Immigrants’ rights advocates in Chicago have been bracing for such raids for months. No raids were reported as of Wednesday, but neighborhoods with large immigrant communities froze in place, with many residents fearful of the havoc they would wreak. Compared to his first term, Trump’s team “has a better understanding of what tools are available to them, and they’ll have that larger understanding of what they can and can’t do, and what they can do to make it more effective,” says Nubia Willman, chief programs officer at Latinos Progresando, a group that provides immigration services in Chicago.

But these organizations have also had time to prepare. Many of the same advocates say they’re pleased with the vast set of protections that Chicago city government, as well as the state of Illinois, have passed since the first Trump administration to ban local agencies from assisting with arrests and deportations and to bar police from sharing sensitive information with immigration authorities. 

Since Trump’s victory in November, they’ve focused on getting public officials to double down on those sanctuary protections. They’ve worked on strengthening their coalition and urging people in office to hold the line as the blows begin to land. Trump has vowed to slash funding and prosecute politicians in sanctuary cities, including Chicago, to force them to dismantle local protections.

“We don’t plan on backing down,” Leone Jose Bicchieri, founder of Working Families Solidarity, a group that promotes labor rights in the Chicago region, told Bolts. “I think the right thing to do for the state and the city is to not back down to the feds. You can’t set that precedent.”

Just days before Trump’s inauguration, local politicians were tested by a proposal from within to weaken the ban on Chicago police from cooperating with ICE. The proposal, sponsored by council members from two predominantly Latino areas, Alderpersons Silvana Tabares and Ray Lopez, would have allowed local police to work with ICE to target immigrants with certain criminal charges. 

The rollback was soundly defeated by vote of 39 to 11 at city council last week after a broad coalition of immigrant rights organizers, labor groups, and other allies rallied against it. 

“They want to make an example out of Chicago, make it ground zero for mass deportations. Well, I’ll tell you what: we do need to make Chicago an example—of people finding their courage and their backbone,” Leo Pargo, a community organizer in Chicago, told city council members before the vote. 

Chicago has had some degree of sanctuary protections since 1985, when then-Mayor Harold Washington restricted city employees from investigating residents’ legal status and barred cooperation with federal immigration authorities. The city council strengthened those protections by designating Chicago as a so-called Welcoming City in 2006. During Trump’s first term, immigrant rights groups worked with Mayor Lori Lightfoot to close loopholes in prior ordinances that allowed police to help deport people who were under investigation for certain crimes, or who were listed in the Chicago Police Department’s notoriously inaccurate gang database. 

Brandon Johnson, the current mayor, reaffirmed his support for these policies in a press conference last week, saying, “The fear that has found its way in the city of Chicago because of the threats that are coming from this incoming administration, the people of Chicago can rest assured that the full force of government will do everything in its power to protect the residents of this city.”

Illinois has passed protections of its own over the years, most notably the Illinois TRUST Act, a 2017 law that mirrors Chicago’s municipal ban on local law enforcement helping federal agents, applying it to police forces throughout the entire state. 

Illinois also became the first state to outlaw private immigrant detention centers in 2019; two years later, the state further limited the number of beds available for ICE to detain immigrants in the state with a law that blocked sheriffs from contracting with ICE to detain people facing deportation in local jails. Some Illinois jails were earning millions a year through these contracts. The state also barred sheriffs from joining the 287(g) program, which authorizes local deputies to act as federal immigration agents. 

Such policies cannot stop ICE from launching direct enforcement actions using their agents, like the raids that Trump’s team may soon launch in the city. Trump this week signed an executive order that allows agents to arrest people even in sensitive areas like churches and schools. 

But throughout the nation, ICE heavily relies on the collaboration of local police and sheriffs to identify and investigate immigrants who may be undocumented and detain them until federal agents collect them. Immigration experts say that, in places without that cooperation, ICE operations are severely limited.

For Felicia Arriaga, an immigration scholar and assistant professor of sociology at Baruch College, sanctuary protections reduce arrests and deportations by forcing ICE to work alone. She told Bolts, “The sheer number of people that are then being apprehended through those operations are much smaller than the number who would have been arrested through the jail enforcement model.” 

She added, “ICE field teams don’t have enough people to go out and arrest all of the people Trump says he is going to.” 

Arriaga was involved in immigrants’ rights activism in North Carolina during the first Trump administration, a time when many counties canceled contracts with ICE. The federal agency responded with raids that swept hundreds of people, and many Chicagoans suspect the Trump administration’s focus on their city is similarly driven by retaliation. 

“Raids are used as a fear tactic,” Arriaga said. “It is meant to try to deter people from trying to limit collaboration.”

Chicago advocates say they’ll now need to be vigilant to make sure that local and state officials actually enforce sanctuary protections. 

“It’s one thing to have laws in the book, but you also have to go through the motions of ensuring that folks are doing things appropriately,” Willman said. Bicchieri agreed, urging Chicago leaders to “remind these agencies officially not to cooperate, but also unofficially make sure their members are not privately trying to give the information about folks and make sure that they’re sanctioned if they do.”

Chicago Police has affirmed officers will not coordinate with ICE and that the department will comply with the Welcoming City ordinance. But there is worry that not all officers are aligned behind the brass. Immigrant workers have previously sued off-duty cops for beating, searching and detaining them outside a neighborhood Home Depot. Some officers have been accused of sexual misconduct involving new arrivals sheltering at a police station. John Catanzara, the head of the Chicago police union, has derided the city’s protections for immigrants.

Elsewhere in the state, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois sued the sheriffs of Ogle County and Stephenson County in 2019 for defying the TRUST Act. The cases involved immigrants who were arrested for minor issues, like driving without a license or without insurance, then detained for up to three days after they already paid bail so that they could be handed over to ICE. The sheriff’s offices eventually agreed to a settlement that included payments to the drivers, ACLU spokesperson Ed Yohnka told Bolts.  “There is no reason for any elected official at the state or local level to violate that law because Donald Trump or Tom Homan tells them they should,” Yohnka said.

One test may come if the Trump administration responds with threats to withhold federal dollars, as it did last decade. Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for many of the executive policies the president has already unrolled since Inauguration Day, advocates for withholding grants from cities unless they comply with federal immigration enforcement and agree to detain people on ICE’s requests. 

The Department of Justice on Wednesday also instructed federal prosecutors to investigate public officials who “threaten to impede” immigration enforcement. 

The city of Chicago sued the D.O.J. in 2017 over conditions it tried to impose on public safety grants, which have traditionally been a key source of federal funding for local police, courts, drug treatment, and other initiatives. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the city in 2018, determining that federal agencies cannot arbitrarily condition funds. According to the ruling, “the power of the purse rests with Congress, which authorized the federal funds at issue and did not impose any immigration enforcement conditions on the receipt of such funds.”

Yohnka hopes that courts protect sanctuary policies from new attacks. “The courts can still play an important role in upholding and protecting the rights of a local government to decide what they are and are not going to do,” he said.

The political climate in Chicago around immigration has shifted in recent years. The efforts to house and resettle new arrivals have stirred animosity among some Chicagoans, and the usual scramble between communities for limited resources has been worsened by Texas Governor Greg Abott’s Operation Lonestar, which has bussed tens of thousands of immigrants and asylum seekers across the country, including to Chicago, with little coordination to allow receiving cities to prepare. 

While Chicago’s shelter system was initially overwhelmed by the influx, Mayor Brandon Johnson this month reiterated the city’s commitment to managing the arrivals without resorting to deportations.  

“What you saw from the Governor of Texas was an attempt to break our spirit here in Chicago. We rose above that attack and we actually built a system of care for Chicagoans and those seeking refuge in the city of Chicago,” Johnson said at a press conference last week after the defeat of the measure to walk back the protections for immigrants. 

Abbot’s Operation Lonestar was aimed at stoking grievances in sanctuary cities to chip away at the public support for immigrants by “creating perceptions that certain groups were getting access to resources that others are not,” Lee told Bolts. Many Republican leaders, including Trump and Abbott, have similarly scapegoated immigrants for problems with violence and drugs, despite overwhelming evidence that the rates of crime and incarceration among immigrants are far lower than that of citizens. 

“They saw Chicago as being a welcoming city, and they wanted to exploit and make an example out of us,” Lee said. “The root of this is in this national anti-immigrant movement that sought out Chicago as being an obstacle to what they wanted to achieve.” 

He added, “In the process, they have sown division and pitted communities against one another.” Javier Ruiz, a board member for the Pilsen Alliance, a neighborhood group based in Chicago’s Mexican community, says there’ve been tensions in the city’s Mexican communities towards the influx of asylum seekers from Venezuela. Some of that surrounds the federal work permits that have been issued to many new arrivals, while many longtime residents have never been able to get the papers needed to step out of the shadows, he said.

Immigrant rights organizers and labor groups have worked to counter the divide-and-conquer tactics by building a broad coalition of working class people to fight for better jobs, higher wages, adequate community investment and affordable housing, said Willman, of Latinos Progresando. To build unity, his organization has built the Excellerator Fund, a joint venture with the Greater Auburn Gresham Development Corporation to invest in Black and Mexican-led neighborhood groups, businesses and programs on the South and West Sides, like the Ballet Folklorico de Chicago, dedicated to preserving Mexican traditional dance, and the South Merrill Community Garden.

“These coalitions are doing the work on the ground of building those bridges together. They’re working to find the resources and then sharing those resources in equitable ways to support the needs that are unique for each community. So this allows folks to learn from one another, to build community together, to go and advocate for resources together,” Willman said. 

Labor groups are also readying their immigrant members to exercise their rights as workers. Working Families Solidarity, which works across eight predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods on the South and West Sides of Chicago, helps members recover unpaid wages by connecting workers with legal aid and applying direct pressure campaigns on employers who refuse to pay, Bicchieri, its founder, told Bolts. Some workers are exploited because their immigration status makes them vulnerable, he said, and organizations can step in to hold employers accountable.

Antonio Guttierez, co-founder of the group Organized Communities Against Deportation, says his group has worked with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights to set up 18 hyper-local rapid response networks that send volunteers to investigate tips about ICE activity. Despite being inactive for years, the network has grown to over 1000 participants, he said; and while some are new volunteers, some teams are being reawakened after initially forming during the first Trump administration. OCAD’s hotline has received dozens of tips about ICE agent sightings, as well as hate messages and deliberate misinformation that has made it hard for operators to manage the volume of calls and decipher which tips are real, Gutierrez said. 

Since inauguration, the rapid response teams have proactively sent out volunteers as early as 4AM to scout locations where federal agents have staged operations in the past. None of this scouting discovered major operations on Trump’s first day in office, Gutierrez said. 

Chicago organizers in recent months have also doubled down on circulating know-your-rights trainings and webinars aiming to reach immigrants that may be under threat of arrest. They have been distributing flyers and cards to remind people they do not have to consent to a search, that they have the right to contact their families and an attorney, and that they do not have to disclose their immigration status with officers. 

The city has also helped spearhead know-your-rights workshops at various locations across the city, in English, Spanish, and French, as the mayor has advertised on his social media. Some of the events were hosted by prominent local politicians like U.S. Representative Chuy Garcia.

Gutierrez stresses the importance of the right to remain silent, explaining that federal agents often have little information about the people they encounter during raids and traffic stops, so officers try to get verbal confirmation that a person is undocumented. 

He said, “Knowing those rights can definitely make the difference between whether someone is detained or not.”

The post How Chicago’s Immigrant Rights Groups Plan to Hold the Line on Sanctuary Policies appeared first on Bolts.

Chicago Police officers have secretly pulled over as many as 20,000 more drivers per month in the past year than they have reported publicly, in violation of a 2003 law requiring them to document every traffic stop, a Bolts and Injustice Watch investigation has found.

The rate of stops conducted off-the-books has increased under Superintendent Larry Snelling, even as he has positioned himself as an agent of reform who is moving the Chicago Police Department away from its longstanding strategy of using traffic stops to find illegal guns and tamp down on crime. In June, Snelling reported traffic stops were down by about 87,000 over the same time last year. But behind that reduction is a pattern of thousands of unreported police encounters, which accounted for one-third of all traffic stops over the first seven months of Snelling’s tenure.

Records obtained by Bolts and Injustice Watch show police department officials know the traffic stop data they report to state regulators are an undercount. Internally, the department tracks stops using police radio data that doesn’t rely on officers filling out the state-mandated forms.

The findings come at a time when the police department’s targeting of Black neighborhoods with thousands of traffic stops has come under increased scrutiny, following the March killing of Dexter Reed, who was shot 13 times by five plainclothes officers just seconds after being pulled over for a seatbelt violation. The officers said Reed fired at them first.

While many police departments across the country have moved away from the use of traffic stops as a crime-fighting strategy, Chicago remains a stark outlier, with more stops per capita than most major cities, according to a recent analysis by the New York Times.

Pulling over drivers for minor traffic infractions like a broken tail light, or turning without a signal has been a central part of Chicago’s policing tactics for nearly a decade. Officers have used targeted enforcement of minor traffic issues in Black and Latinx neighborhoods as a way to find and remove illegal guns from the streets. The goal, former top police officials have said, is to deter drivers from carrying guns and drugs. Critics say the practice is, at best, an ineffective waste of city resources, and, at worst, an illegal violation of people’s rights that puts drivers and officers in harm’s way.

Snelling has pledged to change course, and earlier this year launched a process to bring traffic enforcement under the oversight of the federal consent decree CPD has been under since 2019. Community groups and advocates pushed back on this effort, arguing the slow-moving consent decree process would delay real traffic stop reform. The sweeping set of court-ordered reforms was designed to address patterns of discriminatory misconduct, excessive force, and rights abuses found to be prevalent in the department, but so far the department has fully met just seven percent of its obligations under the decree. 

The significant number of undocumented traffic stops threatens to undermine any reform efforts and obscures the true impact of the police encounters from oversight groups, preventing them from fully understanding which drivers are stopped, and where in the city they are concentrated.

As Snelling moves to bring traffic stops under federal oversight, the lack of transparency also calls into question whether the department will make a good faith effort to curb the problematic police conduct, or if leaders will instead just sweep those patterns out of view from the public.

“It is quite concerning, especially if CPD is intentionally not recording traffic stops so they can claim they’re fixing the problem, when all they’re doing is hiding it behind an absence of data,” said Alexandra Block, director of the Criminal Legal System & Policing Project at the ACLU of Illinois. 

Snelling declined to be interviewed for this report. A spokesperson for Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson declined to comment.

When asked about the unreported stops, the police department’s public relations staff stood by the publicly-reported numbers.

“The Chicago Police Department is committed to implementing substantive and lasting reforms rooted in constitutional policing as we work to build trust in our communities. Superintendent Snelling is committed to ensuring traffic stops are being used effectively,” a Snelling spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.

