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.

While there are roughly 2,200 prosecutors and sheriffs on the ballot this year, there’s not much at stake in this election for most of these offices because they drew just one single candidate. But Bolts has kept track of other important races for sheriff and DA all year to identify and cover the elections that are poised to make the biggest difference for local policy. During the primaries, we covered critical DA races from Ohio to Texas and sheriff races from Florida to Michigan.

And now the general elections are upon us. Below is Bolts’ guide to 33 prosecutor and sheriff elections next month—and some honorary mentions, too.

Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) sheriff

This used to be the office of Joe Arpaio, the far-right strongman who housed detainees at an outdoor camp called Tent City and was convicted of contempt of court for refusing a court order to stop detaining people suspected of being undocumented, only to be pardoned by Donald Trump. Paul Penzone, the Democrat who defeated Arpaio in 2016, resigned from the office earlier this year, and Jerry Sheridan, a former Arpaio deputy, is now trying to win back the office for the GOP.

Sheridan is on the Brady List, a database of law enforcement officers with a history of lying, because a judge found that he lied under oath during a civil rights lawsuit. Sheridan has said he’d bring back some of the most controversial practices from his former boss, Arpaio, including building a new facility like Tent City, which the county tore down in 2017. Tyler Kamp, a former Phoenix police officer who switched parties late last year to run for sheriff as a Democrat, is connecting Sheridan to Arpaio’s record of racial discrimination. 

Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) prosecutor 

Just two years ago, Republican County Attorney Rachel Mitchell narrowly defeated a progressive challenger who ran on curbing the punitive legacy of this office. That was a special election, so Mitchell is already back on the ballot, and this time her challenger has a different message. Tamika Wooten, who ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination, has accused Mitchell of “leniency” toward defendants and faulted her use of diversion programs, The Arizona Republic reports. Wooten’s criticism echoes the attacks made by Mitchell’s primary opponent, who lost by a large margin in August.

On abortion, though, the fault lines in this race align more closely with partisan expectations. When the state supreme court revived an 19 century ban on nearly all abortions this spring, Wooten told Bolts that she would not bring charges under the law, saying, “That is a very serious and personal decision that a person must have with themselves and with their health care provider.” While lawmakers later overturned the 1864 law outlawing virtually all abortion, a ban after 15 weeks remains in place, and Mitchell has refused to rule out prosecuting doctors. She has also fought an effort by the Democratic governor to prevent local prosecutors from charging abortions. 

Arizona | Pima County (Tucson) sheriff

This race erupted in controversy this week after Democratic Sheriff Chris Nanos put challenger Heather Lappin, a Republican who works in the local jail, on forced leave. Nanos alleged that Lappin helped the newsroom Arizona Luminaria, which has long reported on excessive force and inhumane conditions in the Tucson jail, connect with an incarcerated source for pay. Arizona Luminaria has denied that it pays sources, saying it only reimbursed an incarcerated source for costly phone calls from the jail.

Nanos’ leadership over the jail, which has seen a string of deaths during his tenure, has been subject to scrutiny. Moreover, the county board, which is run by Democrats, has for months pressed Nanos for information about sexual assault allegations against a sheriff’s deputy. Nanos and Lappin have largely blamed problems at the office on understaffing, Arizona Luminaria reports. 

The race is unfolding against the backdrop of a GOP ballot measure, on the ballot this fall, that would ramp up the role of sheriffs in patrolling the border. Nanos has steadfastly opposed the measure, and he has said he would not enforce it. He defeated a challenger in the July Democratic primary who argued for tighter relationships with federal immigration authorities. Lappin said during the GOP primary that she supported the measure but has since backtracked.

California | Alameda County (Oakland), and Los Angeles County

Two first-term DAs in California faced near immediate efforts to remove them from office, plus mutinies by staff within their office angered by their reforms. Now each faces a political threat. In Oakland, former civil rights attorney Pam Price won the DA’s office in 2022 on a decarceral platform, and rolled out policies meant to focus on rehabilitation over punishment. But local forces who opposed her election, many of which had just succeeded in ousting San Francisco’s DA next door, quickly organized a recall campaign against her, Bolts reported in August. 

Further south, in Los Angeles, George Gascón made a splash within a day of entering office four years ago, as he rolled out a suite of policies to reduce cash bail and sentencing enhancements. Much like Price, Gascón faced a deluge of controversy and negative press over specific cases that critics said he did not prosecute aggressively enough, and he backtracked on some of his measures, Bolts reported earlier this year. 

