When Seconds Count, Chicago Police Might Be Hours Away – Bearing Arms

A 19-year-old Chicago woman says she plans on suing the city and the Chicago Police Department for failing to respond to multiple 911 calls about a sexual assault, but the odds of her succeeding are pretty slim. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that police generally have no constitutional duty to protect any particular individual from criminal violence, so a federal civil rights lawsuit would face some serious obstacles. Whether she has a viable claim under Illinois law is another question, but the lack of legal accountability doesn’t make the department’s failure to respond any less outrageous.

According to CWB Chicago, 55-year-old Calvin Lindsey allegedly broke into the woman’s home and sexually assaulted her at gunpoint before stealing several of her belongings and fleeing the home about 30 minutes after breaking in.

The victim immediately told her mother and others about the attack. The mother, the woman’s fiancé, and her landlord were among those who called 911. But the first Chicago police officer did not arrive until about four hours after the attack because CPD had no cops available to handle the call, CWB Chicago reported over the weekend. By then, the victim was undergoing treatment at Holy Cross Hospital.

Tom Weitzel, a former police chief in Riverside, Illinois, called the lengthy delays a “catastrophic failure of one of government’s most fundamental responsibilities: protecting its citizens.”

Writing at CWB Chicago, Weitzel declared that “every police chief, every elected official, and every Chicago resident should be outraged” over the lack of a timely response to a rape victim. 

I served nearly four decades in law enforcement, including 13 years as police chief. I understand emergency call volumes, staffing shortages, competing priorities, and the difficult decisions dispatchers and supervisors face every day. But there is absolutely no acceptable explanation for a victim of a violent sexual assault waiting hours for police assistance.

Responding promptly to emergency calls is not an optional police service. It is the foundation of policing.

This failure raises serious questions about staffing, call stacking, dispatch priorities, and whether the original call was properly classified to reflect the severity of a violent home invasion and sexual assault. Every aspect of this response demands an immediate, independent review.

Weitzel points the finger directly at Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, noting that the number of uniformed officers in the Gresham District has fallen by 16 percent since Johnson took office, and the 316 officers available on paper doesn’t reflect the reality that on any given day or shift some of them will be sick, on vacation, administrative leave, or simply not scheduled to work. 

I know firsthand how difficult it is to staff patrol shifts when positions go unfilled. You cannot dispatch officers you do not have. You cannot build an effective emergency response system on overtime, exhausted personnel, and the hope that someone will eventually become available.

Mayor Johnson must stop treating police staffing as a political talking point and publicly commit to rebuilding patrol strength immediately. City leaders must stop vilifying the profession while expecting an increasingly strained police department to deliver services with fewer resources.

Chicago needs a transparent, district-by-district staffing assessment, properly classified emergency calls, effective dispatch supervision, and sufficient officers on every shift. The public deserves published response-time data and accountability when serious calls go unanswered.

The public deserves all that and more. Will they actually get it from Brandon Johnson, though? I doubt it. 

Last month, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that Johnson’s latest budget request keeps more than 350 uniformed vacancies in the Chicago PD unfilled, while replacing dozens of officers with civilians. And this isn’t a one-time thing. One alderman noted that in 2024, Johnson’s budget slashed 833 uniformed positions. In 2025, another 54 positions were eliminated, and now Johnson wants to cut another 132 positions while keeping more than 300 unfilled positions in limbo. 

While Johnson has taken a chainsaw to police staffing levels, he’s also taken aim at the ability of Chicago residents to protect themselves. His administration has sued Glock over the criminal misuse of its products, and is seeking to block sales of the popular handguns across the state of Illinois. He’s called for greater use of “red flag” laws and supports stringent new gun storage requirements that would make it difficult to use lawfully-owned firearms in self-defense in the home, and has fully supported and defended Cook County’s ban on so-called assault weapons.

It’s true that violent crime is trending down in Chicago, just like it is in most parts of the country. But, according to CrimeIndex.org, Chicago’s homicide rate has crept up compared to last year, while murders are down by about 16 percent nationally. And reported rapes in Chicago have increased by 5.6 percent this year. Most of the decline in Chicago’s violent crime rate can be attributed to a 22 percent drop in reported robberies, and I can’t help but wonder if some cases are being reclassified or are simply going unreported, which would make the numbers look better than they really are.

Even if that decline is truly taking place, Chicago is hardly crime-free. And with the major staffing issues exposed by the lack of response to a sexual assault in a young woman’s home, Chicago residents need to think long and hard about what they’re doing to protect themselves. 

Even in the best of circumstances, police can’t guarantee our individual safety, and the Supreme Court has made it clear that they generally have no constitutional obligation to do so. I understand that not everyone is going to exercise their Second Amendment rights, but those who are reluctant to own a firearm or even a nonlethal self-defense tool need to understand that when seconds count, Chicago police could easily be hours away.

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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