200,000 traffic stops missing from reports to state last year

Traffic stops have grown increasingly central to the reform goals of civil rights and police accountability groups in Chicago since the department began to reel in the use of pedestrian stops nearly a decade ago. Police moved away from the controversial tactic known as stop-and-frisk after a wave of scrutiny launched by the police killing of teenager Laquan McDonald in 2014, as well as the botched investigation and coverup by police, prosecutors, and the mayor. The following year, the ACLU of Illinois released a report finding officers regularly targeted Black Chicagoans and violated their Fourth Amendment rights using stop-and-frisk; the city eventually agreed to a legal settlement to begin to reduce the practice.

But as footstops plunged, traffic enforcement in Black neighborhoods soared. Many dubbed this pattern the new stop-and-frisk; police were still initiating millions of encounters with civilians to fish for guns and evidence of other crimes, but by stopping cars rather than pedestrians.

Watchdogs were able to sound the alarm on the massive increase in traffic stops in Black neighborhoods thanks to the Illinois Traffic Stop Study, a 2003 law that requires law enforcement agencies to report the details of every traffic stop to the Illinois Department of Transportation, including a car’s make and model, the driver’s race, and the justification for the stop. With this granular level of data, the state’s racial profiling oversight board is supposed to identify troubling disparities and advise police departments to make changes.

The study has repeatedly shown clear disparities in how often officers pulled over Black drivers. In 2020, Chicago police stopped Black drivers at seven times the rate of white drivers and searched Black drivers or their cars more than three times as often. The ACLU of Illinois sued the city in 2023 on behalf of five drivers who alleged they were racially profiled and had their rights violated in dozens of traffic stops, many of which were not reported.

But the board has never had an accurate picture of the full scope of traffic stops, because the numbers Chicago police reported to the state didn’t match their own internal records.

Our analysis of the radio dispatch data found nearly 200,000 traffic stops last year that were not properly documented or reported to the state.

Traffic stops have, in fact, been falling since early 2023, but not by as much as the state data appears to show. According to the publicly reported data, Chicago police made about 74,000 fewer stops from January through April, a 35 percent drop from the same period last year. But the police dispatch data shows the true reduction in stops was less than 59,000.

“It presents issues for effective oversight and accountability. If you don't know what's happening on the ground, it is hard to make accurate judgments about it. But the data that does exist does paint a pretty clear picture,” said Amy Thompson, an attorney for Impact for Equity who also sits on the state racial profiling oversight board.

She said the board is developing a survey to uncover why some police departments are not in compliance with the law, but it is only an advisory panel that doesn’t have the authority to make sure police are accurately reporting stops.

Data reported to the state in the first half of this year show the gap between stops of Black and white drivers narrowing to three times as many, according to an analysis by WBEZ Chicago.

But with so many stops happening off-the-books, those reports are a misleading portrayal of the purported improvements. Since the radio communications data doesn’t track details like the race of the driver and whether officers did a search, watchdogs groups can’t calculate the extent of the disparities in the off-the-books stops.

"It raises the concern that potentially the stops that are missing are ones where there are harms that are not being surfaced, or where there are particularly egregious incidents that are happening,” Thompson said.

CPD did not answer questions about why there are so many traffic stops logged in the radio system with no paper trail. But two former Chicago Police commanders said in interviews that a small amount of the discrepancy could be due to dispatchers mistakenly logging other kinds of officer activity like a footstop as a traffic stop, or by backlogs of paper traffic stop documents that are delayed from being entered into the record-keeping system or lost altogether.

Jacquez Beasley, one of the drivers suing the city over the traffic stops, suspects his experience of being searched without consent during a traffic stop is far more common for Black drivers than police report to the public.

When he and his brother were pulled over for plate violation in 2021 by a plainclothes officer in an unmarked SUV, the situation quickly spiraled out of control, Beasley said in an interview. After asking Beasley and his brother for identification, the officer called for backup, he said. Within minutes, a large group of undercover cops swarmed the car, ordered them to get out of their car, and detained them.

"The way they flooded the scene, the way they pulled up like that, it escalated so quick. They went from asking my name to putting my brother in cuffs in just minutes,” Beasley said. 

When they asked to search Beasley’s car, he felt he didn’t really have much of a choice. "There was no cause to even search the car. But I knew there wasn't any saying no. I just wanted to get it over with,” he said.

The search turned up nothing, and Beasley was never ticketed for the traffic infraction, he said. The officers still should have made a detailed account of the encounter, under the state law, but there is no record in the traffic stop data that the officers stopped and searched Beasley and his brother, according to the lawsuit. Beasley said he believes officers didn’t bother to report the traffic stop because they didn’t find any drugs or weapons to justify the unnecessary search.

“They didn't find anything. If they found something, they would’ve put the report in. But when they screw up, they want to make themselves look good,” Beasley said.

A previous investigation by Block Club Chicago and Injustice Watch found Chicago Police use traffic stops in Black neighborhoods to target illegal gun possession, though officers had to make over 150 stops for each gun found. And even when officers did make a gun arrest, they often failed to report that the arrest began with a traffic stop.

Missing Chicago police data hinders oversight efforts

In the aftermath of the murder of Laquan McDonald in 2014 and the scathing Department of Justice investigation that followed, a constellation of police oversight agencies were created in Chicago to address the department’s history of unconstitutional and discriminatory policing.

All of those bodies have been stymied by the department’s inconsistent record-keeping and lack of transparency.

The independent monitors assigned to oversee the city’s reform of stop-and-frisk under the settlement with the ACLU of Illinois noted in a series of reports the “unknown quantity” of missing stop-and-frisk documents made it difficult to assess whether officers were complying with the new standards. The monitoring team made recommendations to improve transparency, but unreported stops persisted.

An inquiry last year by Chicago Inspector General Deborah Witzburg into how long it takes for Chicago Police to respond to 911 calls for help was similarly limited by missing data in up to half of all 911 calls. This prevented any analysis of disparities in 911 response times across the city and the factors that contribute to delayed responses, according to the report. 

A separate OIG investigation into use-of-force incidents found Black Chicagoans are far more likely to be stopped, searched, and have an encounter with police escalate into a physical altercation. But the Inspector General’s findings were again limited by unreliable data marked by undocumented encounters.

In the course of investigating patterns in use-of-force incidents, Witzburg’s team examined data on the encounters where such complaints often emerge, including traffic stops. Police provided investigators with data only from traffic stops where officers filled out the required documents—but not those tracked through radio communication records.

"There's a reason that CPD members are required to collect that data on every traffic stop. It is so that oversight entities and the department itself and community stakeholders can get a complete view of the department's traffic stop activity. That only works if they are, in fact, collecting all the data,” Witzburg told Bolts and Injustice Watch.

Although this investigation confirms CPD leadership internally tracks undocumented traffic stops using radio communications data, the Inspector General’s report notes that the police department “was not able to provide OIG with any empirical estimate of rates of unreported or improperly reported stops or uses of force.”

Of the various oversight bodies meant to check CPD’s authority, only the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) can investigate misconduct allegations and punish individual officers. It, too, has dealt with incomplete data in completing its investigations.

The most common complaints the office receives involve claims an officer stopped or searched someone in violation of their rights. During the course of those investigations, the agency regularly disciplines officers for failing to report the stop that resulted in the complaint, COPA Chief Administrator Andrea Kersten said in an interview. In those situations, COPA must use other means, such as GPS and bodycam footage, to gather details about the misconduct incident.

"We're not necessarily limited in our ability to hold officers accountable and find information and evidence about those traffic stops. But we are limited by who complains about them,” Kersten said. “If there is no documentation about these stops, or we don't receive a citizen complaint, then we are not going to have any knowledge that it happened.”

Since 2022, COPA has expanded its capacity to follow patterns across misconduct incidents that point to an underlying issue in police procedures that the agency can advise to fix, Kersten said. The agency's Policy Research and Analysis Division is currently laying the groundwork for a study of the trends around the undocumented stops that COPA's investigators regularly flag, Kersten said. 

"The fatal shooting of Dexter Reed, and the nature of that stop, it shines an unfortunate light on the fact that we as a city need to better understand why this is a police tool that is being used, and what harms it may be causing,” Kersten said. "We are looking at trends across districts. We are looking at trends across different types of officers, to identify if there are unique patterns.”

Community advocates push for new traffic stop policies

Even before the police killing of Dexter Reed, a large coalition of community groups and advocates have called for police to adopt a formal policy to conduct fewer traffic stops. 

In April, Snelling asked U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer, who oversees the federal consent decree, to bring traffic stops under the court’s supervision. 

Many advocates would prefer that traffic stops come under the purview of the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, an oversight body created in 2021 which has the power to set police policy and call for the removal of a superintendent. The commission has asked Pallmeyer to avoid overtaking the community oversight’s role in monitoring traffic stops, since the panel has no authority to set policy on issues under federal supervision.

Advocacy groups have presented the commission with a policy agenda that has three main components: banning officers from using traffic enforcement to fish for unrelated crime, limiting traffic stops for non-safety violations, and restricting officers from asking drivers for consent to search them without suspicion of criminal activity. The commission will have a public hearing on Aug. 27 to gather input on how communities want the commission to intervene, and what a policy would look like. 

A number of U.S. cities have begun to phase out some traffic stops as a primary crime deterrent strategy, saying the risk for racially-biased harm outweighs potential public safety benefits. Philadelphia was the first major city to ban low-level traffic stops as a way to prevent racial profiling in 2021, and since then, a wave of cities including San Francisco, Ann Arbor, and Minneapolis have implemented similar policies.

“A number of cities have policies that refocus police away from making minor stops to prioritize activities that actually affect traffic safety, like dangerous driving,” said Daniella Gilbert, director of the Redefining Public Safety initiative at the Vera Institute of Justice, a national policy group. 

Some jurisdictions that have limited officers from making non-safety traffic stops have been able to focus resources on moving violations and drunk driving, resulting in safer roads and lower racial disparities, studies show.

“There are benefits to road safety itself, in addition to mitigating the erosion of trust and disparate impact that these kinds of stops result in,” Gilbert said. 

Prosecutors in Ramsey County, Minnesota, home to St. Paul, said in 2021 that they would stop charging arrests stemming solely from non-public-safety traffic stops, five years after a police officer in a nearby suburb killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop for a broken taillight. Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx recently said her office would follow suit, but with just a few months left in office, it’s unclear if Foxx’s proposal will be implemented or maintained by her successor.

In the meantime, advocates are continuing to press for a stronger CPD policy to reduce the number of unnecessary stops, but any such efforts will be hampered as long as CPD continues to underreport traffic stops.

As the federal court mulls bringing traffic stops under the consent decree, there’s skepticism among residents and civil rights groups that anything will change soon. They’re disillusioned by Chicago Police’s already extremely low compliance with the consent decree reforms and the department’s track record of misleading oversight agencies to avoid accountability, said C.M.D. Chiimeh, an organizer for Southsiders Organized for Unity and Liberation, at the consent decree hearing.

“It is evident the current approach is ineffective and inefficient. The issues surrounding pretextual traffic stops need to be addressed now. And it has been proven the consent decree is incapable of doing that," Chiimeh said. "Putting this issue in the consent decree … would only continue to perpetuate overpolicing, degrade community trust, perpetuate racial disparities, and squander valuable resources associated with CPD's handling of traffic stops.”

The post Chicago Police Made Nearly 200,000 Secret Traffic Stops Last Year appeared first on Bolts.

After Chicago police arrested Luis Gonzalez on an illegal gun possession charge in 2022, getting out of jail was his immediate concern. He didn’t have $200 to post bail, but being stuck in jail threatened to cost him his job at a West Side gas station and his ability to care for his four children.

“The first thing in my head was my kids,” Gonzalez said. “I would’ve lost my job. I probably would have lost my kids.”

His first call from jail was to the Lawndale Christian Legal Center, a neighborhood group where Gonzalez had often referred others to get help when they were in a jam. The organization paid for Gonzalez’s release and got him a lawyer for his case. He went home to his kids and soon returned to work at the gas station.

But even though he was out of jail, Gonzalez felt like he’d overcome one hurdle just to end up back in the exact same situation that landed him in trouble in the first place. Prior to his arrest, Gonzalez dealt constantly with dangerous situations during his evening shifts at the gas station, often breaking up fights between belligerent customers. He says that he’s twice been robbed at gunpoint during his shift.

Gonzalez, who lived with his kids just a few blocks from the gas station, says he felt he needed to get a gun for protection after someone started shooting at him one night as he walked home with groceries in hand. He says that breaking up fights at the station and calling the police on troublemakers had made him a target. Gonzalez walked away from the shooting unharmed but three of the bullets hit his car parked outside his home. 

“I was in total fear. I couldn’t quit my job, and this was my only income to pay rent and support my kids,” Gonzalez said. “Even after getting shot in my house, I couldn’t afford to move. I went to get a weapon, not to be a menace. I wasn’t out here gangbanging, I was just trying to make a living for my family.”

Within a month of Gonzalez acquiring the gun, police arrested him after they found it during a traffic stop. Getting out of jail helped prevent his life from spinning even further out of control, but he says it was the support he received after his release that dealt him a new hand in life.

Lawndale Christian Legal Center, the group that bailed him out, brought him into a program, Community Release with Support, designed to address the underlying needs of people on pretrial release by linking them with services for housing, addiction treatment, job training and transportation. Since housing was his most urgent issue, they enrolled Gonzalez in a program funded by the Chicago Low Income Housing Trust Fund so he could move his family to a place they felt safe. The program connected Gonzalez with a landlord in their network and helped him pay rent so that no more than 30 percent of his income was going to housing.

Gonzalez says those resources allowed him to move his family out of a two-bedroom basement unit and into a four-bedroom home with a yard where he likes to barbecue for the kids when the weather is nice. His new neighborhood is far enough from the gas station that problems at work are unlikely to follow him home anymore.

“If I didn’t have these resources, I would’ve been still stuck in the same apartment, the same area,” Gonzalez said. “I would’ve probably still been in jail. I would’ve, for my own safety, ended up catching another [gun] case just to make it back and forth to work.”

The program that helped Gonzalez get out of the situation that led to his arrest in the first place was a local pilot, but advocates for criminal justice reform are now asking Illinois lawmakers to expand access to these types of community-based programs across the state.

Many of the same advocates who successfully pushed for the state to abolish cash bail last year are now hoping to build on that reform with The Pretrial Success Act, a bill filed this legislative session that would direct $15 million to community organizations around the state to provide voluntary services to people awaiting trial. The legislation would offer grants of up to $500,000 for these organizations to develop and scale up programs that offer everything from clinical behavioral and health services to transportation, child care, and case management for people on pretrial release in accordance with their needs, in order to improve their odds of success.

“The idea is to get to the root causes,” said Rebecca Levin, Vice President of Policy at Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities (TASC), an organization that provides community-based treatment and recovery support for people with mental illness and substance use disorders. 

The bill, introduced in February by State Senator Elgie Sims and State Representative Maurice West, has been widely supported by social service agencies across the state. Supporters say that it builds on prior Illinois grant programs aimed at improving public safety using community investment—such as the 2021 Reimagine Public Safety Act that established a public health approach to gun violence prevention and the Restore, Reinvest, Renew program launched in 2019 that directs a portion of cannabis tax revenue into disinvested communities. This year’s Pretrial Success Act would be the first to specifically target services for pretrial defendants released from jail. The bill is currently being debated in the Senate Health and Human Services Committee and the House Public Safety Committee. 