Now Gascón faces Nathan Hochman, who is running on bringing back more punitive policies to the office and accuses the incumbent of having “extreme pro-criminal policies,” even as violent crime in Los Angeles is decreasing. Hochman was the GOP nominee for attorney general two years ago, though he is helped in this blue county by the fact that this race is nonpartisan.

California | San Francisco prosecutor

Brooke Jenkins replaced the reform-minded Chesa Boudin as prosecutor in 2022, after Boudin was recalled by voters. As Bolts reported at the time, Jenkins quickly disbanded one of Boudin’s major initiatives, a police accountability unit that had prosecuted killer cops. Jenkins won when she faced voters for the first time two years ago, and is now running for a full term. 

She faces Ryan Khojasteh, a former prosecutor in the office who was hired by Boudin and then promptly fired by Jenkins when she took office. Khojasteh is making the case that Jenkins has gone too far in ramping up punishment for teenagers accused of crimes, proposing a return to more rehabilitative policies. He has criticized her for rolling back diversion programs But he has also tried to distance himself from Boudin and eschew some of his policies. This election is overshadowed by the higher-profile races for mayor and city council, which feature similar debates, and even candidates who are proposing to ramp up policing and arrests on matters like homelessness.

Colorado | Arapahoe County prosecutor, and Douglas County prosecutor

Arapahoe and Douglas, two populous counties south of Denver, have long shared a DA. But as Alex Burness writes in Bolts, come 2025, “similar criminal cases may be met with starkly different responses—depending on which side of [a] new administrative boundary they occur.”

That’s because Colorado recently split its 18th Judicial District in two, separating the liberal Arapahoe County (home to Aurora) from its more conservative neighbor. 

As a result, a reform-minded prosecutor may be coming to suburban Colorado. Democrat Amy Padden is favored over former Republican DA Carol Chambers in Arapahoe County. Padden lost her first DA bid in 2020, when she said she’d work to curb jail terms for low-level offenses and reduce the prosecution of minors as adults. She has kept up these themes this year. “We’re not going to prosecute our way to a safer community,” she told Bolts in July. “The way we reduce crime is to see if there are ways to rehabilitate folks and get them back on their feet.”

Douglas County is likely to head in the opposite direction. The GOP tends to do very well here, so Republican George Brauchler, a former DA with a punitive record, is favored over Democrat Karen Breslin. Brauchler is running on the unusually harsh promise of seeking jail time for anyone who commits any theft, Bolts reported in July. 

Florida | Hillsborough County prosecutor, and prosecutor for Orange and Osceola counties 

Twice since 2022, GOP Governor Ron DeSantis has removed a reform-minded prosecutor from office. The legal battles over whether he had the authority to do this are still ongoing. But the two suspended prosecutors are not waiting for the courts: They’re running to get their jobs back, challenging the people DeSantis appointed to replace them.

In Hillsborough County, home to Tampa, Democrat Andrew Warren faces Republican Suzy Lopez, the DeSantis appointee. Lopez quickly rolled back Warren’s policies, Boltshas reported, canceling a reform he had put in place to curb aggressive policing of Black cyclists in Tampa. In the Orlando metro region, in a circuit that combines Orange and Osceola counties, Democrat Monique Worrell faces DeSantis appointee Andrew Bain, who is running as an independent. This race is marred by a legal complaint that the GOP fielded a sham candidate to help Bain.

Complicating both elections, DeSantis may choose to overturn the elections again if Warren and Worrell win, maintaining Lopez and Bain in office no matter the results. He kept that door open in remarks in September, and some Republicans have said they expect it should voters reject his appointees. 

Georgia | Chatham County sheriff

The Savannah jail, long plagued by allegations of neglect and abuse, has become a flashpoint in the race between Republican Sheriff John Wilcher and Democrat Richard Coleman, a local police chief. 

Wilcher’s campaign has received thousands of dollars from jail contractors, including people associated with CorrectHealth, the jail medical provider targeted by a scathing 2019 investigation into treatment at the jail and at the center of a wrongful death lawsuit alleging poor treatment. Wilcher has also stopped in-person visitations, which Coleman says he will restart if elected; such visits can be an important lifeline for people who are detained.

Many other Georgia sheriffs oversee jails with abusive conditions, though they may not be holding competitive races this fall. Clayton County Sheriff Levon Allen, a Democrat who oversees a jail where deaths keep mounting, is unopposed, for instance. 

Georgia | Cobb County sheriff, and Gwinnett County sheriff

When Democrats in 2020 flipped the sheriff’s offices in Cobb and Gwinnett, two large counties in the Atlanta suburbs, it prompted rapid change in immigration policy: The new sheriffs immediately fulfilled a campaign promise to cancel their counties’ participation in ICE’s 287(g) program, which deputizes local sheriff’s officers to act as federal immigration agents. 

