On October 23, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) hosted an on-line webinar on the status of its yearlong Workforce Allocation Study, which it now calls WAS.

Police workforce allocation as of September 2025.
Source: Chicago Police Dept.

While the 80-minute webinar provided a sort of "police org chart 101," it was short on WAS details—and it raised questions about the workforce study's reliability.

Previously, CPD's executive director of constitutional policing and reform, Allyson Clark Henson, said the webinar would present the study's "Organizational Profile," which details CPD's current staffing and structure. Henson had also said that the webinar would include an "Interim Framework Report" to identify "the methodologies that will be utilized for the forthcoming analysis" of CPD deployment.

During the webinar, officials from CPD's WAS contractor, Matrix Consulting Group, described the Organization Profile and the Interim Framework Report in general terms.

CPD did not, however, provide what a CPD official called the "close to 600 pages" of the Organizational Profile and the Interim Framework Report. CPD did, though, later provide an executive summary on-line.

The executive summary states that the Organizational Profile will provide "a granular snapshot of where employees are detailed and working as of September 2025." Further, the report will give "side-by-side comparison tables of budgeted vs. actual positions," and highlight "staffing gaps and areas of misalignment."

The Organizational Profile "functions as the foundation document for subsequent analysis," according to the executive summary. "By capturing the Department’s structure with precision, it enables the Interim Framework Report to model staffing requirements against a reliable baseline."

The actual reliability of that baseline might be disputed by some—such as the city's Office of Inspector General.

As previously reported by Inside Chicago Government, Inspector General Debra Witzburg has called CPD's patrol staffing data "incomplete and low in quality."

"[T]he police department's data does not lend itself to a good and clear view of how many people are working at any one time; the data is stored in too many different places," Witzburg told a City Council committee last year.

That view was echoed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois (ACLU).

After ACLU settled in 2021 a lawsuit around police response times, it sought records showing police compliance with the settlement, said Alexandra Block, ACLU's Director of Criminal Legal Systems and Policing Project.

According to Block, the city consistently "can't tell us how many people are actually working on any day, on any shift in a given district, because they are not automating and keeping that data—which is just really stunning to me."

Moreover, in a July 2024 report, OIG said that when CPD members are absent from work, "they are still captured in the data" as physically present. Also, CPD assigns some officers to specialized units that work sporadically in each of the 22 police districts—"thus increasing the difficulty in measuring how their presence contributes to Department coverage in any specific location."

In material provided thus far, CPD and its contractor have not said how they'll address the reported flaws in the city's police deployment data.