Levin, whose organization was a key partner in drafting reforms to strengthen services for people released from jail, says the bill is built on a belief that mental health and substance use problems should not be addressed through the criminal legal system. Incarceration has historically been used as a catchall solution for addiction and mental illness, even though incarcerated people rarely receive the necessary care for those conditions, compounding behavioral health problems and magnifying the risk of overdose and suicide after release, Levin said.

“The behavioral health issues and violence have the same root cause, and it’s really the cycle of trauma,” Levin said. “Folks who are traumatized often look to cope through substance use. Folks who are traumatized may experience mental illness. Investing in these behavioral services is about interrupting this cycle of violence and trauma.”

Levin calls the Pretrial Success Act a critical next step after the state abolished cash bail last year. Lawmakers passed the landmark reform, known as the Pretrial Fairness Act, in 2021 to get rid of cash bail and make it so that a defendant’s release no longer depends on their ability to pay bail, but rather only if a judge determines that they are either a flight risk or threat to public safety. After overcoming legal challenges by Illinois sheriffs and prosecutors, the law finally took effect last September.

Advocates in the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice, a partnership between dozens of organizations that worked to develop the Pretrial Fairness Act and lobby for it in Springfield, say that ending cash bail was only the starting point for reshaping the criminal legal system’s role in keeping people safe. 

Under the old system, cash bail was used as collateral to ensure people who were deemed by a judge to be safe to release would attend court dates and wouldn’t reoffend. But in effect, advocates say, jailing someone solely due to their inability to pay disrupts critical needs in their life like employment, healthcare, childcare, or any educational path they might be on. Instead of making communities safer, they say mass incarceration based on people’s inability to pay bail only created more financial desperation and broken families, fueling the kind of instability in poor communities that can lead to crime.

Since the Pretrial Fairness Act took effect last fall, more people throughout the state are now awaiting trial at home with their families rather than behind bars. In Cook County alone, the jail population has declined by 13 percent since cash bail was abolished, according to data from the Sheriff’s Office. Advocates for this year’s pretrial reform bill say that boosting wraparound services for people awaiting trial will not only enhance public safety but help reinvest resources in communities that have long been harmed by mass incarceration. 

“We have communities that have been disinvested for generations. Ending the extraction of wealth from communities through money bonds was an essential first step, but we have to invest in those communities as well,” Levin said. “A piece of that is building up support and services that will allow people to be on a positive path while they are waiting for trial. Ultimately the goal is to reduce involvement in the criminal legal system.”

Gonzalez made it to every court date, thanks to phone and text reminders the Community Release with Support staff sent him. Since Gonzalez lost his car due to the arrest, the program also supplied him with transportation anytime he needed help getting to court or coming home from work. Eventually, he accepted a plea that resulted in no jail time.

“I took full responsibility for having the weapon. Sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes we get caught up doing things that we shouldn’t. But that’s not the end,” Gonzalez said. “Catching this case was a bad thing, but for me it was my blessing in life. They opened up a lot of doors for me.”

Matthew McFarland, vice president of Lawndale Christian Legal Center and former director of the program that helped Gonzalez after his release, says over 3,000 people have participated in the program so far. The neighborhood legal center launched Community Release with Support at the end of 2021 as a two-year pilot program with the Bail Project, a national nonprofit that pays bail for those who can’t afford it and donated $2.9 million for the program. In anticipation of the bond reform law that would soon take effect, McFarland says the project was designed to be a scalable and replicable model for using community investments and social services as a replacement for cash bail. 

McFarland says the project has been an overwhelming success: According to the organization’s data, participants made it to 98 percent of their court dates. 

“Most people plan to meet their court dates. But there’s last minute things that happen like childcare, or issues with their rides. That’s why they don’t make it to court,” McFarland said. “When people are able to fight their case from a position of freedom, they can also address the things dragging them into the criminal legal system in the first place, and they tend to have better outcomes.”

Participants also tend to have favorable outcomes in their cases, McFarland said. Over half of the cases that went to trial ended in a dismissal, and the vast majority that ended in conviction resulted in no additional jail time. 

McFarland says that in addition to helping people make court dates, the program also connected participants to support and social services that helped them make improvements in their lives—like furthering their education by completing their GED or enrolling in trade school, or help navigating child custody issues. Community Release with Support linked over 1,000 participants with employment services, while over 740 were connected to education or training programs. More than 250 clients were connected to housing services, including at least 50 families who enrolled in the same program that helped Gonzalez move his children into a safer home.  

“These things matter for judges,” McFarland said. “Nobody wants to lock somebody up who is succeeding in the community. 

Advocates for reform say funding from this year’s Pretrial Success Act would help scale up such wraparound support programs across the state. The legislation directs the Illinois Department of Human Services, which would allocate the grants, to spread the money among organizations offering programs in each judicial circuit area. The law would also create local advisory councils to recommend how the grants should be allocated in each service area, which must include people with personal experience of being charged with a felony in the state.

Levin with Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities says her organization, which already operates programs across the state, would be able to expand existing case management services already offered for people on probation and cater them to the specialized needs of people released from jail before trial. Lauren Wright, executive director of Illinois Partners for Human Service, says the legislation could help grow social services outside of the Chicago area, where services are already sparse and may not have the capacity to meet the growing needs of people on pretrial release. 

Transportation challenges are also magnified in rural areas, where there are few service providers separated by long distances with limited public transit. Wright says it is also tougher downstate to recruit and retain staff members to provide the necessary trauma-informed services for people on pretrial release.

“There are unique issues that individuals and human service providers face downstate,” Wright said. “Organizations are really struggling already to meet the needs of community members.”

McFarland knows personally how helping someone deal with the underlying issues that led to their arrest can allow a person to set a new course in life. He’d cycled in and out of the criminal legal system for decades, and by his final arrest in 2015 he had a rap sheet 60 pages long that he says “reads like a horror story of somebody who is battling a horrible heroin and crack cocaine addiction.”

McFarland says his own turning point came when, rather than incarcerating him, the court handed him off to a community-based treatment provider where he could recover from his addiction. 

“I was able to get those root causes addressed,” McFarland said. “Amazing things happened. I started making it back to court, and I had the judge cheering me on. I completed treatment, and I was sober. I got a job. I got my driver’s license. The trajectory of my life changed.”

The post Illinois Ended Cash Bail. Now Reformers Want More Support for People on Pretrial Release.  appeared first on Bolts.

It started as a traffic stop for an alleged seatbelt violation. It escalated to a deadly encounter within seconds.

Since the release of body cam footage showing plainclothes police killing Dexter Reed in Chicago, loved ones and activists have demanded to know why the 26-year-old was stopped, and how a simple traffic stop left Reed dead, an officer wounded and cops firing nearly 100 shots in a residential neighborhood.

The traffic stop is part of a pattern that has increasingly targeted Black neighborhoods in recent years and activists say may violate people’s rights. The traffic stops have been called “the new stop-and-frisk.”

And they’ve been particularly aggressive on the city’s West Side, where Reed was stopped and killed. Activists have warned for years that these traffic stops can spark volatile encounters.

In fact, police pull over more Chicagoans in the Harrison (11th) Police District, where Reed was pulled over, than in any other district in the city, according to a Block Club Chicago analysis of police data. The vast majority of those stops don’t lead to tickets. 

One-tenth of all Chicago traffic stops happened in that district—averaging more than 154 stops per day—even though the area accounts for just 3 percent of Chicago’s population, according to a report by Impact for Equity. About 96 percent of people living in the district are Black or Latino, according to the report.  

“The strategy ends up creating a dangerous situation for everyone rather than contributing to any improvement of public safety in Chicago, said Amy Thompson, staff counsel for Impact for Equity. “Pretextual stops are creating danger, not finding danger.”

She thinks that Reed’s arrest illustrates that danger. “Five officers rushed out in plainclothes for a seat belt violation. It clearly was an attempt to fish for crime,” she said.

Chicago’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability, the oversight agency that investigates when officers shoot someone, raised concerns over the reason officers gave for stopping Reed. Investigators are uncertain how officers would have seen Reed wasn’t wearing a seat belt given their positions and the fact Reed’s SUV had tinted windows, chief administrator Andrea Kersten wrote in a letter to Police Supt. Larry Snelling, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. 

Newly released documents show the officers involved in the fatal shootout were being investigated for several other traffic stops that drivers said were unwarranted.

Police Superintendent Larry Snelling, who became Chicago’s top cop last year, has indicated the number of traffic stops is a problem, too. He has reversed course from previous administrations by pledging to reduce traffic stops. He also has committed to routinely training officers to ensure they act based on “reasonable articulable suspicion or probable cause,” he told neighbors at a town hall the day before footage of Reed’s killing was released.

“People have been sounding the alarm that the massive escalation in traffic stops would lead to more violent interactions because of the way this strategy is being conducted. These stops have become so routine and they are so ineffective that we knew we would have some tragedy like this occur as a result,” said Ed Yohnka, spokesperson of the Illinois ACLU. “The stops take place in this fashion where guns are drawn and there’s an immediate escalation of things.”

How stops surged after Chicago funneled more cops to traffic stops

Traffic stops in Black neighborhoods surged after a 2015 ACLU report found stop-and-frisk encounters were frequently baseless, targeted Black and Latino Chicagoans and routinely violated people’s rights. After the city agreed to reform the practice, Chicago police turned to traffic stops, Yohnka said.

The number of traffic stops Chicago Police reported to state watchdogs surged from under 100,000 in 2015 to nearly 600,000 in 2019, according to the Illinois Traffic and Pedestrian Stop Study. Documented stops dipped during the first years of the pandemic, but in 2023, Chicago police logged its second-highest number of stops in two decades, according to the Impact for Equity report. Black drivers are stopped up to seven times more often than white drivers, the state report showed. There are few traffic stops in districts where many police officers live while cops disproportionately stop drivers in Black neighborhoods.

But the study vastly underestimates Chicago police traffic stops. A Block Club investigation found hundreds of thousands of traffic stops annually that the department did not report to the state, in violation of a transparency law meant to address patterns of racial bias in police encounters.

Chicago police rely heavily on these encounters to search for contraband like illegal guns and drugs, stopping and arresting thousands more Black drivers than they report to oversight agencies, a Block Club investigation found. Officers make millions of stops but find guns in fewer than one of every 150 stops, Block Club and Injustice Watch found.  

“It is clear that this kind of stop has nothing to do with traffic safety. It is all about trying to search for guns and drugs,” Yohnka said. “If your expectation is to try to find a weapon, you look at that situation much differently than someone who rolled through a stop sign.”

Chicago police have funneled resources and manpower supposedly earmarked for other public safety strategies to make more traffic stops and scale up gun arrests, Bolts and Block Club have found.

The signature project of David Brown, Snelling’s predecessor, was a community policing unit purportedly launched to build trust between South and West Side residents and police, solve local problems and tackle crime at its root. By 2021, it was the largest unit in the department with over 800 officers.

But an analysis of dispatch records by Bolts showed those officers rarely did those positive community engagement activities. Instead, they were deployed primarily on the South and West sides as a roving strike team and the central enforcer of the growing traffic stop program. The community policing team stopped and searched more drivers than any other police unit, amounting to nearly one-third of the mountain of traffic stops in 2021, data shows.

The community team was dismantled amid outcry from watchdogs and legal turmoil from drivers and officers who complained of an illegal quota system that discriminated against Black Chicagoans. 

An ongoing class action lawsuit filed by Black and Latino drivers and the ACLU alleges the traffic stop strategy—and Brown’s community team in particular—flooded Black neighborhoods with traffic stops as a pretext to search drivers without their consent. The complaint references emails sent by then-Deputy Superintendent Ernest Cato III that ordered commanders to “utilize traffic stops to address violence.”

A former lieutenant on the community team sued the city in 2021, claiming leadership retaliated against him for refusing to  require officers under his command to conduct at least 10 stops daily. Though the community team was disbanded, Snelling reinstated it under a new name.

“Every officer in those units is not one that’s in the community, talking to neighbors and trying to find solutions,” Yohnka said. “Our clients described traffic stops where officers approach the car with their hand on their gun. People are being singled out and targeted for their race. It points out the danger of these stops, the inefficiency of the stops and the tragedy of the situation.”

Officers who are supposed to respond to 911 calls have also been steered toward traffic stops, a Block Club investigation found.

Hundreds of officers each day are assigned to rapid response duty, answering top-priority 911 calls and reducing long wait times that have become a pressing concern for many communities, according to police directives. It is supposed to allow beat officers to stay on their local patrols and build community relationships rather than respond to emergency calls.

But dispatch data shows rapid response officers rarely handle 911 calls. Instead, the majority of those officers are dedicated to traffic stops, the data shows.

“That’s a lot of manpower,” community organizer Arewa Winters said. “While we have all these issues going on everywhere, and you’re pulling people over with no good outcomes. Is that a practical use of manpower? Could you be somewhere else doing something else?”

A promise to reduce traffic stops: ‘We have to unlearn old things’ 

Snelling, the city’s first superintendent chosen under a new community oversight commission, has broken from past leadership by promising to address the harms caused by the mass use of traffic stops. 

Former Supt. Brown denied the existence of racially discriminatory stops and quotas and rejected evidence that stops were used to fish for gun possession cases.

At an April community hearing, Snelling acknowledged how traffic stops are part of the department’s strategy for dealing with guns, touting the department has scaled back on traffic stops while still increasing gun arrests. Snelling plans to continue to reduce traffic stops by training officers on different tactics, he said.

“We have to train the officers out of that and bring them into something new,” Snelling said. “In order to get them to learn new things, we have to have them unlearn the old things.”

Snelling said Chicago police have conducted 46,000 fewer stops in 2024 compared to the first quarter of last year. Police spokesperson Thomas Ahern declined to share a source for how the department tracked that reduction in stops, saying the statistic came from “computer data.”

To address the long-term issues with traffic stops, Snelling committed to bringing traffic stops under the supervision of the federal consent decree so the reductions “will be long lasting after I am gone,” he said.

But many are skeptical and urge the superintendent to take more immediate action. Only 6 percent of the requirements from the consent decree have been met in the five years since it took effect, according to a recent report.

“Whether or not Snelling views traffic stops differently, in order for community to have clarity on what their interactions with law enforcement will be, and even so police has clarity on what they can and cannot do, there needs to be a formal policy on these pretextual stops,” said Thompson of Impact for Equity.

When the goal is to investigate unrelated crime, officers are motivated to escalate a traffic stop to search for contraband, not deescalate the situation, Winters said. The tactic widely used in Black neighborhoods thrusts hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans each day into a high-risk situation that could turn lethal at any moment.

Investigators concluded Reed shot at officers first. But the focus on who fired first distracts from the bigger picture, Winters said: Neither the officers nor Reed were in a potentially deadly situation until police pulled Reed over. 

“The conversation needs to begin with what the police started with and how they approached that young man.”