But Georgia Republicans this year retaliated with a new law that requires sheriffs to apply to join 287(g), and hold people suspected of being undocumented when ICE requests it.

The law shrinks sheriffs’ discretion. But Priyanka Bhatt, an attorney with Project South, an organization that advocates for immigrants’ rights in Georgia, says sheriffs still have room to minimize ICE’s footprint, if they so choose. Even if a sheriff’s office is forced to enter into a 287(g) contract, she told Bolts, it can still refrain from proactively interrogating or arresting immigrants. “The way in which the sheriffs implement 287(g) is under their control,” she said.

The first-term Democratic sheriffs are now running for re-election. Cobb County Sheriff Craig Owens, who has spoken out against the new law and said he wouldn’t devote resources to 287(g), faces Republican David Cavender, who says he’d partner with ICE more closely and has echoed Trump’s rhetoric about the “open southern border.” Gwinnett County Sheriff Keybo Taylor faces Republican Mike Baker, who has made fewer public statements and who did not respond to Bolts’ request for comment on his views on immigration. 

Georgia | Chatham County prosecutor, and Clarke and Oconee counties prosecutor

The Georgia GOP adopted a law last year that threatens to remove DAs from office if they adopt a policy to not charge certain types of cases, such as abortion or marijuana. Critics denounced the law as an effort to target a swath of new Democratic officials, mainly women of color. To sign the law, Governor Brian Kemp traveled to Savannah, home of DA Shalena Cook Jones, who ran on expanding diversion programs locally and has defended reforms from Kemp’s attacks.

Republicans also signaled that they hoped to use the law to target Deborah Gonzalez, the DA of Clarke County (Athens) and Oconee County, who’d quickly rolled out some reforms such as ending marijuana prosecutions after winning office. 

The new law hasn’t yet been used to remove a DA. But Cook Jones and Gonzalez are now running for second terms, fighting off complaints that they’ve neglected the duties of their office, and saying they would continue their approach. Cook Jones faces Republican Andre Pretorius, with whom she is trading accusations of misconduct. And Gonzalez is facing Kalki Yalamanchili, a former prosecutor who is running as an independent.

Illinois | DeKalb County prosecutor, and Lake County prosecutor

In eliminating the use of cash bail last year, the Illinois Pretrial Fairness Act also made prosecutors the gatekeepers of bail reform, Bolts explained this spring. Proponents say they now hope that prosecutors will implement the law in good faith, though some prosecutors have been clear that they’ll do what they can to maximize pretrial detention. 

The debate is playing out in two prosecutor races this fall. In Lake County, a populous suburb just north of Chicago, State’s Attorney Eric Rineheart was one of very few prosecutors who backed ending cash bail. Four years after ousting a GOP incumbent, he faces Republican Mary Cole, who has centered her campaign around her opposition to the Pretrial Fairness Act, saying it endangers public safety. (Data shows that crime has not increased since its implementation.)

West of Chicago, in DeKalb County, GOP State’s Attorney Rick Amato is retiring this year after spending the last few years fighting bail reform. Republican Riley Oncken is continuing Amato’s strategy of blaming Democrats for crime, while Democrat Chuck Rose says the law is working. 

Kansas | Johnson County prosecutor, and Johnson County sheriff

Kansas’ most populous county voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020 for the first time since 1916. Sheriff Calvin Hayden, a Republican, did not take it well, and spent the following years amplifying lies about the 2020 results and investigating unfounded allegations of fraud. GOP voters responded by kicking him out in their August primary, which he lost to Doug Bedford, a former undersheriff. 

Bedford is now running against Democrat Byron Roberson, the Prairie Village police chief. In 2010, Roberson shot and killed a woman with a history of mental illness, Susan Stuckey, in her apartment. The local DA’s office declined to prosecute, but the family demanded answers and had to sue to obtain records that raised questions about the police response. As he runs for sheriff, Roberson has said the events made him more aware of a need for mental health professionals to respond to 911 calls. 

The DA who decided to not prosecute Roberson at the time, Republican Steve Howe, is still in office and he has faced more recent accusations of glossing over police shootings; one investigation showed that he provided a false account of a 2018 shooting. This fall, Howe is seeking a new term against Democrat Vanessa Riebli, a former prosecutor in his office.

Riebli narrowly won the Democratic primary over a defense attorney who campaigned on a more progressive platform, while she focused on administrative restructuring like changing how cases are assigned in the office. She is also running on a promise to guard reproductive rights. One question is whether Hayden’s actions stain Howe: The DA has faced criticism within his own party for not speaking up against the sheriff’s endless and baseless investigation into local elections.

