By Bill Cameron, WLS News

The Chicago Police Department needs more cops and this morning they’ve announced a new recruiting campaign.

This is not more cops like so many want, but merely filling vacancies in the police dept’s 12,500 count of sworn personnel. Supt. Garry McCarthy says he wants to hire more minority officers, but that’s going to take awhile.

Listen to Bill Cameron’s report for WLS news here:

“One of the reasons for that is because when you become a police officer you stay for 20 plus years and four years ago when I got here, the average age of the Chicago police officer was 44 years old,” McCarthy said. “Now that number has come down to 41, I believe it is right now, but at the end of the day, that’s progress, it’s not success. So with it we’re recruiting more and more minority individuals but it’s still not getting us to the place where we want to be and it’s going to take a long time before that dynamic changes.”

CPD has actually been criticized for too few minority officers long before the so-called Ferguson phenomenon of the more recent past.

@ 2015 WLS News