Is Daley balancing the budget by not hiring more cops?

I have heard the following sentiments expressed by Chicago police officers, and I've seen them repeated in the posts and comments at Second City Cop:

"The city is lying about how many cops are actually on the street."

"The Chicago Police Department is short thousands of officers."

"Manpower shortages are causing safety issues for CPD officers.  We're outnumbered and overwhelmed."

"It's getting increasingly dangerous to be a Chicago Police Officer."

"Where is the money that the city is 'saving' by not hiring new recruits to replace retirees?"

"Why doesn't some journalist dig into this?"

In an article that appeared in the Chicago Reader on August 12, reporter Ben Joravsky has written the single best article on the CPD staffing crisis that I've seen:

The Vanishing Beat Cop

He starts with a citizen's description of a disturbance in Logan Square:

...Fifteen to 20 young men--gangbangers, he calls them--out on the street as the police cars pulled in.

But instead of scattering in the face of the advancing officers, they stood their ground and began to taunt them.

"They were yelling, 'Fuck the police, fuck the police,'" says Hudson. "I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Believe me, I'm no fan of police brutality--but this shit is getting out of hand."

Hudson had never before seen such brazen defiance in the face of authority, but the incident was far from the first this summer in his corner of Logan Square, near Drake and Cortland. "The gangbangers will shoot off guns or keep us up late or break a window, and we'll call the police, and they're slow to respond," he says. "If they're openly defiant to police officers, how are ordinary citizens going to be safe? There's a loss of authority here."

The apocalyptic worldview Hudson has taken away from these experiences is echoed by a dozen or so police officers I've talked to over the last few weeks. They don't want their names used because they fear retaliation, but they're surprisingly candid about their growing sense of helplessness.

As they see it, it's open season on cops--and the cold-blooded murder July 18 of Officer Michael Bailey as he waxed his car in full uniform at six in the morning outside his Park Manor home is just the latest evidence.

"The problem is there's not enough police on the street--period," says one senior officer. "I've been at this job for 20 years and it's never been this bad."

Joravsky went through several city budgets and discovered--surprise!--that the city is apparently using money earmarked for x number of officers, who aren't actually hired, to pay for other "departmental needs". 

"It's an old trick all right," says Second Ward alderman Robert Fioretti. "They're using attrition in the force to balance their budget. They don't fill vacancies and then use the money somewhere else. This stuff's been going on for years."

But more aldermen are starting to complain as they get heat from residents over slow police response times. "We get constituent calls saying 'we need more police,'" says Fioretti. "I'm not the only one. I just came from a closed-door meeting with the mayor's budget guys. Aldermen were telling him--you're balancing the budget by not filling vacancies."

The 2009 budget called for 7,813 patrol officers, but it looks like the actual number is more like 6,480.  In 2000 there were more than 8,000 patrol officers.

Joravsky describes shortages of detectives and dropping clearance rates, and then he uses a term I've been hearing more frequently as of late, and it's a scary concept:

The real fear is that if police cuts continue, the proverbial tipping point will be reached when everyone in town--bad guys included --realize the city's underpoliced.