Michigan | Macomb County prosecutor

Peter Lucido faced multiple allegations of sexual harassment while he served in the Michigan legislature. After he became Macomb County’s prosecuting attorney in 2021, an investigation found that he had behaved inappropriately toward women working in his new office. 

Lucido, a Republican, now faces Democrat Christina Hines, who has worked as a prosecutor in neighboring counties. In 2021, shortly after Eli Savit became the reform-minded prosecutor of Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor), Hines joined Savit’s office and helped develop a restorative justice program. Last year, she published an article that defended restorative justice as a rehabilitative tool that also brings more closure for victims. But as she runs in Macomb County, which Trump narrowly carried twice, Hines has distanced herself from some of Savit’s major policies, such as his decision to stop seeking cash bail, Michigan Advance reports.

Even so, CPAC, a prominent conservative conference that Lucido has attended, attacked Hines this summer with a social media ad associating Hines with George Soros, the billionaire whose super PAC has helped liberal prosecutors win office, calling her part of a “radical plan to fundamentally change Michigan, and ultimately our country.” Hines has denied any direct association with Soros, focusing her campaign on Lucido’s ethical issues, from the many allegations against him to his decision to celebrate Confederate General Robert E. Lee. 

Michigan | Oakland County prosecutor, and Ingham County prosecutor

Two counties east of Detroit feature Democratic prosecutors running for second terms. 

The race in Oakland County will be this year’s clearest test for criminal justice reform in Michigan. Karen McDonald, a self-described “progressive prosecutor,” has expanded diversion programs, and she has helped some people who were sentenced to life without parole as children apply for resentencing. Her Republican challenger, Scott Farida, is a former prosecutor who says the office should be harsher toward defendants.

In Ingham County (Lansing), Democrat John Dewane was appointed prosecutor in late 2022 after his predecessor Carol Siemon resigned. Siemon had implemented reforms to reduce incarceration, including limiting firearm possession charges and refusing to seek life without parole for people accused of murder. Dewane rolled back her reforms when he took office.

The county is blue enough that Dewane is the clear favorite to win a full term next month. But the race is still worth watching because of who the GOP nominee is: Norm Shinkle played a starring role in one of the moments where Trump came closest to overturning the 2020 election results. As one of the four members of the State Board of Canvassers that fall, Shinkle refused to certify the results, amplifying Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud. Michigan is intimately familiar with what a law enforcement official willing to entertain election conspiracies can bring: Just an hour west of Lansing, a sheriff has kept investigating the 2020 election. 

New York | Albany County prosecutor

David Soares, a vocal foe of criminal justice reform and the DA of New York’s capital county for two decades, lost in the June Democratic primary to local attorney Lee Kindlon. But he did not concede and he is now mounting a write-in campaign to secure a sixth term.

Bolts reported this summer that Soares has used his bully pulpit to attack a suite of reforms passed by Democrats, most notably the landmark changes to New York’s bail system and a law that raised the age for charging people as adults from 16 to 18. Kindlon is more supportive of the reforms, and he has accused Soares of fearmongering. Albany progressives who back Kindlon say they hope that the election fosters more attention to rehabilitation and diversion efforts, especially for young people. 

Ohio | Hamilton County (Cincinnati) prosecutor 

Four years ago, Republican Joe Deters held on to this prosecutor’s office after beating Fanon Rucker, a Black Democrat who told Bolts this year that racist messaging against him contributed to his loss. But Deters joined the state supreme court last year, and was replaced as prosecutor by Republican Melissa Powers, who has emulated his rhetoric. She has said that, if she loses, Cincinnati will transform into “a Baltimore, a Saint Louis,” she has called for maximizing prison terms, and she has joined the police union in attacking local judges as “woke”, particularly juvenile court judges that she claims are too lenient. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that a decrease in youth crime belies the fearmongering against judges.

Powers faces Democratic challenger Connie Pillich, a former lawmaker and an unsuccessful candidate for governor. Pillich’s campaign has not focused on proposing criminal justice reforms; as a lawmaker last decade, she sponsored legislation to roll back a reform meant to rule out prison for some nonviolent charges. She has also blamed Powers and prior GOP prosecutors for crime in the county; Democrats have not held this office since the 1930s even as they have taken firm control of the rest of the county government.

Ohio | Hamilton County (Cincinnati) sheriff

Voters in Cincinnati are also choosing their sheriff. Democrat Charmaine McGuffey is running for re-election in a rematch against her predecessor, Jim Neil. McGuffey ousted Neil in the 2020 Democratic primary in a tense race. McGuffey, who had worked under Neil, alleged that Neil fired her because she’s gay and because she warned about abuse in the jail. She also faulted Neil’s cooperation with ICE and said she’d reduce the overcrowded jail. While the jail population decreased slightly during the pandemic, it still remains well above capacity.

