An audit by Chicago’s Office of the Inspector General into the overtime spending of the city’s police department prompted grantees at South Side Weekly to investigate. Jim Daley and Kiran Misra’s series has uncovered a trove of new information regarding who in the department earned the most overtime and when overtime spending occurred. In their most recent investigation, Daley details how The Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation spent $3.87 million on overtime in April, according to internal records — more than half the amount budgeted for the entire year.
Most of that money paid City workers to sit in hundreds of trucks in anticipation of possible protests of police killings of Black and Brown people in Chicago and Minneapolis. Read Daley’s full report, here.