Minorities make up two-thirds of CPD's 16,000 new applicants

More than 16,000 people - most of them minorities - have applied to the Chicago Police Department in the last two months, a number Superintendent Eddie Johnson says he's "extremely ecstatic" about.

With the completion of the recruitment campaign it started in November 2016, the department received 16,544 applications, with 35 percent submitted by black applicants and another 33 percent from Hispanic applicants, according to Johnson. Another 2.4 percent of the applicants are of Asian descent. White applicants make up about 29 percent.

Out of the thousands of hopefuls, 970 new hires will be made. The hiring blitz was announced by Mayor Rahm Emanuel last year in an effort to quell the city's rampant gun violence, which occurs predominantly in minority communities on the South and West sides. Chicago recorded more than 780 homicides in 2016, the most in a single year since the mid-1990s.

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