This year, Neil is running as a Republican. He says he wants to resist the “agenda of the Democratic Party” to “not support law enforcement,” and has complained that the county is flying the Pride flag on public buildings. He also says the office could detain still more people, and that it has room to hold immigrants, including by shipping detainees out of the county.

Ohio | Portage County sheriff

Some conservative sheriffs have involved themselves in elections, engaging in yearslong investigations of the 2020 results and setting up task forces to police voting. Enter Portage County Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski, who in September drew widespread condemnation when he called on county residents to “write down all the addresses” of people with yard signs for Kamala Harris. 

He made those remarks in a xenophobic social media post that used the term “locust” to describe undocumented immigrants. 

Jon Barber, Zuchowski’s Democratic opponent this fall, denounced the sheriff’s remarks, telling Bolts, “I don’t know how it could be interpreted as anything else but voter intimidation.” Barber also took issue with Zuchowski’s “derogatory” attitude toward immigrants, saying, “I don’t know anyone who’s in the United States who does not have some immigration lineage.” Zuchowski is also facing allegations that he forced people held at his jail to work for his reelection campaign. 

South Carolina | Charleston County prosecutor and sheriff

During her 17-year tenure as Charleston’s prosecutor, Solicitor Scarlett Wilson has faced complaints of widespread racial inequalities. Four years ago, she narrowly beat a Democrat who promised to conduct a “racial audit” of the office to address disparities. But the dynamic in this year’s campaign is very different.

Wilson’s Democratic challenger, David Osborne, is a former prosecutor Wilson demoted in 2021 because he sent an email to a defense attorney mocking the office’s mandatory training on racial equity and unconscious bias, The Post and Courier reports. The defense attorney was representing someone charged during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020; Osborne has since accused Wilson of letting down police and not prosecuting protesters aggressively enough. Still, Thomas Dixon, a pastor and prominent local Black activist who has long denounced Wilson for not holding law enforcement accountable for shootings or in-custody deaths of Black people who die in custody, has said he’d welcome change in the office.

Charleston voters did force some turnover in 2020—just not in the prosecutor’s race. Sheriff Al Cannon, a Republican who’d held the office since 1988, lost to Kristin Graziano, a Democrat. Upon taking office, Graziano immediately fulfilled a campaign promise to reduce collaboration with ICE, terminating the county’s participation in the agency’s 287(g) program and refusing to hold people for ICE without a judicial warrant. Prominent Republicans have since attacked her for not detaining immigrants, using the Trumpian strategy of equating immigration and crime. 

Graziano in November faces Republican Carl Ritchie, who has indicated he’d toughen office policies toward people suspected of being undocumented.

Texas | Harris County (Houston) prosecutor and sheriff

A Democratic primary in March already shook up Houston’s DA office: Sean Teare, a former prosecutor in the office, defeated eight-year incumbent Kim Ogg. When a 2017 court ruling held that local bail policies were unconstitutional because defendants were routinely jailed simply for being poor, local officials reformed how the county handles pretrial detention for misdemeanors, but Ogg strongly opposed those changes. Teare defended bail reform while challenging Ogg, and he told Bolts that Ogg had created a “culture of fear” in her office that made her staff overcharge some cases and remain too reliant on pretrial detention.

Now Teare faces Republican Dan Simons, another former prosecutor in the DA’s office who, like Ogg, is accusing misdemeanor bail reform of endangering public safety and misrepresenting the changes in bail policy that followed the court ruling. During his time at the office, some coworkers questioned Simons’ ethics, Houston Landing reported, with one junior prosecutor claiming he told her to lie to a defense attorney to force a plea deal. Democrats have grown stronger in Harris County in recent years, and are now generally favored to win, but some countywide races have remained tight.

If he wins the DA’s office, Teare could have an ally in Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, a Democrat who embraced the bail changes and some other reforms, but who is also overseeing jails that are rife with abuse and deaths. Gonzalez is also up for reelection this year, facing Mike Knox, a former Houston police officer who wants to ramp up policing and join ICE’s 287(g) program, which Gonzalez left in 2017. 

Texas | Travis County (Austin) prosecutor

Another reform-minded prosecutor won in Texas’ March primaries. Travis County DA José Garza beat an expensive challenge funded by tech interests and Elon Musk backing attorney Jeremy Sylestine, who made the case that Garza’s policies were endangering Austin. “We scored a major victory for our progressive movement and for criminal justice reform,” Garza said on election night. Garza now faces Republican Daniel Betts, who is campaigning on a similar message as Sylvestine. Travis County is a lot bluer than Harris County, making any race there an uphill climb for the GOP. 

