HOMAN SQUARE — When Lashonda Tart desperately needed the police on a summer evening in 2019, they never showed up.
A gunman had fired a hail of bullets that shattered the windows of her Homan Square house while she and her children were inside, she said.
Tart hid her kids in a closet and dialed 911.
They waited.
After 10 minutes, she called 911 again. Then she called her neighborhood police station and reported the shooting to the sergeants’ desk.
Fearing for their lives, Tart and her children waited another hour.
“Nobody ever came,” Tart said.
It wasn’t the first time Tart’s calls for help had gone unanswered. But she felt she had hit a breaking point, her faith in police destroyed.
“It was very demeaning, degrading,” Tart said. “There was no help, no respite. No nothing.”
Many Chicagoans, especially those living in Black and Latino neighborhoods, have similar experiences of being left to fend for themselves in times of crisis.
Police leadership has blamed inadequate 911 responses on a shortage of officers and resources. But the Police Department’s own records suggest the problem isn’t the number of officers — it’s what those officers are doing on their shifts.
Hundreds of Chicago police officers daily are assigned to what the department calls rapid response duty, with the stated mission of responding to emergencies. But a Block Club analysis of police data shows those officers are rarely dispatched to 911 calls.
In the first half of 2023, only a tenth of the activity reported by rapid response officers was dedicated to 911 calls — a steep drop from 2020, when 911 responses accounted for nearly half of their activity, according to data from the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications.
Instead of servicing 911 calls, rapid response officers spent the majority of their time conducting traffic stops, the dispatch data shows.
Rapid response officers conducted at least 36,000 traffic stops in the first half of 2023, accounting for nearly two-thirds of their logged activity. That’s nearly double the portion that traffic stops made up in 2019.
Besides traffic stops, the rapid response officers reported thousands of other activities, including community interactions, domestic disturbance checks, burglary responses, emergencies at CTA stations and wellness checks. But these other activities have made up a smaller and smaller share of rapid response officers’ documented work in recent years, the dispatch data shows.
The wait times for emergency assistance show the Police Department needs to reexamine how it uses its officers, say public safety advocates and the city’s own inspector general.
“This is not a resource shortage problem,” said Inspector General Deborah Witzburg. “This is about resource allocation.”
‘Hollowed Out‘
Officers were first assigned specifically to rapid response duties in 1993 as part of the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy, widely known as CAPS. That first-of-its-kind community policing initiative was aimed at strengthening partnerships between police and residents.
The program hinged on empowering beat cops to get to know the neighborhoods they patrol so they could build consistent, reliable relationships with residents. Meanwhile, each district’s rapid response officers would deal with the lion’s share of 911 calls.
But the structure crumbled over the years, said Wesley Skogan, a professor emeritus at Northwestern University who has studied CAPS.
As the program was “hollowed out,” the rapid response officers remained, but their duties no longer resembled their original mission, Skogan said. Rather than dealing with 911 backlogs, rapid response officers were deployed to other department priorities — such as traffic stops.
“They were created for something that has disappeared,” Skogan said. Now those officers are “doing a lot of traffic stops. They don’t do that many traffic stops without it being an organizational priority.”
On any given day, up to 600 officers are still technically assigned to rapid response duty, according to police data. But those officers are no longer organized into a formal rapid response unit, and the bulk of officers assigned to rapid response are not actually tasked with focusing on 911 calls, according to police spokesman Thomas Ahern.
Instead, just one squad car per shift in each district is dedicated to the 911 duties the rapid response officers were originally created for, Ahern said.
‘It Makes You Wonder, Why Even Bother?’
The ACLU sued Chicago police in 2011 on behalf of the Central Austin Neighborhood Association, alleging that calls for help during life-threatening emergencies in Black neighborhoods were repeatedly ignored. The city settled the lawsuit in 2021 by agreeing to publish district-level data on how long it takes police to respond to 911 calls. So far, that data has been incomplete and inconclusive.
The response times are even longer for 911 calls that are not life-threatening, said Eric Russell, a member of the civilian oversight council for the 6th (Gresham) Police District, which includes much of Auburn Gresham and Chatham on the South Side. Residents who call the police to report incidents like burglaries and drug deals are often “told that these are not important” and police are “short staffed and busy dealing with lifesaving issues,” Russell said.
In 2022, Austin resident Bertha Purnell called police about the theft of her car. Even though her life wasn’t in danger, she expected the police would show up to talk to her.
“We waited, we waited, we waited, and they never came,” Purnell said. “It’s really disheartening. It makes you wonder, why even bother?”
As Purnell waited, her mind raced and she thought about how many people could get hurt while the thief took her car on a joyride, Purnell said. Several friends and neighbors called to tell her they’d seen her car in the area. But since police didn’t follow up, she didn’t know how to share the tips.
