Chicago's city worker residency requirement

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by homebucket

It's not like doctors have to be at the hospital 24/7 in order to be proficient at their jobs and to understand the needs of the patient population. A doctor does not forget how to work up, diagnose, and treat various conditions just because they went home and watched Netflix.

Likewise, a police officer or firefighter does not forget the streets they patrol on a daily basis just because they went home to a different city.

How would someone become exceptionally qualified to be a cop in a city where they don't live over someone who does live in that city?

[homebucket]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

How would someone become exceptionally qualified to be a cop in a city where they don't live over someone who does live in that city?

Training and on the job experience, like any other job.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

A cop should definitely understand the neighborhood that he or she patrols. It is fundamental to police work.

But in a city as large (and hyper-segregated) as Chicago, the residency requirement doesn't really enforce what you want it to.

How is a cop who lives Edison Park and mostly patrols the Garfield Park area more fundamentally in-tune with that community than a hypothetical cop who lives just across city limits in neighboring Park Ridge?

I mean, the former one gets to vote for mayor and an alder-cretin, so there's that I guess, but on socio-economic and demographic measures, Edison Park and Park Ridge are orders of magnitude more similar to each other than either are to Garfield Park (like a different galaxies level of difference).


As I said before, the main point of chicago's city worker residency requirement is about keeping city tax dollars within the city, and by extension, keeping some fringe neighborhoods more stable middle class.

You can kind of look at it as a sort of "economic greenbelt" because the city of Chicago really has no control over how land gets developed out in the collar counties, so the least it can do is prevent people who collect city paychecks from feeding into the disgusting sprawl beast.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

But in a city as large (and hyper-segregated) as Chicago, the residency requirement doesn't really enforce what you want it to.

How is a cop who lives Edison Park and mostly patrols the Garfield Park area more fundamentally in-tune with that community than a hypothetical cop who lives just across city limits in neighboring Park Ridge?

I mean, the former one gets to vote for mayor and an alder-cretin, so there's that I guess, but on socio-economic and demographic measures, Edison Park and Park Ridge are orders of magnitude more similar to each other than either are to Garfield Park (like a different galaxies level of difference).


As I said before, the main point of chicago's city worker residency requirement is about keeping city tax dollars within the city, and by extension, keeping some fringe neighborhoods more stable middle class.

You can kind of look at it as a sort of "economic greenbelt" because the city of Chicago really has no control over how land gets developed out in the collar counties, so the least it can do is prevent people who collect city paychecks from feeding into the disgusting sprawl beast.

I'm not saying that residency rules are a bulletproof solution to this, but I am saying that knowledge of the community is a natural qualification for performing police work. So it's hard to see how the talent pool is degraded in any big city if you limit eligibility to residents of that city. Now, if your police department just doesn't pay your police enough to live in the city they serve, that's something different...

[Steely Dan]

^ a nice idea, but when put into practice in big segregated American cities, residency requirements don't really pan out that way so much.

[ardecila]

I suspect the hiring challenges a lot of cities are facing now will lead to the elimination of some or all of the remaining residency laws.

This would be catastrophic, at least in Chicago - our "cop neighborhoods" have tens or hundreds of thousands of residents, not all of them are city workers but most of them are homeowners. If you roll back the residency requirement, you get an colossal outflow to the burbs overnight. Everyone will foresee a collapse in their property values, whether they work for the city or not, and nobody will want to be stuck on the losing end like a bank run or 1960s white flight. I can just see the realtors salivating over all the turnover.

The city does not contain enough yuppies to backfill those areas, and even if they did, a compact bungalow on a tiny lot with declining CPS schools and flooding issues wouldn't appeal to them. With immigration slowed down to a trickle too, it's not clear who would move in. Worst case, some areas might see Detroit-style abandonment.

[Steely Dan]

^ yeah, it could get really ugly really fast in places like Norwood Park and Mt. Greenwood.

I read on a city website that 10% of the people living in Mt. Greenwood are city workers.

That's out of total population, not just employed people, so probably like 20% of the employed people down there collect a pay check from the city!!!

It's gotta be one of the densest concentrations of cops and firemen on the planet.

If they're ever finally given their get outta jail free car, holy open floodgates, batman!

[Gantz]

No idea why the focus is on cops. Most city workers are not cops.
Most city jobs do not even require an intimate knowledge of the city they are in. A hypothetical procurement analyst working for a city agency can as well be working from Panama for all they care, wouldn't effect their job one bit.
A city worker that the public sees is a small minority of workers sitting deep in the bowels of a typical government bureaucracy. The larger the city the smaller proportion of city workers that are directly public facing.

[Docere]

Yeah, I think the community connection is secondary at this point, maintaining the tax base is the main benefit of the policy.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Gantz

No idea why the focus is on cops. Most city workers are not cops.

Well, I don't know about other cities, but in Chicago it seems to be the cops who grumble about the residency requirement the most. The FOP is always whining about it, so they get associated with it.

And with the way that most (white) cops all pile into the very most extreme NW and SW corners of the city, as if to say "fine, we'll live in the city, but only in the most far-flung, secluded extremities of it", is another tell-tale sign that they no likey the residency requirement.

I'm not joking when I say that places like Mount Greenwood are probably among the most dense cop places in the world.