Garza, who has been a foil of Texas GOP officials, also faced a separate effort to toss him from office this year when a county resident filed a legal complaint against him, taking advantage of a new state law providing for the removal of prosecutors who refuse to prosecute certain charges. A GOP prosecutor assigned to investigate the complaint recommended that it not move forward this summer, though a local judge has still kept the case alive.  

Texas | Tarrant County (Fort Worth) sheriff

Fort Worth’s local jail has seen a surge of deaths during the tenure of Sheriff Bill Waybourn. Local organizers have long been demanding an investigation into Waybourn’s practices and accountability over the deaths, and Bolts reported this week that he appears to be flouting a state law dictating oversight, sparking the attention of the state agency that regulates jails.

Waybourn has also ramped up immigration enforcement and helped set up a county task force to police elections.  

Waybourn, who is a Republican, is facing Democratic challenger Patrick Moses, who accused the sheriff during a public forum earlier this year of “neglecting the people that are dying in the jail,” Bolts reported. Tarrant County, one of the nation’s largest jurisdictions, has historically voted Republican but grown more competitive in recent years—a political shift that itself has fueled far-right conspiracy theories about voter fraud.

Washington | Pierce County (Tacoma) sheriff 

The 2021 death of Matthew Ellis, a Black man who was hog-tied by the Tacoma police and a Pierce county sheriff’s deputy, sparked a state investigation into local law enforcement and led to the passage of a ban on hog-tying this year. Even as he faced scrutiny, Pierce County Sheriff Ed Troyer stood by the practice and was the only sheriff to defend it to the attorney general. Troyer also faced a scandal within months of taking office in 2020 for calling the police on a Black newspaper carrier, sparking reform calls from state Democrats. 

Troyer is retiring this year, and two candidates hope to replace him. Keith Swank, a former Seattle police officer, is a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2022 on a platform of cracking down on immigration and blaming crime on “anti-police activists.” Patti Jackson, who currently works in the sheriff’s office, is endorsed by local Democrats and says she’d pursue “progressive initiatives” to address the “root causes” of crime. She’s also touting Troyer’s endorsement.

Leslie Cushman, an advocate with the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability, a group that helped champion the ban on police hog-tying, told Bolts she’ll demand reforms from whoever wins, including pushing for deescalation policies, changing how mental health calls are handled, and barring police traffic stops for minor infractions—a reform other jurisdictions are considering this election.

And the list goes on | Some honorary mentions

Chicago is poised to elect Eileen O’Neill Burke as its new prosecutor after she squeaked out a close Democratic primary win and is now heavily favored in the overwhelmingly blue Cook County. It’s the same dynamic in Ohio’s blue Franklin County, home to Columbus, where Democrat Shayla Favor, who won a tight Democratic primary for prosecutor campaigning on what she called a “progressive vision for public safety,” now faces Republican John Rutan, who shares conspiracy theories about elections and 9/11 and has been disowned by the local GOP. 

In another blue county, Atlanta DA Fani Willis is poised to win re-election; she’s still prosecuting Trump while running against one of his former lawyers, Courtney Kramer. 

Savit, the prosecutor in Ann Arbor, is running for re-election unopposed and he is bound to gain a new ally: Alyshia Dyer, a social worker, who won a tight primary to become the next sheriff of Washtenaw County. Bolts reported that Dyer has put forth a progressive platform, including ending low-level traffic stops, and she is now unopposed in the general election. Other unopposed candidates include Dar Leaf, a far-right Michigan sheriff in Barry County, Michigan, who has kept investigating the 2020 election, and Greg Tony, the sheriff of Broward County, Florida, who rolled back a reform shortly after being appointed to the office by DeSantis.

Elsewhere still, Miami is electing a sheriff for the first time in decades. In Clay County, Florida, a sheriff who was ousted in 2020 after allegations that he wrongfully detained a mistress—he was later acquitted— is attempting a comeback. In Wisconsin’s swing Kenosha County, the site of the Black Lives Matter protests during which Kyle Rittenhouse shot three men in 2020, the deputy DA (Democrat Carli McNeill) who authored the criminal complaint against Rittenhouse faces Republican Xavier Solis, an attorney who represented a foundation that raised money for his legal defense. 

Bolts is also watching prosecutor races that could be competitive in Florida’s Palm Beach County, New York’s Westchester County, New Hampshire’s Hillsborough County, and Texas’ El Paso County, as well as sheriffs races in Genesee County (Flint), Michigan and San Francisco.

