officer Matthew Balles, who moved to the Aurora department in 2022 after eight years as a Chicago cop. Balles, who grew up in Rolling Meadows and worked on a tactical team in Chicago's violent Englewood District, says he liked the fast-paced work and his bosses. But he says he disliked Chicago’s residency rule, which requires cops to live in the city.

There’s also a big difference in the interactions between cops and the public in the two cities, Balles says.

“People are a lot more comfortable approaching the police here,” he says of Aurora. “If you're out driving around or doing something in Chicago, I definitely remember a lot less people coming up to my squad car and asking you questions. Here, that happens all the time.”

Tom Weitzel, a former police chief in Riverside, says the Zoomer generation, born from the late 1990s to the early 2010s, tends to look at policing differently than previous generations.

“You have to adapt to the generation that's coming in to your workforce,” Weitzel says.Weitzel remembers preparing a few years ago to interview a job candidate who'd passed all of his written and physical tests.

“Somebody knocks on the door during the middle of the interview, and it's Uber Eats," Weitzel says. "This kid ordered it from this hot dog stand in Lyons. I'm, like, ‘Well, I've never seen this in 37 years.’ "

That applicant didn't get hired.

"It's a really challenging atmosphere out there, for sure," Weitzel says.

Weitzel says he’s amazed by the lack of interest in becoming a police officer compared with when he became a cop about four decades ago.

“When I took the exam in Riverside, there were over 300 people that attended the exam at Riverside Brookfield High School," he says. "And when I left, the last exam that we gave in Riverside that I participated in, 2021, 10 applicants showed up."

On being told that one in six new police officers in Chicago has left the job since 2016, Weitzel says, “I would not think that is a good number."

Recruiting and retaining cops these days is as competitive as scouting and retaining college athletes, he says.

“It would be like a high school athlete who's recruited by five top football programs — Notre Dame, Alabama, you pick ‘em,” he says. “What is the atmosphere like? What is the leadership? What type of incentives do they have? What type of support do they have?

“As a police officer, you want to work in an organization that not only has leadership support but training opportunities, special assignment opportunities and a good political atmosphere that supports law enforcement.”

In recent years, Weitzel says, the state of Illinois has made it easier for an officer to transfer a future pension from one department to another, which has helped fuel moves — similar to how the College Football Transfer Portal has made it easier to jump from one team to another.

AN AIR OF ‘FREE AGENCY’

Evanston police Cmdr. Ryan Glew likens the police recruiting landscape these days to “free agency” in sports. And his department has embraced it.

“We're trying to get laterals in here every month,” Glew says.

Evanston provides officers with a $2,000 retention bonus every six months. And cops who successfully recruit officers from other departments get a $5,000 bonus for every officer who transfers to Evanston.

Since 2018, nine officers have transferred from the Chicago Police Department to Evanston, and a 10th officer retired from Chicago and now works in Evanston, Glew says.

But Evanston has lost officers to lateral transfers, too. Altogether, it’s been kind of a “wash” so far with the number of officers coming and leaving, Glew says.

Navarrete, who moved from the Chicago Police Department to Evanston in 2022, says he had looked at several other suburban departments and chose Evanston because he was impressed with the new chief and liked that it’s a mid-size city on the border of Chicago, with some of the same crime problems he dealt with in Chicago.

Navarrete says he didn’t get a salary bump when he came to Evanston, actually making $10,000 less that first year because he'd been getting so much overtime in Chicago — but it was overtime he didn’t want to work.

Navarrete says he’s a more “well-rounded” cop now. He works as a field training officer and as an evidence technician — opportunities he might not have gotten at this stage of his career if he'd stayed in Chicago.

Navarrete, whose sergeant at the Chicago Police Academy was Snelling, the current police superintendent, says his rookie training was topnotch in Chicago.

Still, he was sometimes overwhelmed by the trauma he experienced on the streets. And when his days off were getting canceled regularly because of the shortage of officers, he says his girlfriend gave him an ultimatum: It’s me or the Chicago Police Department.

“As a CPD officer, you're seeing a lot of shootings. I had a kid die in my arms. Nothing compares to it. Evanston is a lot slower in terms of, like, shootings, homicides. We still have them, of course, but just the severity and the number of them is a lot less. So mentally I feel a lot stronger here,” he says of being in Evanston.

“And I'm not taking that trauma home, right? At CPD, I lived in the South Loop. So I would leave Englewood, drive 15 minutes home after seeing a kid die. My [future] wife was, like, ‘Hey, you got to make a decision here. It's either family or work.’

“I have a 6-month-old baby now,” Navarrete says. “I got married. I finished college. My world just completely flip-flopped.”