It is reminiscent of when officers killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop near Minneapolis in 2016, Winters said. Officers used a broken taillight as a pretext to stop Castile and investigate him for an unrelated armed robbery nearby, an investigation showed. Within a minute of the encounter, officers fired at Castile while his girlfriend and her 4-year-old child were in the car.

That same year, Winters’ nephew Pierre Loury was killed after officers pulled over a car he was in to investigate a shooting earlier that day. After the 16-year-old tried to run away, an officer shot Loury after the teen climbed a fence.

“I know so many other families who have lost loved ones to police. We’re retraumatized, we’re frustrated, we’re angry, we’re hurt,” Winters said. “It’s truly overwhelming. But at the same time, we have to fight. We have to push back on the narratives that they try to spin.”

The post Behind Dexter Reed’s Police Killing, a Surge in Traffic Stops on Chicago’s West Side appeared first on Bolts.

Eileen O’Neill Burke, a former judge, won a remarkably close race over Clayton Harris III, a former prosecutor who defended Foxx’s legacy and received her backing late in the race. 

The Associated Press called the race on Friday, ten days after the March 19 election, a period during which local officials counted thousands of mail and provisional ballots. As of publication, with few ballots left to count, O’Neill Burke leads by 1,556 votes, or 0.3 percentage points.

O’Neill Burke showcased her decades of experience in the courtroom during the campaign; thanks to conservative donors, she vastly outspent her opponent with TV ads and mailers to project an image of an unwavering leader capable of delivering justice to dangerous criminals. But even as she ran on a tougher-on-crime message, she also praised some of Foxx’s reforms on restorative justice and expressed support for the state’s recent law abolishing cash bail. 

Harris, meanwhile, drew endorsements from influential forces that had previously supported Foxx, such as the Cook County Democratic Party and the Chicago Teachers Union. In a race marked by dramatically low turnout, those alliances proved insufficient, breaking a string of progressive wins in the region that also included Brandon Johnson in the 2023 mayoral race.

In this heavily Democratic county, O’Neill Burke will be strongly favored in November against Republican Bob Fioretti and Libertarian Andrew Charles Kopinski. Cook County has one of the year’s major prosecutor races, with the reelection bids of Los Angeles’ George Gascón and Atlanta’s Fani Willis coming up later this year; March also saw two wins for reformers in Texas.

On Friday evening, O’Neill Burke issued a statement congratulating her opponent for his campaign, saying, “If I’ve learned one thing during the process, it’s that there is so much more that unites us than what divides us.” 

She heard the same message “across every neighborhood and every town,” she said: “We want less crime and safer communities, not by locking everyone up, but by turning people around.” 

But the primary revealed an electorate that was starkly polarized geographically. The result came down to the city versus its suburbs: Harris won within Chicago and O’Neill Burke carried the rest of Cook County.

O’Neill Burke and Harris also both romped with huge margins in different neighborhoods. Each won several wards of Chicago, and several suburban townships, with more than 70 percent.

These patterns mirror Cook County’s recent prosecutor elections, dating back to 2016.

Foxx won her first race in 2016 on the heels of the killing of Laquan McDonald, a Black teenager shot 16 times by a police officer while he was walking away. State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez was widely blamed alongside the sitting mayor and police superintendent for delaying charges against the officer and withholding footage that disproved the police’s justification narratives.

In ousting Alvarez, Foxx promised enhanced police accountability, less reliance on incarceration, and a more transparent system. Once in office, she rolled out reforms that scaled back the use of cash bail, reduced prison admissions, and expanded diversion programs for drug cases and low-level offenses. 

But Foxx also drew heated attacks and condemnation from people attached to more traditional policing methods, with Chicago’s police union and its president John Catanzara emerging as chief antagonists. As Chicago’s issues with gun violence, drugs, and smash-and-grab robberies rose during the pandemic after several years of decline, as they did elsewhere in the nation, Foxx’s critics pressed for more punitive policies. Foxx still secured reelection in 2020 over challengers who questioned her reforms. 

Will Tanzman, executive director of the People’s Lobby, a local progressive group, credits her wins in part to an “incredible grassroots movements of people in the streets who really changed the public conversation about what it takes to create safe communities and go beyond tough-on-crime policing and prosecution.”

Three years later, in the spring of 2023, mayoral candidate Paul Vallas also thought that a tough-on-crime backlash would carry him to the mayor’s office with support from the police union but he lost to Johnson, who promised during his campaign to support criminal justice and policing reforms.

Johnson beat Vallas by 4.3 percentage points in April of 2023. That’s nearly identical to the margin by which Harris won Chicago this month.

But O’Neill Burke bested Harris by roughly 7.5 percentage points in the suburban areas of Cook County, enough to carry her to a countywide victory. This matches a common pattern around the nation, with candidates more supportive of reform doing better within cities than surrounding areas, including in Democratic primaries. 

Still, the Chicago-suburbs gap shrank since the last two prosecutor primaries. In 2016, Foxx performed 10 percentage points better in Chicago; four years later, she performed 12 percentage points better. Harris this year did six percentage points better within Chicago than the rest of Cook County.

Within the city, the distribution of votes in the 2024 prosecutor primary was strikingly similar to the 2020 prosecutor primary, and the 2023 mayoral runoff:

Foxx, Johnson, and Harris, who are all Black, each carried predominantly Black neighborhoods on the South Side, the West Side, as well as the liberal, more white areas on the North Side.

Despite Burke’s stronger showing outside Chicago, Harris also overwhelmingly carried majority-Black south suburbs that previously helped Foxx, such as Rich and Thornton Townships. He also prevailed in some areas like Evanston where residents are predominantly white and liberal.

But Harris’ wins in some parts of the South and West Side neighborhoods were not as forceful as Foxx’s in 2020. Harris did perform better in some majority-Latinx areas including Little Village, Brighton Park and McKinley Park.

O’Neill Burke did very well in more conservative enclaves on the edge of Chicago that are home to high populations of police officers and fire workers, such as Norwood Park, Mount Greenwood and Jefferson Park. 

For instance, she received 83 percent of the vote in Chicago’s 41st ward, a police stronghold in the Far Northwest side. Her lead of 5,100 votes just in that ward is roughly four times larger than her countywide victory. 

In the runup to the Democratic primary, Catanzara, the police union head, urged police officers to “hold their noses” and participate in the Democratic primary regardless of their party to cast a ballot for O’Neill Burke. 

In a video posted to the police union’s social media accounts, Catanzara derided Foxx’s tenure. He framed Burke as the candidate who could “save the city and this county and get back to what everybody seemed to remember being law and order and accountability,” he said.  

O’Neill Burke declined Cantazara’s support; her campaign said his statement was “inappropriate” given the nature of the relationship between the police and the prosecutor’s office.

She enjoyed a financial edge in the race thanks to hundreds of thousands in donations from Republican donors. Harris said she was backed by “very extreme right funds.” O’Neill Burke tried to turn the table by attacking him for working with corporations like Lyft with an anti-labor record. One of her ads attacked him as an “an anti-union corporate lobbyist” and “political insider.”

“Even though she’s running on a tough-on-crime platform, she is running as a good government reformer,” Dick Simpson, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Chicago who has long studied Cook County elections, told Bolts. 

Simpson also thinks O’Neill Burke was able to appeal to the more moderate Democratic voters in the suburbs by balancing criticism of Foxx with support for some of her policies, like boosting restorative justice and alternative programs for cases that touch on drug and mental health. 

O’Neill Burke, like Harris, also backed the Pretrial Fairness Act, the landmark law that banned the practice of making defendants pay money in exchange for staying out of jail. The reform, whose implementation began last fall, has drawn heavy fire from Republicans and from state’s attorneys in other parts of the state. 

Tanzman commends O’Neill Burke’s decision to nod toward some reforms, including her support for the end of cash bail. “It is meaningful that Burke said she supported the Pretrial Fairness Act and that is going to be how voters expect her to govern,” he said. 

“The more conservative candidate decided to incorporate some key elements of the criminal justice reform movement,” he added.

Still, the two candidates also staked different positions that made it clear that Harris was more likely to continue Foxx’s legacy. O’Neill Burke escalated her criticism of Foxx in the campaign’s final stretch, saying people were leaving Chicago out of fear because the legal system isn’t working under her.

Harris pledged to carve his own path, and he was largely not as outspoken in favor of reform as the current prosecutor, but he also said he’d give Foxx an “A” for her accomplishments. 

In one example of his cautious two-step, he signaled that he’d be more aggressive than Foxx in seeking pretrial detention for violent crimes and gun cases. Still, O’Neill Burke staked a more punitive stance than him, pledging to petition judges to order pretrial detention in every single case involving a violent crime. 

Under the system set up by the Pretrial Fairness Act, courts can still order that someone be kept in jail pretrial on some types of charges, but only if prosecutors ask for it. Some state’s attorneys have taken a hard line in response to the new law, saying they’ll try to keep people behind bars in any case that’s eligible for it, Bolts reported last month. 

In another clear policy difference between the candidates, Harris aligned himself with Foxx’s efforts to keep lower-level crimes out of the prison system. He said he would maintain her policy of prosecuting retail theft as a misdemeanor rather than a felony when the value of stolen goods is under $1000; O’Neill Burke said she would lower the threshold to $300 to align with state law. 

O’Neill Burke also drew criticism during the campaign for her role in the wrongful conviction of a 10-year old Black child in 1994. In reference to his alleged criminality, she said at the time that the child was part of “a whole new breed,” language for which she has since apologized. 

Her campaign told Bolts earlier this month that, if she is elected, she would look to build a strong team in the state’s attorney’s office to investigate possible wrongful convictions. 

Though many progressive organizers are wary of Burke’s opposition to some of Foxx’s reforms, they say they’ll try to press the next state’s attorney away from punitive solutions and hold her accountable to her promises on restorative justice and wrongful convictions. “We don’t want to take a step backwards,” said Frank Chapman, field organizer for the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. 

“Our demands are not going to change,” he added. “It’s a thorny road we trot. But make no mistake about it, we will continue to fight for justice.”

The post O’Neill Burke Squeaks Out Win in Prosecutor Race, Breaking Chicago’s Progressive Streak appeared first on Bolts.

Cook County, home to Chicago and many of its suburbs, bears the infamous reputation as the nation’s wrongful conviction capital. The regimes of notorious, corrupt Chicago police ringleaders like Jon Burge and Ronald Watts forced or coerced hundreds of false confessions, leading to hundreds of exonerations in the years since their abuses first came to light.

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, elected as a progressive reformer in 2016 to lead the country’s second-largest prosecutor’s office, made addressing the legacy of wrongful convictions a centerpoint of her tenure. After taking over the office, Foxx revamped its Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU), which had been launched by her predecessor, Anita Alvarez, to examine misconduct allegations or new evidence that call convictions into question. During Foxx’s almost eight years in office, prosecutors have overturned 250 convictions, almost three times as many as were overturned under Alvarez.

But the unit’s work has been overshadowed in recent months by public controversies. A former CIU leader quietly resigned in December, more than a year after defense attorneys accused her and other prosecutors of deliberately withholding exculpatory evidence for a decade. While Foxx has again tried to revamp the unit during her final months in office, a judge recently barred the unit’s new head from testifying in his courtroom over what he called a “conflict of interest” just weeks after she assumed the post.

Now, the unit and its future are again in flux. Foxx announced last April that she would not seek a third term, and the candidates vying to replace her have espoused different views of the agency and its role in the legal system. 

Clayton Harris III, a longtime government worker and former prosecutor, has promised to build on Foxx’s legacy of reforms, including her efforts to overturn wrongful convictions. Harris, who is backed by local progressive leaders and the county’s Democratic party, said he’s had meetings with the Illinois Innocence Project and the Exoneration Project about how to manage the CIU and wants to improve its operations. 

Currently, different types of cases are routed to different units within the state’s attorney’s office; when an incarcerated person files a post-conviction petition, for example, that case is handled by a member of a post-conviction unit, while cases involving innocence claims are sent to the CIU and resentencing cases are sent to the sentencing review unit. Harris says that if elected, he plans to combine those three units “so that there’s cross-pollination” among prosecutors working on similar cases.

“These are innocent individuals that were taken from their families that never should have been incarcerated,” Harris told Bolts in an interview. “So, let’s start there before anyone says another word.”

Harris’s opponent in the Democratic primary, former prosecutor and retired judge Eileen O’Neill Burke, has pledged to continue the work of the CIU if elected. But she has also come under fire for her own role in the 1994 wrongful conviction of a Black boy who was accused of murdering an older white woman. O’Neill Burke, who helped try the case, had at the time evoked the since-debunked “superpredator” myth, claiming the 10-year-old boy was part of “a whole new breed” of criminals. 

O’Neill Burke, who has pledged to roll back some of Foxx’s reforms and crack down on gun prosecutions, has remained largely unapologetic both for her role in the wrongful prosecution and her previous comments about the boy. She told the Chicago Tribune last December that his confession was “compelling evidence” while declining to answer questions about her other remarks. 

O’Neill Burke’s campaign, which has become increasingly critical of the reforms under Foxx in the days leading up to the primary, declined to make her available for an interview with Bolts but said in a statement that she supports a “robust conviction review unit.” Her campaign manager Don Black wrote that, if elected, O’Neill Burke would staff the unit with “the best prosecutors who will collaborate with other post-conviction units to share resources and improve efficiency.”

The winner of the March 19 Democratic primary will face off against Bob Fioretti, a progressive-turned-hardline conservative who, as a civil rights attorney, previously represented someone who was wrongfully convicted. Fioretti, who is unopposed in the GOP primary, faces steep odds in the November general election in the overwhelmingly Democratic county.

As the office changes hands, advocates like Joshua Tepfer say whoever takes the reins has their work cut out for them. As a civil rights attorney with Loevy & Loevy and the Exoneration Project, Tepfer has represented the vast majority of the people exonerated under Foxx. He says his issues with the office are less ideological than they are logistical. 

In an interview with Bolts, he said the office’s current setup has created some “efficiency problems.” The CIU will only accept wrongful conviction cases where a person is making a claim of “actual innocence” that’s supported by new evidence that was not presented at trial. The CIU will not review cases on direct appeal and “may decline review during the pendency of post-conviction proceedings.” Usually, those appeals are handled by the office’s post-conviction unit.  

“I don’t understand why I can’t litigate my cases if I think someone’s innocent. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me,” Tepfer said. He supports efforts to create more collaboration across the post-conviction units, similar to the proposals from Harris and O’Neill Burke. “It should be a post-conviction and review unit and everyone who is handling post-conviction cases—whatever the case—should be analyzing them to determine whether or not we think justice was done,” he said. 

In March 2016, just days after unseating Alvarez, Foxx boarded a plane to Brooklyn, New York, to meet with Kenneth Thompson, the Kings County district attorney, and Ronald Sullivan Jr., a Harvard University law professor. Working under Thompson, Sullivan had created and led what was considered at the time to be the nation’s preeminent wrongful conviction unit, having played a role in more than two dozen exonerations in fewer than four years.