The post The 33 Prosecutor and Sheriff Elections that Matter to Criminal Justice in November appeared first on Bolts.

Anthony Ehlers and another of Broadway’s friends in a cell next door heard him say he was having trouble breathing and called out to a guard, according to an affidavit written by Ehlers. Roughly 15 minutes later, a nurse arrived, but she didn’t want to climb the stairs to Broadway’s cell. “It’s too hot. I’m not going up there,” she said, per the affidavit. “Tell him to come down here.” 

By the time she ambled up the stairs several minutes later, Broadway was unconscious. His history of severe asthma was well-documented, and prison medical staff had prescribed him medications for the condition. Yet the nurse instead twice administered the overdose reversal drug Narcan as she yelled at Broadway to open his eyes, according to medical records and an affidavit from someone in the cell next door. Two guards in the cell took turns giving him chest compressions while she looked on.

The guards reached for the stretcher—but it didn’t have straps or handles. A man one cell over offered up his bedsheet and eventually helped two guards carry his friend’s limp body downstairs. By the time an ambulance arrived at the prison to take Broadway to the hospital, he wasn’t breathing and had no pulse. An autopsy later revealed he died of bronchial asthma, with heat stress listed among “significant contributing conditions.”

The medical care Broadway received at the end of his life is commonplace for the nearly 30,000 people incarcerated by the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC). Wexford Health Sources, the company the state has paid for prison health care services for decades, has long faced accusations of neglect and abuse, including enforcing a “one good eye” policy and providing such poor treatment to older people with dementia that court monitors compared it to elder abuse. 

“Mike was far from the first, and unfortunately, he won’t be the last,” Ehlers wrote in a message to Bolts. “He died as a result of being less than in the eyes of the people who oversee us. … The staff in these prisons DO NOT see us as human beings.”

Terah Tolner, an attorney representing Broadway’s family, said his experience is “just one example of many of IDOC and Wexford’s pattern of delay and unpreparedness and inadequate medical treatment.” Illinois has been bound by a federal consent decree to improve the quality of treatment it provides incarcerated people since 2019, after a lawsuit alleging poor medical care triggered intervention by the courts. 

Nonetheless, earlier this year, IDOC inked a 5-year, $4 billion contract with Wexford, raising fresh questions about the state’s commitment to improving quality of care for incarcerated people.

Sarah Grady, a civil rights lawyer who has represented a number of incarcerated people in lawsuits against IDOC and Wexford, is disappointed in state leaders like Governor JB Pritzker and Latoya Hughes, the governor’s pick to lead IDOC as interim director since March 2023 for awarding Wexford a new contract despite its tumultuous history. 

“It was a really incredible opportunity for the governor and the state to really think about a model that does not embrace this privatization,” she told Bolts. 

Pritzker, who has heralded progressive legal reform efforts like eliminating cash bail, did not respond to a request for comment. Naomi Puzzello, an IDOC spokesperson, declined to comment on Broadway’s death, citing an ongoing investigation. “The Department has not foreclosed any reasonable ways to provide healthcare services to the patients in its custody,” Puzello said in an emailed statement. “At present, the Department remains committed to continuing to provide medical services [to] the individuals in custody through its emergency contract with Wexford.”

Wexford also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

State prison officials are constitutionally bound to provide a very basic level of care to the people they incarcerate. While there’s no express guarantee of health care in the U.S. Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled that prison staff cannot knowingly ignore incarcerated people’s severe illnesses. Writing in a 1976 opinion, Justice Thurgood Marshall established the standard when he held that “deliberate indifference to serious medical needs of prisoners” violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

For much of the nation’s history, this care was provided directly by state prison or health authorities. But around the 1980s, as the number of people behind bars skyrocketed, privatization took root as state lawmakers began to outsource these and other functions. Today, roughly two dozen states use for-profit health care contractors.

The industry is now dominated by a handful of corporations, including Corizon Health, Wellpath, and Wexford. All three have long histories of lawsuits and problems with staffing and quality of care. Corizon paid Arizona officials $3 million in penalties over six years for chronic understaffing. In May, Massachusetts officials declined to renew their contract with Wellpath following complaints that the company routinely denied care and used restraints and solitary confinement on people experiencing mental health crises.

Wexford has a long and complicated history with Illinois dating back to the 1990s, when state officials first began privatizing prison medical care. In 2005, the company had secured a $547 million contract to provide health care services to most state prisons. The following year, Illinois prison officials opened an investigation into a deputy warden who was accused of also working as a paid lobbyist for Wexford in New Mexico. Then in 2008, a former IDOC director was sentenced to two years in prison for accepting $50,000 in bribes from lobbyists, including a Wexford lobbyist. (The company itself was not accused of wrongdoing in the case.) 

