On a troubling trend from New York to Chicago and beyond
Big city police departments have struggled to hire enough police officers for years. But while these officer shortages are a problem, they’re also unevenly distributed across neighborhoods. In Chicago and Washington, DC, the most violent neighborhoods also have the greatest officer shortages. Even New York, which pioneered Jack Maple’s “cops on the dots” strategy in the early 1990s, has huge disparities in staffing by borough. That leaves too many cops worked to the bone, and residents with far less protection than they deserve.
We could do a much better job putting officers where they’re needed most. That would make cities safer, and have enormous benefits for our most vulnerable neighborhoods. It would also make it easier to ensure that officers spend time proactively engaging with the communities they’re supposed to protect, rather than simply jumping from crisis to crisis.
Violence is concentrated, but cops are not
In most cities, a small number of blocks account for a disproportionate share of violence. Concentrating officers on these “hotspots,” at the times when violence is most likely to occur, can have a significant impact on safety. Systematic reviews of published studies show that these efforts drive meaningful reductions in overall crime.
Crucially, the most effective forms of hotspot policing involve “problem-oriented policing” interventions, where officers dedicate time to understand and proactively address crime, rather than simply focus on incident response. A 2020 review of high-quality studies on problem-oriented policing interventions found that they delivered a 34% reduction in crime and disorder, on average.
But hotspot policing isn’t very effective if departments don’t put officers in the hotspots. In Chicago, for example, violence is heavily concentrated in a subset of the city’s South and West Side neighborhoods, but the police force is spread more evenly across the city. The result is a yawning imbalance in resources relative to need.
On the North Side, there are generally between 30 and 60 patrol officers on staff in each police district for every reported homicide (data for all the cities and districts referenced in this article is available here). The city’s best-staffed district, which covers Wrigleyville and Lincoln Park, among other neighborhoods, had 94 patrol officers per homicide last year. But across Chicago’s South and West Sides, most districts report fewer than 15. The worst-staffed district, South Chicago, has just 6.4. There are more officers per capita in South and West Side neighborhoods, but those numbers pale in comparison to the need.
The results are predictable. Officers in high-violence neighborhoods are worked to the bone, with little time for the sort of proactive engagement necessary to drive down crime. Residents suspect that emergency response times are slower, and are less likely to call 911 in the first place.
Chicago tries to close the gap by surging specialized tactical teams into high-violence neighborhoods. But as a 2017 Department of Justice investigation found, those tactical teams are rarely equipped (or instructed) to engage with neighborhood problems. Instead, they roll in to make arrests (or traffic stops, as the case may be). Unsurprisingly, residents are more likely to see unfamiliar, non-uniformed officers as an occupying force rather than partners in public safety. In a particularly twisted outcome, Chicago’s Inspector General found that because residents in high-violence neighborhoods believe that police will only show up in a timely fashion if there’s a threat of violence, some callers will falsely report the presence of guns in order to accelerate response times.
These gaps shrink (but do not disappear) when analyzing the ratio of officers per major crime or officers per call for service. But homicides are the right place to start. They matter more than assaults or burglaries. And because homicides come with a body and are matched against death records, they are almost always captured in crime statistics. By contrast, just 40% of other violent crimes are reported to law enforcement. That’s in part because residents in some neighborhoods don’t believe that police will respond in a timely fashion. A neighborhood with a high homicide rate but low robbery rate isn’t safe – it’s a neighborhood where residents have given up reporting robberies.
Fortunately, in spite of this problem Chicago’s murder rate has declined dramatically in the last few years, falling 9% in 2024, and a whopping 27% in 2025. The city’s ongoing officer misallocation represents additional low-hanging fruit. Moving more officers to high-violence neighborhoods is one of the best tools the city has to continue to drive down violence in the coming years.
Big cities aren’t protecting the neighborhoods that need it most
Notably, this dynamic is not unique to Chicago. Relatively few departments publish their staffing data by district, but stark gaps emerge in many of the departments that do. Washington, DC, has 11 times more officers per homicide in its 2nd police district (59) than it does in its 7th (5.4).
In New York, the relatively low level of homicides per precinct make a similar analysis difficult. But a similar pattern emerges at the borough level. Even as the city touts its zone-based strategy of officer allocation, at the borough level there is an eight-fold gap between the ratio of officers per homicide in the Bronx (29) and Staten Island, which reports an extraordinary 244 officers per homicide.
Keen observers will see another pattern in the data. For the cities with the three biggest staffing gaps, the districts with the highest levels of staffing are generally in the whitest and often wealthiest parts of town, including far Northwest DC (DC’s 2nd district), Chicago’s North Side, and the New York boroughs of Staten Island and Manhattan.
The districts with the lowest levels of staffing are all in heavily or majority Black neighborhoods, including parts of Chicago’s South and West Sides, Southeast DC (which is covered by DC’s 7th district), and the Bronx. And while Philadelphia doesn’t release its district-level staffing, the City Controller there identified a similar pattern in a 2022 study.
Left-wing critics of policing are right about one thing: In city after city, we have prioritized white lives over Black ones. But that’s not because we have too many police officers — it’s because we fail to use those officers to protect Black neighborhoods.
Crucially, a greater presence of uniformed patrol officers, charged with working regular beats and getting to know their neighborhoods, could also do much to repair police-community relations. Officers who look and act like part of the community are a lot more likely to build trust – especially if it’s an explicit part of their job. And residents are more likely to call 911 when they think they’ll get a timely response.
This is a political problem
Police departments know this. In Chicago, at least four separate workforce allocation studies have come to the same conclusion since 2010. The executive summary for a fifth such study was recently released, noting that the Department needs to either reallocate or hire 270 patrol officers to protect neighborhoods with the highest levels of violence.
The problem is that pulling officers out of safer neighborhoods is likely to provoke pushback — especially when those neighborhoods tend to be wealthier and whiter. And it’s reasonable for everyone to want a baseline level of safety, regardless of how many murders happened on their street last year.
But this is an opportunity to exercise some political courage. The murder rate is one of the most important things that voters grade politicians on. And crime rarely respects political boundaries. Disrupting networks of criminal activity in high-violence neighborhoods is likely to deliver more safety citywide.
There are also opportunities to add officers to understaffed neighborhoods without draining them from safer ones. A good first step would be to cut down on the number of centralized and tactical units, releasing them back into uniformed patrol in the neighborhoods where they’re needed most.
That’s just the start. Far too many departments still have sworn officers, writing parking tickets and working desk jobs in HR and IT. The Police Executive Research Forum notes that this can not only free up officer capacity, but also help control costs and improve service. And most departments have just scratched the surface here. As Jeff Asher noted for The Argument earlier this year, when New Orleans hired a private contractor to respond to noninjury traffic accidents, emergency response times plummeted and homicide clearance rates improved.
Officers are one of a city’s most valuable resources. They have to be put where they can be most useful, trained and held accountable for their performance, and then re-allocated as patterns of violence change.
That won’t be easy. But the recent fall in violent crime has given cities time and space to make structural reforms. If we take advantage of this moment, we can secure safer streets and far more protection for the neighborhoods that need it most.