With Sullivan by her side, Foxx charted an overhaul to Cook County’s CIU. One of Sullivan’s chief recommendations: The unit’s leader should be an outsider, particularly one with criminal defense experience, and insulated from the cases that came before them. To lead the wrongful conviction unit, Foxx tapped Mark Rotert, a defense attorney of nearly two decades and a former federal prosecutor. By the time he resigned two years later, Rotert had overseen the office’s first ever mass exoneration, in which cases for 15 defendants with connections to cops under Watts’s command were tossed out because the office concluded it couldn’t trust information provided by police. 

The CIU’s independence from the rest of the state’s attorney’s office didn’t last long, however. As Rotert’s successor, Fox selected a 23-year veteran of the office named Nancy Adduci. In addition to Adduci’s new role managing the wrongful conviction unit, Foxx allowed her to stay on as prosecutor in a trio of cases stemming from the murder of Clifton Lewis, a Chicago police officer who was shot in December 2011 while working off-duty as a security guard at a West Side convenience store.

Days after the shooting, police charged Tyrone Clay and Edgardo Colon, members of the Spanish Cobras street gang, with Lewis’s murder. By February 2012, the CPD had joined forces with federal law enforcement for a dragnet investigation they dubbed Operation Snake Doctor, intended both to build a case against a third suspect, Alexander Villa, and to neutralize the larger street gang. Colon, the alleged getaway driver, was eventually convicted of murder in 2017, but his conviction was thrown out in 2020 because an appellate court found that police questioned him after he repeatedly asked for a lawyer. Clay spent more than a decade behind bars awaiting trial, fighting to have his confession tossed out. Villa was convicted in 2019, but waited years to be sentenced while he pushed for a new trial.

Then, in fall 2022, one of Villa’s defense attorney’s subpoenaed the CPD and obtained a trove of records that cast a shadow over Adduci’s handling of the cases. Among 35,000 pages of internal police emails and attachments turned over was evidence that, as early as 2012, Adduci and Andrew Varga, another Cook County assistant state’s attorney, used private email addresses to communicate with investigators, shielding the documents from requests under Illinois’s open records law. In one email, officials discussed unreleased evidence that showed none of the three men charged in the killing were near the store at the time of the shooting.

Foxx pulled Adduci and Varga from the case in January 2023 and prosecutors dropped all charges against Clay and Colon that June—shortly before Adduci, Vargas, and former CPD superintendent Gary McCarthy were to be questioned under oath about their failure to turn over evidence. Villa, meanwhile, was sentenced in August to life in prison, after the judge in his case repeatedly rebuffed defense attorneys’ requests for a new trial.

At best, Adduci’s behavior gives a “terrible appearance of impropriety,” said Rachel Barkow, a law professor at New York University who studies the administration of criminal law. “At worst, you have somebody leading the conviction integrity unit who should’ve themselves been reviewed for the integrity of their own convictions.” 

The person who leads the CIU should be “beyond reproach,” Barkow said, “and it appears that’s not the case here.” She said that the head of a wrongful conviction unit should not also be prosecuting cases. “Who’s gonna review her cases?” she asked.

Amid the fallout, Foxx in December announced another shakeup. After overseeing more than 180 exonerations, Adduci was replaced as head of the CIU by Michelle Mbekeani, senior policy adviser to Foxx and former staff attorney at the Shriver Center on Poverty Law. The newly rebranded Conviction Review Unit would “operate under the principle of participatory justice” by engaging with community members and criminal justice advocates, Foxx’s office said in a press release. 

Less than a month after she was replaced, the Chicago Sun-Times reported Adduci was “no longer with the office.” A spokesperson wouldn’t say whether she resigned or had been fired.

Mbekeani’s time in the unit, meanwhile, has been no less turbulent. The day after Foxx’s rebrand of the unit, a website linked to a local right-wing operative’s network of fake newspapers posted a story accusing Mbekeani of running a “side business” that connects incarcerated people with innocence claims to attorneys. Mbekeani has said that her company, called Period, was a class project and never a real business, however University of Chicago press releases and blog posts show it received $75,000 in seed funding.

During a resentencing hearing in January, a Cook County judge called Mbekeani’s involvement in the venture a “per se conflict of interest” and removed her as prosecutor on the case. The judge also called Mbekeani’s answers to his questions about her involvement in Period “duplicitous, incomplete, evasive and untruthful,” and banned her from appearing on “any other case assigned to this courtroom.”

“I don’t see how there’s a conflict there,” Barkow said. It would only be problematic if Mbekeani were “involved in getting people counsel for cases before her.”

Fioretti, the Republican candidate for state’s attorney, called Mbekeani an “activist” whose job is “second-guessing prosecutions,” in a press release. “No one wants to put innocent people in prison,” the release said, “but the best way to stop that from happening is to do a thorough job as a prosecutor.” 

During his distinguished career as a civil rights attorney, Fioretti once questioned whether the state’s attorney’s office could even fairly handle innocence claims. In the early 2000s, his client, LaFonso Rollins, was exonerated after more than a decade behind bars; Rollins ultimately settled a $9 million–wrongful conviction lawsuit with the city in 2006. That same year, Fioretti called for a special prosecutor to probe Rollins’s case. 

“We do not believe the Chicago Police Department or the state’s attorney’s office can be impartial,” Fioretti said at the time.

Tepfer, the civil rights lawyer, said prosecutors now seem more aware that wrongful convictions happen due to police misconduct after years of abuses coming to light. Foxx made it a priority to address some portion of the innocence claims that have surfaced in recent years, particularly around the scandals involving police who coerced confessions.

But preventing wrongful convictions and reforming the conditions that lead to them requires a larger cultural shift inside the state’s attorney’s office, Tepfer said. “It’s gotta be foremost on any candidate’s agenda,” he said. “It has to be a policy—or something that is trained throughout the office—to question cases and scrutinize cases as they come in, whether it’s through current cases and charges or it’s through a review of old cases.”

The post Leadership Scandals Surround Chicago’s Wrongful Conviction Unit appeared first on Bolts.

Foxx’s presence in Cook County has reassured advocates for bail reform. While prosecutors often undermine the implementation of criminal justice reforms, she has staunchly defended the law against its critics. First elected in 2016 on progressive promises, Foxx reduced her office’s use of cash bail well before the Pretrial Fairness Act took effect last year, even as local defense attorneys pressed her to make even bolder changes. 

But Foxx chose to retire this year rather than seek reelection, leaving the nation’s second biggest prosecutor’s office open for the taking. Voters will now decide who oversees the abolition of cash bail in Chicago for years to come. 

In this staunchly blue county, the Democratic primary on March 19 will likely decide Foxx’s successor, and reform advocates are wary of what this means for the future of pretrial detention. 

“Cook County previously elected a state’s attorney that championed these reforms,” Matt McLoughlin, an activist and cofounder of the Chicago Community Bond Fund, told Bolts. “There are real concerns about who takes control of the largest prosecutor’s office in the state and what role does that individual play in policymaking in the capital.” 

The two Democratic candidates vying to replace Foxx—Clayton Harris III, a former assistant prosecutor, and Eileen O’Neill Burke, a former judge who also worked as a prosecutor—have both expressed broad support for the Pretrial Fairness Act. They’ve both praised the law, and neither is trying to win the election by fearmongering over its effects, a marked difference from other prosecutors’ backlash against bail reform elsewhere in the country, and elsewhere in Illinois.

But O’Neill Burke has also blamed Foxx for being too lenient in some cases, signaling she’d turn the page on the incumbent’s reform priorities. Harris has comparatively aligned himself with the outgoing state’s attorney, whose tenure has seen a considerable decline in the local jail population. Local progressive leaders and the county Democratic Party recently coalesced around Harris as the candidate more likely to continue criminal legal reforms in Chicago.

In responding to Bolts’ questions on pretrial detention, Harris outlined a different philosophy than O’Neill Burke when it comes to how systematically he’d try to keep people behind bars. O’Neill Burke’s campaign declined to respond, but her public statements paint a more punitive picture of how she’d wield the considerable power that the Pretrial Fairness Act gives prosecutors. 

Under the new law, courts can still order someone detained pretrial—but only if prosecutors ask for it. This sets up a new decision point for them: It puts the burden on prosecutors to file detention requests with judges, and then prove at a hearing that the defendant poses either a danger to the community or a flight risk. 

“In effect, the state’s attorney has now become the gatekeeper,” O’Neill Burke told WGN Radio in January. “So it has become exponentially more important that the state’s attorney knows what they’re doing and that they put structure, training, criteria in place.”

Outside of Chicago, some state’s attorneys have taken a hard line in response to the new law, vowing to petition judges to order pretrial detention in every case that’s legally eligible for it, regardless of the circumstances. Patrick Kenneally, the state’s attorney of McHenry County, northwest of Chicago, says his office will ask for anyone charged with an eligible felony to be jailed. 

“We are filing all of those cases because we believe that based on the nature of the charge, that person is self-evidently a danger to the public,” Kenneally, a Republican running for reelection unopposed this year, told Bolts.

For reform advocates who championed the Pretrial Fairness Act, this approach goes against the spirit of the law. “Just because someone is facing an eligible charge, it doesn’t mean prosecutors actually have to have that person detained,” said McLoughlin. “They’re supposed to be using some discretion to determine if that person is a danger to the public.”

McLoughlin added, “At the end of the day, that isn’t about keeping the community safe so much as it is about projecting a tough image of law-and-order.”

For proponents of the Pretrial Reform Act like McLoughlin, the law wasn’t just about ending cash bail, but also reducing the number of people who are locked up in jail. Staying free while awaiting trial allows defendants to keep their jobs, continue supporting their families, and freely meet with their attorney to prepare their legal defense. Pretrial freedom also removes jail as a point of leverage prosecutors often use to pressure someone into taking a plea deal. 

“​​Jailing people awaiting trial increases the rate at which people will be rearrested in the future,” said Sharlyn Grace, senior policy advisor for the Cook County Public Defender’s Office. “It decreases their employment prospects and their earnings potential, and generally contributes to the opposite of what everyone wants for the community.”

O’Neill Burke has partially mirrored Kenneally’s blanket approach for some categories of cases. She has pledged to seek pretrial detention for “each and every” case involving a violent crime, as well as anyone charged with possession of a gun that’s covered by the state’s Assault Weapons Ban. (Gun possession is among the most common felony charges in Cook County.)

Harris has promised an aggressive approach to detaining those accused of violent crimes, but he told Bolts via email that he doesn’t share that blanket approach. The office under his leadership would decide on a “case-by-case basis” whether to seek a detention hearing over violent offenses, he said in a statement emailed by his campaign. 

For gun possession cases, Harris says his office would petition for detention if the gun was used to commit a crime, or if the defendant has a “record of violence.” Elsewhere, echoing a point made by some Chicago public defenders, Harris has expressed concern about the fact that gun possession charges disproportionately fall on Black men, saying they are likelier to carry guns for self-protection. 

For Madeleine Behr, policy director of Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, prosecutors should consider their options rather than automatically seek pretrial detention, even in cases of domestic abuse and sexual violence. “For some people experiencing gender-based violence, they often call law enforcement to get the violence to stop in the moment,” Behr said. “But that doesn’t mean they are interested in pursuing charges or a commitment to moving forward with a case for weeks or months or years.” Prosecutors, she said, should “consult directly with the victim for what they would like to see.” 

Whether a prosecutor seeks pretrial detention is only the tip of the iceberg—while it may be the most visible part of their discretion, by that point they’ve already made a suite of other decisions that steer a defendant toward either jail or release.

Prosecutors have always leveraged their power to decide what charges to use in a case. For instance, they may stack charges or start by filing severe ones to pressure a defendant into pleading guilty on lower charges. Under the Pretrial Fairness Act, these charging decisions are also a decisive factor in whether prosecutors are allowed to request pretrial detention at all.

The new law states that courts cannot jail defendants who face some lower-level charges. The provision is meant to limit prosecutors and judges from using the elimination of money bail to increase pretrial detention.

But reform advocates are nervous that prosecutors who want more leeway to detain may respond by filing steeper charges for which pretrial detention is still eligible.

“Differences in charging decisions may be tied to the prosecutor’s desire to have the defendant detained pretrial,” said Ben Ruddell, director of criminal justice policy at the ACLU of Illinois. “If the prosecutor really wants to detain someone pretrial, then they might opt to charge someone” with a stiffer offense than they would have used under the previous system.

James Kilgore, director of advocacy and outreach for FirstFollowers Reentry Program, shares Ruddell’s worry. “One of the things they may do is stack charges and create felonies out of misdemeanors,” he told Bolts. “Whereas before people were going to be kept in jail anyway because they didn’t have bond money, now they have to have a serious charge in order to be kept in jail or on electronic monitoring.”

Here too, O’Neill Burke’s statements signal that she would take a more aggressive stance than the incumbent and her leading competitor. 

For instance, Foxx has set a policy to prosecute retail theft as a misdemeanor, rather than a felony, whenever the value of stolen goods is below $1,000. Harris has said he would continue this policy but O’Neill Burke has denounced it. “Just not prosecuting crime doesn’t deter it, it promotes it,” she told WGN. She says she would charge all retail theft cases where the value exceeds $300 as a felony, as state statutes allow. 

Retail theft charges are not eligible for pretrial detention even at the felony level, so that policy alone would not change the jail population. Still, it provides a window into O’Neill Burke’s interest in dialing up the range of charges her office uses. “I do not believe that they promote a thriving, safe city,” she told the Chicago Sun Times about the Foxx administration’s policies.

Harris, meanwhile, has said he’d give Foxx an “A” for what she’s done during her tenure, saying she has mostly erred in not communicating the benefits of her reforms. 

The next state’s attorney will also steer office policy on electronic monitoring. When they’re not seeking pretrial detention, prosecutors can still ask for release to come with certain conditions, like ankle monitors.

Illinois’ ankle monitor system has been rife with errors; 80 percent of alerts received by local law enforcement as of 2021 were mistaken, a University of Chicago analysis found. Still, a violation may allow prosecutors to ask that the court detain someone. “Given the inaccuracy of these devices and their propensity to create false alarms, this can also be an opportunity to send people back to jail for violating their release conditions,” Kilgore said.

So far, the new system hasn’t resulted in more Chicagoans placed under house arrest as they await trial.

The winner of the Democratic primary between Harris and O’Neill Burke will move on to the general election to face Republican Bob Fioretti, a former alderperson unopposed in his party’s primary. Fioretti has attacked bail reform as dangerous and says Foxx’s office is “erring on the side of letting criminals walk free.”

Fioretti faces long odds in November because Cook County is overwhelmingly Democratic. But sitting prosecutors elsewhere in the state are using similar rhetoric to say the new law is forcing them to release people who should be locked up. They’ve often spread incorrect information to make their case, like Kankakee County State’s Attorney Jim Rowe’s claims that courts can no longer jail fentanyl dealers and carjackers, or McLean County State’s Attorney Erika Reynolds’ statement that misdemeanor domestic violence cases are now ineligible for detention. 

