Imagine calling 9-1-1 nine times for a home invasion and rape in progress. And nobody comes. For hours.
Welcome to Chicago. On November 6, 2026, a 19-year-old woman named Yizel was home alone in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood when an armed man broke in, forced her into the bathroom, and raped her at gunpoint. He stole her phone and bag and then left.
Her family called 911 repeatedly. EMS arrived. The Chicago police did not.
Dispatch records show the 911 center received nine calls. The Gresham District was in “Radio Assignments Pending” status—no patrol cars available. The attack reached the radio around 12:21 p.m. The victim was at Holy Cross Hospital by 1:13 p.m.
At 2:05 p.m. a sergeant asked for an officer; the dispatcher said none were available. An officer was finally sent at 2:13 p.m.—more than three and a half hours after the assault began. Her family tracked the stolen phone to a nearby park within an hour and the landlord believed he spotted the suspect.
No officers checked. Yizel waited more than four hours to speak with a police officer.
She later said it should never have taken that long and that she didn’t feel protected. She noted that faster response might have allowed police to catch the man while he was still nearby. CPD leadership offered no comment on the timeline of their response. A suspect photo was released and he remains at large.
This outcome is the product of years of deliberate understaffing. Citywide sworn officer strength peaked near 13,350 in early 2019, pre-George Floyd, and now stands at around 11,400 to 11,600, a drop of roughly 1,700–2,000 officers.
The Gresham District dropped from 378 officers when Brandon Johnson took office in May, 2023 to about 316 today, a 16 percent cut. Johnson’s budgets have frozen hundreds of vacancies, eliminated or converted sworn positions, and left the department barely keeping pace with retirements.
A recent workforce study documented “real and uneven staffing pressures” and called for hundreds more officers on the street. Overtime has soared while priority calls still sit unanswered for hours.
Rank-and-file officers aren’t the problem. Department leadership under successive mayors and the political direction set by Mayor Brandon Johnson are. Johnson has treated police staffing as a budget lever rather than a basic public safety requirement.
Governor J.B. Pritzker’s broader policy environment in Illinois has reinforced the same priorities: restrictions on lawful self-defense while the police who are supposed to serve as the alternative are slashed.
The result is predictable. When a violent felony is in progress, the nearest available officer can be hours away. Criminals face delayed (if any) consequences and victims are left to survive alone. In Chicago, maybe more than anywhere else in America, you are your own first-responder.
Yizel had no firearm in her home and no practical way to resist an armed invader. In a city where political leadership has reduced sworn officer strength for years, that’s the actual security arrangement. Police can’t be counted on for an in-progress home invasion or rape call when the district has no cars to send. The city’s leadership owns this failure.