“Even if it’s not a shooting, we still deserve some type of response in a reasonable time,” Purnell said. “It might not seem like an emergency to you. But to the person that it’s happening to, it’s an emergency to them, and they deserve to be seen about it.”
In 2023, after repeatedly hearing stories like Purnell’s, the inspector general’s office completed an investigation into delays and disparities in police responses to 911 calls.
“We heard a lot of concern about police taking too long to respond or not responding at all when someone calls with an emergency, particularly in some neighborhoods” on the South and West sides, Witzburg said in an interview.
The investigation found that for half of all 911 calls, responding officers failed to document their time of arrival at the crime scenes — an oversight so routine that the inspector general’s office couldn’t track response times or hold the Police Department accountable for delays.
‘It Felt Like Forever’
Tart’s frustrations with police began years before the bullets came through the windows of her home.
Tart is a Navy veteran with disabilities, and when she retired from service she chose to “come home to my community to help turn it around,” she said. But she was shaken when police failed to respond quickly to a deadly shooting she witnessed on her block.
It was an early morning in spring 2016 when Tart saw a man shoot a teenager to death in the street just outside her home.
“I heard gunshots,” Tart said. “I looked out the window and I could literally see the man aiming at his head.”
The man drove away in a Chevrolet Impala.
“I immediately started thinking about my children’s life and my life, and I crawled to the phone,” Tart said.
“It felt like forever” waiting for first responders to arrive. While an ambulance did pull up not long after Tart’s 911 call, it was six hours before Chicago police knocked on her door to ask for a description of the shooter and the car he was driving, Tart said.
If officers had arrived sooner, “I think they would’ve been able to find the perpetrator,” Tart said.
For years after that, drug organizations conducted deals on Tart’s block, carjackings became more frequent and gang violence broke out regularly. Tart made herself known to local police by regularly calling to report the problems, especially when she noticed the sellers were stashing their drugs in her neighbors’ trash cans.
Tart drew the sellers’ ire when she reported the issues to police.
The drug organizations began to harass her. They slashed the tires on her truck. Eventually, they threatened to blow up her house and murder her family if she kept interfering, she said.
After one of Tart’s calls, police arrested one of the people harassing her. But the threats continued, and even though she’d made herself vulnerable by cooperating with police, the police seldom responded to her calls for help, she said.
Tart filed complaints against officers for berating her and telling her to stop calling 911 and “make peace” with the drug sellers on her block. But those complaints never resulted in disciplinary action, an investigation report shows.
Tart believes the 2019 shooting at her house was an act of revenge from the disgruntled dealers who wanted her to stop disturbing their business.
That time, Tart’s outrage led to one of the rare instances when police are investigated and reprimanded for failing to respond to an emergency.
After Tart filed a complaint, the Police Department’s internal affairs division opened an investigation. It found that officers sent to help after the shooting never arrived at her home. Instead, while the officers were driving to respond to the shooting, they stopped to assist a different investigation into a stolen car, the investigation report shows.
“It’s like they care more about property than about human lives,” Tart said.
Even as Tart called multiple times to ensure police were on the way, the officers never notified dispatchers they went somewhere else, according to the report.
The New Plan
Since Mayor Brandon Johnson appointed him in August, police Supt. Larry Snelling has deflected criticism of high crime rates and slow responses by pointing to the net loss of about 1,500 officers the past few years. At an October budget meeting, he promised to “put more officers back on the street” by using civilian staff to manage non-criminal calls for assistance.
But despite the recent dip in staffing, Chicago still has more officers per capita than practically all other major cities, including New York and Los Angeles, which “suggests the problem isn’t that we don’t have enough officers,” Witzburg said.
Meanwhile, Snelling recently created a unit to help address the rapid response issues and the outcry over long 911 wait times, Ahern told Block Club.
“There’s an evaluation of the areas that have the highest propensity for violence, and that’s where their focus is,” Ahern said. “Each area has their unique needs, and that’s how it is strategized.”
Ahern said the Police Department does not disclose the number of officers assigned to specialized units.
Snelling’s new team is a reboot of his predecessor’s signature initiative, the Community Safety Team, Ahern said. The department previously relied on the Community Safety Team to help respond to 911 calls and saturate high-crime areas with police, Ahern said.
But in practice, the Community Safety Team rarely ever responded to emergency calls. When the team was at its largest in 2021, it handled fewer than 2,200 calls for help — while conducting more than 150,000 traffic stops, dispatch data shows.
Officials disbanded that team last year amid a wave of criticism, including a lawsuit filed by a former lieutenant on the team alleging illegal traffic stop quotas.
The Community Safety Team was also singled out in a 2023 lawsuit by the ACLU that claimed it was a key component of an illegal traffic stop program that routinely violated the rights of Black and Latino residents.
The new team may have a different name, but “they’re all kind of the same things with different guises,” Skogan said. “They all just do traffic stops.”
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