In fact, defendants can still be detained over drug sales, carjacking, and misdemeanor domestic violence, depending on the circumstances.

Opponents of the law have also argued against any bright line that shields some categories of charges from pretrial detention. In 2022, the Illinois State’s Attorney Association, a group that represents prosecutors in the state and typically advocates for more punitive policies, pushed for a bill that is no longer active to allow the court to jail people on lesser charges.

Kenneally, the McHenry prosecutor, wants to make more charges eligible for pretrial detention. 

“My fundamental critique is that, very often times, when people are being charged with these non-detainable offenses, they are in a position to commit more crimes,” Kenneally said. “If their criminal history suggests they will continue to commit crimes, it has taken the discretion of prosecutors and judges to hold those people.”

“We can’t hold somebody on concealing a corpse or concealing a murder, but we can hold them for pushing their boyfriend or throwing a piece of pizza at their boyfriend, and it’s fundamentally absurd,” he told Bolts. (The charge of concealing a homicide is eligible for pretrial detention if prosecutors demonstrate a flight risk.)

This continued conflict over the law’s future would be resolved in Springfield, but the identity of the next Cook County state’s attorney may still shape those developments.

In championing bail reform, Foxx provided a counterweight to the positions of the Illinois State’s Attorneys Association, a role similar to what reform-minded prosecutors have done elsewhere in the country. Cook County alone makes up 40 percent of the Illinois population, and its lawmakers enjoy a lot of clout in the legislature. 

This made Foxx a punching bag for more punitive Chicago officials and other prosecutors, but reform advocates say her pushback against misinformation was essential for the law’s survival. 

“It was hugely important that State’s Attorney Foxx was a supporter of the Pretrial Fairness Act, an advocate and a defender of the law, and a thought partner in its development,” said Grace, of the public defender’s office. “It absolutely matters that we have a state’s attorney who is engaged in good faith efforts to protect this historic transformation of our pretrial system.”

Correction (March 4): The article has been corrected to reflect that the bill to enable pretrial detention for low-level offenses is no longer active.

The post As Kim Foxx Exits, Chicago Is Choosing the Next “Gatekeeper” of Its Bail Reform appeared first on Bolts.

James Orr was in his apartment in the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side one Wednesday morning in 2013 when he heard his phone buzz. “James, you have 30 days to move,” an Illinois state police officer on the other end told him. The 62-year-old, who had moved into the apartment with his wife in 2006 after finishing a three-year prison sentence, was incredulous. “What do you mean I have to move?” he asked. He had lived there for seven years.

As part of a previous conviction, Illinois required Orr to appear on the sex offense registry, one of five public conviction registries in the state. The sentence came with a litany of other restrictions that will follow him for the rest of his life. Orr can’t visit parks, forest reserves, schools or playgrounds and must pay a yearly $100 registration fee. He’s also prohibited from living within 500 feet of any school, playground, day care or childcare facility. 

That’s why state police came calling in 2013. “You have to move, sir,” the officer repeated. “A day care moved [within] 500 feet.” Orr says he panicked and started calling around, trying to find a place to go. But each time he found an available apartment, police shot down the address saying it wasn’t compliant with Illinois’s dense web of housing restrictions. 

Orr estimates he checked on more than 20 places but still couldn’t find a legal place to live by the time his month-long window to move drew to a close. He could continue to stay at an illegal address. But if he were caught, he’d be sent back to prison. He and his wife packed their belongings into a storage unit and moved in with his sister, but when he called police to update his address, they told him it was too close to a school. His only other option was to register as homeless—but in all his interactions with police, he says no one told him he could.

It often plays out like this: A person can’t report their address because it’s not legal. Without a legal address, they can’t register. When they don’t register, police pick them up and charge them with a new crime.

It took police another year to come knocking after Orr failed to find a legal address or register as homeless. A judge ultimately convicted him of failure to report a change of address, a class 3 felony, and sentenced him to seven years in state prison. It was the second time he’d been imprisoned solely because he couldn’t find legal housing; police once arrested him in his home during an address check after determining his apartment was in a banishment zone, despite them previously allowing him to register the address.

“How do you get out of it? How do you get out of the cycle unless you build you a house on a dirt road somewhere?” Orr told Bolts.

The expansive nature of so-called housing banishment laws in Illinois, in addition to a laundry list of other restrictions, make it nearly impossible for people with past sex offense convictions to find a place to live. Few available housing units exist that aren’t within 500 feet of playgrounds, schools, and day cares. As a result, Orr and more than 1,400 other people like him, predominantly Black men, are forced into indefinite homelessness across the state, cycled in and out of prison and relegated to an underclass with lifelong stigma.

Orr and hundreds of other unhoused Chicagoans with sex offense convictions have spent years organizing against housing banishment laws and registry requirements with the Chicago 400 Alliance, a coalition of housing, reentry and victim advocates as well as social service agencies. The group’s most ambitious challenge to date is a bill pending in the Illinois legislature that would ease residency restrictions and expand housing options. The legislative session, which begins this week, ends in late May.

The bill would shrink banishment zones around schools and playgrounds from 500 to 250 feet and remove home day cares from the list of residency restrictions. Once a person finds stable housing, under the proposal, they also couldn’t be forced to move if their home later becomes part of an exclusion zone.

“The reality is that our current policies are not working,” Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford, who is the bill’s chief sponsor, told Bolts. “They’re not serving who they should serve. It’s creating a crisis of homelessness and it does not make our communities safer.” 

As an employee at the state department of corrections in the 1990s, Lightford helped create Illinois’s sex offense registry. But now, after years of enhanced penalties and restrictions, she said, “What we’ve done is disenfranchised a whole population of people.”

Orr still didn’t have housing the last time he got out of prison in 2017. His wife’s apartment wasn’t compliant with state residency restrictions, so at first he tried a shelter a few blocks from a police station. But when he stopped by the station to update his address on the registry, he heard a familiar refrain—no good, it turned out the shelter was too close to a playground.

With no other options, Orr opted to sleep in his wife’s car while he saved for one of his own. Within a few months, he’d scraped together enough to bounce from one hotel room to another. Seven years later, he says it’s an endless cycle. “I’m still doing the same thing I was doing when I first got out in 2017—sleeping in my car, staying in a hotel.” 

Orr stays with his wife just two nights a year. He can’t stay anywhere for longer than two days a year, or else it’s legally considered a secondary residence. Orr and others who register as homeless must check in with local law enforcement on a weekly basis. Even if a person on a registry manages to find legal housing, exclusion zones are constantly in flux. People can be forced out at any time, regardless of whether they own or rent their home. Ubiquitous and often impossible to identify from outside, home day cares pose a particular challenge. 

If a person’s housing becomes illegal, police generally offer a 30-day window to find a new place within the scope of the law—though that’s a courtesy, not a legal right. Two options exist for people still without housing at the end of that period: live homeless or return to prison.

Steven, who asked that his full name not be used for fear of retaliation, finished his prison sentence in 2007 and moved to Riverdale, a Chicago suburb south of the city. Housing was easier to come by there, since it’s less densely populated than the city. For years, he managed to find a legal place to stay with relative ease. 

That all changed in 2019. He and his wife had been living in their apartment for five years. The pair dated in sixth grade, reconnected years later, and have been married for more than a decade. One mid-July day, police arrived to measure the distance between their apartment and a new day care that was opening up down the block. Steven says they told him his apartment was 28 inches too close. “It just got harder, and harder, and harder to find a place where I could stay. So I became homeless,” he told Bolts.

Every afternoon, after he finishes work as a peer counselor at an addiction treatment center on the city’s west side, Steven visits his family’s home. Each evening, after he says goodnight, he leaves again. Sometimes he stays with his mother, sometimes his sister, sometimes a friend—always couch surfing and never staying anywhere longer than two days. When his grandchildren ask why he leaves at night, he tells them he works the night shift.

“It hurts. I want to lay next to my wife,” Steven said. “I want to play with my grandchildren. I want to have fun with my children not just part of the day but, sometimes, all day. I want to wake up to them. I want to hear the noises, and the arguments, and the fussing. That’s what I miss most.”

The impact of Illinois’s housing banishment law extends far beyond people with convictions and shapes generations of families in lasting ways. 

As the primary caregiver to an adult son with an intellectual disability who must comply with the abundance of housing restrictions and residency requirements, Cheri worries what will happen when she can no longer look after him. Those rules, coupled with a dearth of skilled nursing facilities with beds available for people with sex offense convictions, leaves her with virtually no viable options.

“It definitely puts pressure on the family,” said Cheri, who asked that her real name not be used to protect her family. “What are we going to do with these people? Just throw them away when their families are no longer able to take care of them? I mean, it kind of feels like they’re throwing all of us away.”

Cheri says the judge in her son’s case gave him three days to move after he was convicted and sentenced to probation, community service, and ten years on the sex offense registry. Her house was 11 feet too close to a home day care, so the family put it up for sale and spent the next ten months searching for a place to live. She says she lives every day “in constant fear that someone’s going to open up a day care, someone’s going to put in a park, wherever you live.”

The conviction, and the stigma that comes with it, creates instability in nearly every aspect of their lives, Cheri says. The punishment is lifelong. “We can’t go to museums. We can’t go to forest reserves, we can’t go to parks. There are family reunions that we can’t attend because he can’t be present.” It creates, she said, “a class of people who, no matter how hard they try to do the right thing, are just pushed down constantly.”

Over the past four decades, Congress ushered in a series of federal mandates that pressured states to vastly expand policies targeting people with sex offense convictions. This includes the Wetterling Act, named for an 11-year-old boy from Minnesota who was abducted in 1989. The measure, part of the infamous 1994 crime bill, required states to establish a registry for people convicted of sex offenses and other crimes against children. Megan’s Law, which followed the murder of seven-year-old Megan Kanka in New Jersey, mandated that states make their sex offense registries public. 

Illinois lawmakers, for their part, passed into law a cavalcade of measures targeting people convicted of sex offenses. In 1986, the state began requiring people convicted of two or more sex offenses against children to record their information in a private law enforcement database. Lawmakers expanded the registry to include people convicted of any sex offense against a child in 1993, then again to include anyone convicted of any sex offense in 1996. Later that year, lawmakers made the registry public. 

Each year, as legislators returned to Springfield, they tacked on new conditions. By 2013, people on the registries were prohibited from living within 500 feet of any facility “providing programs or services exclusively directed toward persons under 18 years of age,” working at businesses that photograph children, or participating in holiday activities with children outside their families, like handing out Halloween candy.

Every state maintains some form of public conviction registry and 27 have residency restrictions of some kind. But another 23 states have resisted such housing restrictions, which are not recommended by federal agencies and are opposed by numerous advocacy organizations, like the Association for the Treatment and Prevention of Sexual Abuse, the professional organization for researchers and treatment providers in the field.  

A large body of evidence shows these measures do little to prevent—or even respond to—sexual violence.

According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, eight out of every ten perpetrators of sexual violence know the person they harm. In cases with children, that proportion climbs to 93 percent—and the perpetrators themselves are often children. A 2009 U.S. Department of Justice bulletin states that youth under 18 comprise more than a quarter of all people who carry out sexual violence, and more than one-third of perpetrators when the person harmed is also a child. Four of ten survivors under age six are targeted by another child, according to a 2000 Bureau of Justice Statistics study. The report also finds that the most common age of sexual assault perpetrators is 14. 

Yet survivors report sexual assaults to police in fewer than one-third of all cases. Police make an arrest in just 5 percent of assaults, and fewer than 3 percent result in a felony conviction. Cases that do make it to trial—and result in a lifetime of punishment—represent only a small fraction of the perpetrators of sexual violence and, reflective of the legal system at large, disproportionately target Black men. In Illinois, roughly one out of every 139 men is on a public conviction registry—which include sex offenses, murder, gun convictions and crimes involving violence against youth. When accounting for race, the divide is even starker: one out of every 39 Black men in the state is on a registry. 

Madeleine Behr, policy director at the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, says politicians have long weaponized survivors in order to appear “tough on crime,” all while pushing registries and increasingly restrictive policies that create more harm than they address. “Survivors and victims know who harmed them. It’s something that I think gets so lost in this conversation,” Behr told Bolts. 

Studies have consistently shown housing restrictions and exclusion zones don’t make communities safer—and, in fact, can even weaken public safety. When the Minnesota Department of Corrections studied cases in which someone was reincarcerated for a new sex offense after being released from prison during a 16-year period, researchers couldn’t identify a single case in which residency restrictions would have prevented a new crime. A 2012 study from Connecticut’s Office of Policy and Management found that only 20 of the nearly 750 people released from prison in 2005 with sex offense convictions were convicted of a new sex offense. That’s in line with research from the Bureau of Justice Statistics that found people with prior sex offense convictions were far less likely than people convicted of other offenses to be rearrested or to go back to prison.

Even an Illinois task force created to study registration and residency requirements and composed of state lawmakers, law enforcement, policy advocates and state prison officials found that housing banishment laws were ineffective. In a 2017 report, the group said the homelessness and loss of family support caused by housing banishment policies put people at a higher risk of recidivism. “In sum, residency restrictions do not decrease sexual reoffending or the sex crime rates in the areas where they are used,” the task force concluded.

Patty Casey, a retired Chicago police commander who oversaw her department’s registration unit, calls the status quo a “lose-lose situation” for both police and people who have to register. Officers, she says, are tied up verifying the legality of place after place, while people with sex offenses are trapped in an endless loop of homelessness.

Casey singles out the restriction against living within 500 feet of home day cares as “absolutely ludicrous.” Home day cares can pop up practically anywhere—licenses are free and require little more than a background check, an inspection, 15 hours of training and a medical exam. “It creates a large number of homeless registrants,” Casey said. “They’re restricted [from living] almost everywhere.” 

Casey told Bolts she plans to testify in support of the bill to ease residency restrictions and expand housing options during the upcoming legislative session. If signed into law, she said, “we would have so many less homeless persons, and it would be easier on law enforcement and easier on the registrants.”

It remains to be seen whether the support from folks like Casey and Lightford, the Senate majority leader, will be enough to muster the legislature to shirk decades of sensationalized, “tough-on-crime” policies. Four other legislators, including two more in Senate leadership, have signed on as bill sponsors and numerous others have committed to voting for it. While supporters expect some GOP opposition, a previous version of the bill even had a Republican sponsor in the House.

Notably absent from the conversation so far is Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who is rumored to have presidential ambitions and has touted the state’s efforts to make Illinois a national leader in criminal legal reforms. Advocates with the Chicago 400 Alliance have questioned the governor’s silence on the issue. (Pritzker’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.) 

“Why aren’t they telling the lawmakers they should pass this bill?” said Adele Nicholas, a civil rights attorney and director of Illinois Voices for Reform, one of the groups advocating for the bill. “I guarantee you that if they did, it would become law.” Nicholas has challenged numerous state sex offense policies in federal courts and before the Illinois Supreme Court, leading to three separate injunctions against the state.

The state’s “own commission looked at the evidence several years ago and concluded that these laws are counterproductive,” she said, referring to the 2017 task force. “The evidence is out there, but they’re not taking any action to stand up for evidence-based policy.”

Chicago 400 members have for months visited Springfield to educate legislators and build support for the bill. Steven says he’s confident they’ll ultimately prevail, but he’s often shocked by how little policymakers know about current law and its impacts on people with sex offense convictions. “You’ve made laws because people are uneducated; they’re afraid,” he said. 

For the time being, hundreds of people with sex offense convictions continue to live in precarity, forced into homelessness by a system of the state’s design. “There really is no way of knowing the degree of punishment until you’ve lived it,” said Cheri, the mother of someone on the registry. “There’s no end. You just can’t ever get past it.”

Orr says he’s still trying to rebuild from the last time he went to prison because he couldn’t find a home. His sister died about a week before he was released in 2017. Orr remembers going to her home and finding the freezer brimming with containers of catfish, his favorite meal. “She was gonna throw me a surprise homecoming,” Orr said. “That was like another broken heart.”

The instability, fear and stigma lived day in and day out take a toll. “It can be so scary and shameful at the same time,” Orr said. “There’s so much politics in this particular crime. They break up a lot of families. A lot of people couldn’t survive this.”

“It’s very disappointing and hurtful,” he added. “I try to tell myself it’s gonna get better.”

The post How Illinois Housing Banishment Laws Push People into Homelessness and Prison  appeared first on Bolts.

It had been a year since a federal judge ordered the city of Chicago to overhaul its police department. The requirement was to address discriminatory policing and misconduct that had decimated public faith in law enforcement, and progress was slow. But in summer 2020, the recently appointed Superintendent David Brown announced a new direction in public safety that promised to strengthen the bond between police and the communities they serve.

At the core of this community-centric policing strategy was a newly minted unit, the Community Safety Team. Brown said their mission would be getting to know neighbors, partnering with local churches, block clubs and businesses, and empowering residents to guide law enforcement’s crime priorities and solutions to neighborhood safety issues.

“The only way to create safer communities is one neighborhood at a time,” Brown said at the July 2020 announcement of the new team. 

But rather than police encounters aimed at building community trust, data show the Community Safety Team, which quickly grew to over 800 officers in less than a year, focused instead on interactions known to harm community relations: hundreds of thousands of traffic stops. 

The Community Safety Team was responsible for nearly a third of all traffic stops citywide by 2021, more than any other police team. Community Safety officers overwhelmingly stopped drivers in Black neighborhoods on the South and West Sides, contributing to massive racial disparities in traffic enforcement, data show.

Police accountability watchdogs say the Community Safety Team’s conduct reveals a pattern of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) hiding aggressive tactics beneath a veneer of community policing. In the past, CPD’s most aggressive units made heavy use of stop-and-frisk encounters to search people for drugs and weapons. But since a 2015 lawsuit led to major reforms of the practice, CPD replaced stop-and-frisk with stopping exponentially more motorists.

Now, despite a new progressive mayor’s outspoken stances against such notoriously harmful policing practices, and a newly confirmed police superintendent signaling a decisive shift in public safety strategy, many doubt whether the department can course-correct to an earnest community policing model. 

“The city has a horrific history of these roving, violent citywide teams…that racially profile people and terrorize and physically brutalize people,” said Alexandra Block, Director of Criminal Legal Systems and Policing Project for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. “The Community Safety Team is just an outcrop of that pattern.”

When drivers believe they are stopped and searched by police without reason, the feeling of harassment only deepens the divide between police and the communities they patrol, said Joseph Williams, member of the Englewood Police District Council, one of the civilian oversight bodies recently created to enhance community partnership and accountability. 

“There’s no way you can do community policing while you’re doing all those stops,” Williams said. “You make them feel like less than a human being. They leave feeling worthless, like they’ve been targeted. I know what I felt like when I went through that.”

When Williams, 34, was pulled over most recently in July, the stop was relatively uneventful, and officers let him go without a search. But each of the countless traffic stops he endured still reminds him of a traumatic incident when he and a group of friends were pulled over as teens.

As the officers searched the group without their consent looking for illegal guns, they violated and humiliated the teenagers, Williams said.

“I’ll never forget them pulling me and my friends right out of the car and searching us,” Williams said. “They reached down into my private parts, went into our boxers, and they didn’t find anything. …We were young and glad we were let go, but ultimately that was a traumatic experience.”

The Community Safety Team

As the department poured resources into the Community Safety Team, Brown pledged their work would be driven by long-term relationships with residents, businesses, religious organizations and neighborhood groups.

By the end of 2020, the Community Safety Teams logged over 200 of those community interactions, according to a Bolts analysis of data from the Office of Emergency Management and Communications’ dispatch system, which generates a unique record each time officers radio headquarters to document civilian interactions or routine activities. Those community interactions included food drives, youth sports events and community input meetings, according to a Chicago police spokesperson. 

But those interactions were dwarfed by the 48,000 traffic stops the team conducted in 2020—nearly all of that unit’s documented activity that year. In 2021, when the Community Safety Team was at its largest, its officers logged over 150,000 traffic stops—more than twice the number of community engagement activities, the data show.

Although the Community Safety Team was called a “first-of-its-kind approach designed for officers to get to know the people and places within each of the unique neighborhoods," Brown’s promises were reminiscent of a different community policing initiative launched in the 1990s, the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy, or CAPS.

The CAPS approach was a hyper-local, bottom-up strategy that hinged on residents working with officers to identify both the issues in the community as well as potential solutions. The strategy worked to increase trust in police because the same officers had a consistent beat in a particular geographic area where residents could get to know them personally and officers could get familiar with the safety challenges in a small area, proponents said. 

In the Englewood neighborhood on the city’s south side, CAPS officers have helped by listening to people’s priorities and focusing on problem-solving rather than numbers, Williams said. For instance, when a group of abandoned cars on a city-owned vacant lot became a magnet for drug dealing and other crime, Williams told the local CAPS team that it was a serious problem for neighbors. Officers then quickly dealt with the issue, he said.

"They ticketed those cars and got them towed. The community's been trying to get that done for a year almost," Williams said. "Our CAPS department is phenomenal."

But the Community Safety Team turned out to be a somewhat opposite approach: rather than officers building relationships in consistent beats, it was a roving citywide unit with no direct ties to specific neighborhoods. And they employed the same tactics as the notorious strike forces and saturation teams— squads of officers used to flood areas with police activity.

The legal backlash

After Chicago police shifted away from widespread use of stop-and-frisk tactics in 2015 following an ACLU Illinois lawsuit over the practice, the number of traffic stops conducted across the entire department soared. Between 2015 and 2023, officers made over 4.5 million traffic stops, mostly in Black and Latinx neighborhoods, CPD data show. Nearly 900,000 of these stops were made in 2019 alone, and by then the Illinois chapter of the ACLU had again raised the alarm that the stops may be violating drivers’ civil rights. 

This work culminated in a class action lawsuit filed in June 2023 against the city on behalf of Chicagoans claiming the traffic stop strategy routinely violated the rights of Black and Latinx drivers. It singled out the Community Safety Team for the tremendous volume of traffic stops it conducted, amounting to what the suit called Chicago Police's "mass traffic stop program."

The lawsuit claims this program relies on illegal quotas, and flooding Black and Latinx neighborhoods with police encounters to deter unrelated crime, using the pretext of traffic enforcement to search drivers for contraband—often without their consent. This racial profiling of drivers of color resulted in police "harassing hundreds of thousands of Black Chicagoans" annually, Block said. 

Twenty-five-year-old West Side resident Mahari Bell joined the lawsuit after being stopped over 10 times in the past eight years. While some of the stops seemed harmless, others left him fearing for his life, Bell said.

"A lot of us are just tired. People don't want to be harassed by Chicago police," Bell said. "I was profiled, harassed, my rights are violated consistently. Nobody wants to live like that, especially in the city that they're from."

While driving for UberEats in May 2022, Bell was pulled over downtown when officers accused him of cutting off another driver—a claim he contests. Just moments into the encounter, officers put Bell in handcuffs without any explanation. When they asked to search his car, Bell felt like he had no choice but to agree.

"It all happened so quick. There wasn't any need for a search or for handcuffs. The officer, he was very accusatory, so it was clear that it wasn't about traffic," Bell said. "I feel like if I would have said no, the stop could have been completely different. I could've spent the night in a holding cell."

But even when police encounters don’t escalate, being constantly pulled over makes Bell feel "belittled, degraded and ultimately disrespected," he said.

"It made me realize, I think a lot of officers in Chicago just don't care to be a part of the community. They don't care to offer their public service," Bell said. "Despite my intentions, despite who I am, I'm still just a statistic to CPD. Just another traffic stop that has to be done for their numbers."

The lawsuit is still in early stages, but its goal is to end citywide units dedicated to traffic stops so Chicago Police can reel in the harm to community trust inflicted by the Community Safety Team and affiliated units, Block said.

"We are hoping CPD will rethink its reliance on the mass traffic stops strategy as its go-to supposed crime fighting technique, because it just doesn't work," Block said.

The ACLU's class action lawsuit builds upon an existing complaint about the Community Safety Team that came from within the unit itself. In 2021, Franklin Paz, a former lieutenant on the Community Safety Team sued the city over illegal traffic stop quotas. Paz, who was also a 20-year department veteran, claims he was demoted and punished for resisting the quotas. 

Police sergeants on the Community Safety Team testified that when they were assigned to the unit, leadership told them their primary mission was to stop masses of drivers and proactively initiate police encounters, court records show. Officers were required to meet stop quotas unrelated to crime levels or traffic safety, according to Paz, who was instructed to demand that each officer in his platoon conduct at least 10 traffic stops daily, the complaint shows.

The ACLU lawsuit references emails where CPD’s then second-in-command, Deputy Superintendent Ernest Cato, urges commanders to raise traffic enforcement numbers and "utilize traffic stops to address violence."

The lawsuits share common claims that the Community Safety Team was simply a rebrand and reshuffling of CPD's infamously aggressive saturation teams.

Though Brown promised at the launch of the Community Safety Team that "this is not a roving strike force like what CPD had in the past," officers testified that unit was staffed with personnel from tactical teams, gun teams, saturation teams, and other groups trained to aggressively stop residents, often while patrolling in plainclothes and in unmarked cars. 

Bolts’ analysis of CPD attendance and assignment data supports this, showing that at least 45 of the sergeants leading the Community Safety Team in its first year were assigned to the community policing initiative immediately after leaving tactical teams.

A new administration, a new era for policing?

Amid the legal backlash, CPD quietly sunsetted the Community Safety Team by reassigning officers to other units en masse by the start of 2023, leaving fewer than a hundred officers on the team. After becoming police superintendent in September, Larry Snelling said during a police budget hearing that he has since “broken that team down” and reassigned the officers back to local districts. 

But even as the Community Safety Team waned, the unit’s aggressive traffic stop tactics continued to be enforced by other officers, including those assigned to neighborhood districts where Snelling emphasized he would focus police resources, data show. The most recent dispatch data show the units stopping the largest numbers of drivers are now those assigned to local districts, including beat officers, tactical teams, and rapid response officers.

Snelling is one of the first major appointees of Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former teacher and union organizer who ran and won on a historically progressive platform, and has promised to chart a new course for public safety centered on community investment, not solely law enforcement power. Since taking office, Johnson has had to balance expectations from the progressives who put him in power with those of the police union which has been antagonistic from the start. One of Johnson’s first acts as mayor established an Office of Community Safety, charged with “dual responsibilities of leading a full force of government, rapid response to safety issues and developing community-driven strategies for addressing the root causes of harm,” a spokesperson for the mayor told Bolts. 

With a progressive mayor at the helm, mounting pressure from newly created civilian oversight councils, and the weight of the consent decree bearing down, the pressure is also on Snelling to set policing policy that can move the dial on community safety without sacrificing public trust in law enforcement.

Historically, incoming CPD leadership inevitably launches a signature crimefighting initiative, like Brown’s Community Safety Team or former Superintendent Garry McCarthy’s use of the CompStat strategy that resembled broken-windows policing. And Snelling will likely follow the example of his predecessors with a signature community policing initiative, said CPD expert Wes Skogan, professor emeritus of political science at Northwestern University.

"My guess is Larry Snelling will invent a new acronym with a promise of a reinvigorated community policing program," Skogan said. 

But like the exchange of officers between tactical teams and the Community Safety Team, a new name doesn’t guarantee any fundamental change in how residents are impacted by the policing tactics. 

Unless new leadership focuses on safety "outcomes" like crime reduction rather than "inputs" like traffic stop numbers, the aggressive policing tactics will likely continue, said former interim Superintendent Charlie Beck, who in 2020 dramatically restructured the department by shifting officers out of citywide units and into neighborhood police districts. 

"You get what you ask for. If you emphasize traffic stops as what you want, then you'll get them. Unfortunately, if you cast too wide a net when you do that, you can make people feel like they're under siege,” Beck said.

There is also broader skepticism over whether Johnson’s administration can effectively steer the department away from the domineering policing tactics that have landed the city in hot water time and again. Johnson has faced continued pressure over his increase of the police budget, his administration’s contract agreement with the Fraternal Order of Police that doubles annual pay raises and may weaken accountability processes for disciplinary cases, and his continued funding of the ShotSpotter gunshot detection technology despite prior vows to drop the controversial surveillance system. 

But Johnson’s budget does offer a preview into the community investments aimed at tackling the root causes of crime, with $209 million going towards efforts like anti-violence programming, restorative justice, re-entry programs and gender-based violence prevention and intervention, a spokesman for the mayor said. The plan vastly expands staffing for public mental health clinics and mobile crisis response teams, which include social workers and addiction specialists who would respond to 911 calls in lieu of police during mental health emergencies. Johnson’s budget would also expand the city’s youth job programs, and includes investments to address the housing and homelessness crisis brought to the forefront by the influx of asylum seekers. 

Johnson and Snelling have both touted plans to replace up to 400 officer roles with civilian positions, such as domestic violence advocates and workers assigned to the officer training academy. 

“Having those civilian employees amongst us, it creates a better environment for the officers,” Snelling said. “It’s officers working with civilians, so we have a better understanding of the community and the community has a better understanding of us. It shows we can work in partnership with people who are not sworn members.”

Community policing

In spite of the Community Safety Team, some prior community policing efforts have forged strong connections between residents and officers, leaving some hopeful for the future. Snelling’s earlier efforts at building connections with Englewood residents made Williams optimistic about future community policing efforts, he said. 

"He brought his tactical officers out—the ones who do a lot of the crazy stuff sometimes—he brought them out so they could get to know the community in a different way,” Williams said. “He's coming in, he's walking those streets, trying to build the relationships.”

A 2019 community policing project, the Chicago Neighborhood Policing Initiative (NPI), emulates CAPS by dedicating a group of officers in each district to build long-term relationships with residents and neighborhood groups and coordinate city resources to solve problems in the area. Unlike the Community Safety Team, these officers don’t do the typical emergency responses, traffic stops, and patrols. 

The program has "reimagined what police officers can do," said Deondre' Rutues, a council member for the 15th Police District in Austin, as well as the Community Engagement Specialist for the Chicago Neighborhood Policing Initiative.

"We're supposed to lead the charge and tell them what we need from them," Rutues said. "It isn't a process where police just come and lock somebody up. The officers follow the lead of the community to determine what to do."

Changing police leadership, staffing shortages and the interruption of the coronavirus pandemic halted the NPI from being fully implemented, a Northwestern report found. But the success of the NPI shows that one arm of the city's agenda may be dedicated to an earnest attempt at community policing. 

But as long as the other arm is focused on mass traffic stops conducted by roving strike teams, Chicago's community policing agenda will be at odds with itself, says Rutues.

"You created the Community Safety Team to enhance relationship building...But it continues to undo everything that is supposed to be contained in the Consent Decree, and also the work people on the ground are trying to do." 

The post “I’m Just Another Traffic Stop” appeared first on Bolts.

On April 4, Chicago progressives cheered when Brandon Johnson won the mayoral race by defeating Paul Vallas, who was backed by the city’s police union. Vallas, who predicted a less safe Chicago if voters picked Johnson, promised to beef up policing in the city while Johnson, by contrast, spoke about strengthening other public services to not rely on the police as a catch-all solution for public safety. 

During his inauguration on May 15, Johnson called for new investments in housing, mental health, and youth employment, with special attention to outlying neighborhoods that have long experienced divestment and violence. 

“We don’t want our story to be that Chicago became so traumatized by violence and despair that our residents felt no other choice but to leave us,” Johnson said in his speech to a joyous crowd of supporters at the Credit Union 1 Arena. “A safe Chicago means a safe Chicago for all, no matter what you look like, who you love, or where you live, we’ll do it together by investing in people.”

Since that celebratory day, Johnson has had to tackle the realities of governing, which have tripped up other progressive politicians who tried to deliver on their campaign planks while navigating the ire of cops. Chicago’s police union has already vowed to retaliate against his reforms, and similar threats have cowed many officials over the years. But the city’s activist community, whose support propelled him into office, now expects him to deliver on his ambitious plans. 

Over the last few months, several key policy and personnel decisions have already tested whether Johnson can chart a new course on public safety in the city, offering an early case study for how left-leaning officials try to sustain their commitments in the face of police opposition. Since May, Johnson has created a new “community safety” office, which is tasked with coordinating the mayor’s “root cause” approach to public safety.

But he also raised progressive groups’ eyebrows with his pick for an interim superintendent of the Chicago Police Department (CPD)—a member of the top brass who’s been critiqued for perpetuating a culture of protectionism and coverups—and when he left in place a controversial police surveillance contract that he’d pledged to end during his campaign. These were both temporary moves that he’ll get a chance to revisit soon. 

And Johnson is just now facing what may be his greatest test yet—summertime in Chicago, when gun violence has historically spiked, especially on the South and West sides, and when supporters and skeptics alike will be looking to see if the new mayor turns his lofty campaign promises into substance. 

“Johnson is quite right that dealing with jobs, social services, and mental health are things that can dramatically lower the crime problem that we have in Chicago,” Dick Simpson, a former alderman and professor emeritus in political science at the University of Illinois Chicago who is a longtime commentator on local politics, told Bolts.

“As long as things are going more or less in the correct direction, and you don’t have a Laquan McDonald’s shooting,” he said, referencing the 2014 killing of a 17-year-old at the hands of Chicago police which set off a national uproar that permanently marred Rahm Emmanuel’s administration. “[Johnson] has about two or three years to get it right.”

On his very first day in the 5th Floor office of City Hall, Johnson signed an executive order creating the new role of Deputy Mayor for Community Safety, who would be tasked with coordinating the city’s efforts to address the “the root causes of crime, violence, and harm, and to advance a holistic and comprehensive approach to community safety.” Four days later, Johnson appointed Garien Gatewood, director of the Illinois Justice Project, for the role.

Simpson called Gatewood’s appointment “a good step” in turning the mayor’s policy promises into action.

“The mayor needs an appointed person to filter out what comes in the massive [crime statistics] reports, or even the police superintendent waltzing in and saying things are going fine.” 

Johnson has called the “community safety” position a novel one, although Mayor Lori Lightfoot had a deputy mayor for public safety with the similar task of shifting the city beyond “law-enforcement driven solution(s).” Susan Lee, Lightfoot’s pick for the job, did so by directing funding to violence prevention organizations, but Lee was severely undermined by alderpeople who were skeptical of that approach amid rising homicides and shootings after the pandemic, and she eventually resigned. 

Gatewood has a staff of eight, but he admitted in an interview with WTTW that his office does not have the funding necessary to deliver on Johnson’s comprehensive approach to public safety alone and called for help from the city’s business and philanthropic communities. That approach involves pouring money into social services like job training, counseling and mental health services into Chicago’s most distressed areas, he also said.

Alongside key appointments, Johnson is now poised to implement the signature policy proposals for public safety that he touted during his campaign and included in his transition plan. Many of these policies are not entirely new, but have actually been introduced in the city council under past administrations. Before, they were blocked by unsupportive mayors, but Chicago progressives are now hoping that having a career organizer in the mayor’s office will now make a difference. 

Though Lightfoot counted herself as a supporter of the Bring Chicago Home policy to create new housing for more than 65,000 unhoused people in the city using real estate transfer taxes during her first campaign, she held up its passage during her term. Neither did she offer support for the Peace Book ordinance introduced in 2022, which would allocate 2 percent of the police department’s budget to create youth-led gun violence reduction programs.

Another of those stalled policies is the “Treatment Not Trauma” ordinance, which would invest $100 million to create non-police crisis response teams to 911 calls when people are experiencing mental health crises and reopen the city’s neighborhood mental health clinics that were closed under the administration of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Lightfoot’s predecessor. This measure is central to Johnson’s push, as expressed in his transition report, to “define violence overall as a public health issue,” and address it as such. 

Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, alderperson of the 35th Ward who was first elected in 2015, told Bolts the reasons why he and his fellow progressives in City Hall couldn’t get these measures passed before came down to mayoral priorities.

“[Lightfoot] pulled out all the stops to even prevent [them] from receiving a hearing under her administration,” Ramirez-Rosa said. “What we love about this new administration is that progressives don’t just have a seat at the table, but they are now leading and at the forefront of legislating in City Hall.”

While the city council’s Progressive Reform Caucus, which includes alderpeople from across the city like Ramirez-Rosa, Jeanette Taylor, and the driving force behind Treatment Not Trauma, Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez will back Johnson should he bring any of these measures up for a vote, their votes amount to 19 out of the 25 needed for passage, so he’ll need an additional six alderpeople on board before he can get them through the chamber. But Ramirez-Rosa is confident they can muster those.

“Between the number of progressives in City Council and also support from the mayor, I have no doubt that we’ll have the votes necessary to move these forward,” he said.

Critics of Johnson’s approach, like the editorial board of the Chicago Sun-Times, have raised concerns about funding these programs at a time when the city is facing a major fiscal shortfall. Even if he overcomes these hurdles, raises the necessary revenue, and passes all three programs in the coming months, which Ramirez-Rosa expects to happen, it will still take considerable time for them to have an effect, and so they won’t put a dent in the city’s violence until well after this summer is past.

Vaughn Bryant, executive director at Metropolitan Peace Initiatives who previously developed the citywide violence prevention program called Safe Passages, told the TRiiBE recently that the timeline for these long-term violence prevention efforts to succeed isn’t months or years but potentially decades.

“It took [Los Angeles] 20 years to get to a point where they are now,” Bryant said, describing Los Angeles’ current crime statistics, which is about one-third of the number of homicides per 100,000 people that occur every year in Chicago. And the more people are exposed to high-levels of neighborhood violence like in Chicago, the greater their likelihood of getting involved in violence themselves, which is especially true among the young. 

That’s why Ramirez-Rosa sees Johnson’s summer youth employment program as “critically important” in the interim, as a near-term solution. 

The city’s summer jobs program is employing close to 24,000 young people this year, up 2,000 jobs from 2022. But that total represents a little more than half of the 45,000 who applied to the program. Johnson has since vowed to ensure that every teen and young adult who wants a job through the program gets one. 

“We’ve already made some strides this summer in terms of increasing youth employment and youth employment opportunities,” Ramirez-Rosa told Bolts. “We’re going to continue to make progress in the coming years.”

Johnson has also had to address new crises that have surfaced since his inauguration. His first major piece of legislation was not one of the much-touted public safety ordinances but a $51 million package for immediate relief for asylum-seekers who began arriving in the city at a pace of 100 per day in May after being bused north from border states like Texas. 

While the mayor mustered the support necessary to secure its passage, it was not without a fight. Several alderpeople from wards that voted strongly in favor of Johnson over Vallas vociferously opposed this measure, as well as concurring plans to house asylum-seekers in closed-down public school buildings.

Besides navigating sudden crises, and all the routine politicking with fellow elected officials, Johnson will still need to engage with the city’s existing apparatus for public safety—the police. His biggest hurdle will likely be the police union, the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which opposes many of the reforms he has called for, such as strengthening mechanisms for police accountability. 

“It’s not like a wage dispute where one side wants 6 percent increase and the other side wants 2 percent and they agree on 4 percent,” Simpson told Bolts. “The leadership and membership [of the FOP], for the most part, are totally hostile to the ideas that Johnson has.” 

Besides constituting an important voting bloc and marshaling significant campaign funding to their preferred candidates, major municipal police unions have flexed their power over would-be reformers by staging dramatic acts of public disdain, like when CPD officers turned their backs to Lightfoot in 2021 as she was visiting two injured officers in the hospital, or, more seriously, conducting deliberate work slowdowns, like the New York Police Department allegedly did in response to the George Floyd protests that roiled the city even as shootings spiked in the year thereafter.

FOP President John Catanzara warned before the election that there would be “blood in the streets” of Chicago and a spate of resignations should Johnson assume office, and it remains to be seen if the FOP will make good on that threat. In an early effort to warm the relationship with rank-and-file police officers, Johnson expressed firm support for them while attending a recent swearing-in for rookie cops.

Johnson is already making leadership decisions for police. David Brown stepped down as superintendent after Lori Lightfoot was defeated in the mayoral race in the first round in February, and then her interim choice Eric Carter resigned unexpectedly after only two months on the job.

Johnson in early May tapped Fred Waller as a new interim police chief, provoking complaints that Johnson was reneging on his commitments to reform the scandal-ridden department. Waller is known for having promoted Alvin Jones in 2012, an officer implicated in a sweeping police corruption and extortion racket, 10 months after an investigation by CPD’s Internal Affairs Department and the FBI caught two of his closest team members red handed in a sting operation. 

Waller has since claimed he didn’t know about Jones’ misdeeds at the time he promoted him, but critics accuse him of being complicit in the department’s “code of silence,” not just overlooking serious misconduct but sometimes actively covering up for it when calls for accountability arise.

In addition, Waller was suspended in 2020 for saying “grope me, don’t rape me,” in a meeting about the decision to move officers from police districts to other units. He used banked vacation time to serve the 28-day penalty, so he did not miss a day of paid work, but still decided to resign from the force a few months later.

According to Simpson, Johnson likely chose Waller, despite his questionable history, because “he’s not viewed as shaking the boat.”

“Police aren’t going to be unhappy with him, even if he makes adjustments,” Simpson continued. “That’s a pretty good interim solution, assuming that a new police superintendent is appointed long term and that is someone who can actually handle the job.”

Waller’s tenure is likely to be short-lived, though. Johnson will soon make a permanent selection for CPD’s superintendent from the list of three nominees selected by the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability last week. That newly created police oversight body, which includes members directly elected by the public, evaluated the applications of 54 candidates who applied for the position in May, and narrowed it down to a list of three candidates, two from within the ranks of CPD, and one from outside. 

In an initial public meeting after the announcement, some community members were more hopeful in the internal candidates’ abilities to implement reforms, while others remained skeptical of the entire police department’s ability to change, the Triibe reports. The FOP, for their part, commended the selection process.

“This process is 100 times better than when the police board was conducting it,” Catanzara said. “It’s much more fair and inclusive.”

 The mayor now has 30 days to review the candidates, but can also ask the commission to go back to the drawing board and give him new names. Whatever nominee he ultimately picks will also need to be approved by the city council.

Johnson has also faced criticism that he has backtracked on a campaign pledge to immediately terminate CPD’s contract for a controversial gunfire detection technology called ShotSpotter.

Jose Manuel Almanza, director of advocacy and movement building at Equiticity, has been at the forefront of the movement to end the ShotSpotter agreement. According to Almanza, it started in 2021 when a group of organizers in the working-class neighborhood of Little Village convened to develop a response to the police shooting of 13-year-old Adam Toledo. 

In that nationally publicized case, CPD officers responded to the scene after receiving a ShotSpotter notification that a gun was fired in the neighborhood. An officer pursued Toledo into an alley, shooting him as he turned around and raised his hands in apparent surrender.

Recent studies by the MacArthur Justice Center and the city’s Office of the Inspector General found that CPD officers responding to ShotSpotter alerts rarely collect evidence relating to gun crimes but do engage in discriminatory practices of stopping and frisking Black and Latinx folks.

“It changes the CPD’s behavior,” Almanza told Bolts. “They find me walking down the block to my friend’s house, or they find my neighbors hanging out in front of a friend’s house, or they find my cousin walking to the corner store, and because ShotSpotter is telling them that [a shot was fired in the area], they treat us as suspects.” 

When Johnson pledged on his campaign website to “end the ShotSpotter contract and invest in new resources that go after illegal guns without physically stopping and frisking Chicagoans on the street,” Almanza was on board as a supporter, even going so far as to volunteer his time as an unpaid canvasser for Johnson. 

“Past administrations, not just here in Chicago, but in any major city and the federal government, there’s never really been a big effort to address those issues,” he said. “It’s always been addressing the symptoms of crime, reacting to the symptoms of crime, and not really solving what’s really causing these things so they don’t happen.” 

That’s why Almaza was enraged to see that the city would not be canceling the contract early. Instead, Johnson’s signature appeared on a document authorizing a $10 million extension payment to SoundThinking, the organization that runs the ShotSpotter technology. A spokesperson for the mayor’s office told WBEZ that Johnson may have had no choice but to approve the payment Lightfoot had already authorized, but that his automatic signature placed on the document was a mistake. 

Almanza worries about the influence of SoundThinking, whose deal with the city represents 11 percent of their overall revenues.

“They’re co-opting the movement’s language, talking about equity, trying to gain support from community members [by] changing the way they’re talking about ShotSpotter,” Almanza said.

Activists like Almanza feel betrayed about this delay, as well as the mayor’s decision not to remove armed officers from Chicago Public Schools after saying that police “have no place in schools.” But he’s not giving up on Johnson just yet.

“It’s up to us to hold him accountable to those things,” he continued. “That’s not to say it in a negative way, that’s saying it in a coalition, base-building kind of way, where we all have the same goal in mind.Johnson’s only been in office for like, what, a [couple] month[s]. Right now, we’re giving him the benefit of the doubt.”

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