By 2010, the prison watchdog group John Howard Association of Illinois was warning of serious deficiencies in the psychiatric care that Wexford provided inside the state’s main women’s prison. Around the same time, from his cell at Stateville prison, Don Lippert filed a typewritten complaint in federal court alleging that he was routinely denied treatment for his diabetes, causing him headaches and nerve damage.

Despite the mounting problems under Wexford, in 2011 the state nonetheless awarded the company a 10-year, $1.3 billion contract to provide virtually all medical care to people incarcerated in Illinois prisons. 

That same year, Lippert teamed with civil rights lawyers to argue that “widespread and persistent mistreatment” of incarcerated people extended far beyond indifference among specific staff members and was “a consequence of overarching policies and procedures put in place and executed by both IDOC and Wexford.” Others eventually joined the lawsuit, and in 2017 U.S. District Judge Jorge Alonso granted class-action certification. A court-appointed medical expert, in a report accompanying Alonso’s opinion, concluded that the state “has been unable to meet minimal constitutional standards with regards to the adequacy of its health-care program for the population it serves.”

In January 2019, the parties settled the case. A five-year consent decree, included as part of the settlement, required IDOC and Wexford to overhaul their medical and dental services by increasing staffing, improving record-keeping, and implementing policies that better protect incarcerated people. An independent monitor was tasked with overseeing the reforms and regularly updating the court.

But as the lawsuit played out in court, medical care for incarcerated people remained dismal. In 2018, a medical expert told the court that of 33 deaths behind bars studied, 12 were preventable. Another seven, the report noted, might’ve been preventable, while five others could not be determined because the deaths weren’t adequately documented.

Even now, bound by a consent decree, heinous treatment continues to plague Illinois prisoners. The independent monitor wrote in a 2020 report that one nurse continued to pass out medication despite being asked by a guard to check on a person who was drooling and unresponsive. In 2023, the monitor flagged the case of an 80-year-old man with dementia who drank bleach from a soda bottle that had been left in his room. 

Wexford’s 2011 contract with Illinois expired in 2021. After decades of business with the state, millions of dollars in settlements, and a trail of horror stories, incarcerated people and advocates on the outside hoped perhaps a change was finally in order.

But the company continued to provide care in Illinois prisons while IDOC solicited bids for a new provider. It received just two: from Wexford and VitalCore Health Strategies. Prison officials scored the two proposals based on the providers’ capability and experience, technical ability and methodology, resources, references, commitment to diversity, and pricing, according to Puzello, the IDOC spokesperson. Once approved by an independent state purchasing officer, the IDOC commissioner, appointed by the governor, can officially enter into the contract.

In January, IDOC announced it was again choosing Wexford—this time to the tune of more than $4 billion over five years, with an option to renew for another five. Contract talks with Wexford remain ongoing. In June, IDOC extended an emergency contract with the health care provider through the end of the year while they finalize the terms of a new agreement.

In May, four months after IDOC announced that it was again choosing Wexford, Judge Alonso agreed to extend the consent decree and court monitoring of health care in Illinois prisons for another five years. In making his decision, Alonso noted that half of the staff positions Wexford is contracted to provide remained unfilled, medical staff continued to administer incorrect medications, and IDOC still had not developed a comprehensive set of health care policies nearly four years after a July 2020 deadline.

Alan Mills, executive director of Uptown People’s Law Center, is a perennial prison litigator and one of the lawyers fighting IDOC and Wexford in the Lippert case. He questioned the factors that IDOC considered in choosing Wexford over VitalCore, which bid lower for the contract. “Clearly, the quality of medical care being provided is not ranked high enough,” he said.

Mills told Bolts that for-profit companies like Wexford have “a built-in economic incentive to provide only the minimum level of care that gets your contract renewed.” Since contractors are paid a flat rate, rather than by the services provided, “every time they actually provide care, it comes off of their profits.”

A 2020 Reuters investigation found that, of 500 state jails surveyed between 2016 and 2018 across the U.S., those that contracted with one of the five largest private providers had higher death rates than those run by government agencies.

The issue is bigger than any one company, said Grady, the civil rights lawyer. Improving medical treatment for incarcerated people in Illinois requires a culture shift, where profit motives no longer drive decisions about care.

She called for greater oversight from state lawmakers, and she urged Prtizker and Hughes to think transformatively about a system that prioritizes quality of care over profit. (Pritzker’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

“If you spend just a little bit of time looking at this system,” Grady continued, “there can be no doubt that it is not good for the state–including the taxpayers–and it’s certainly not good for the vulnerable people who are forced to suffer because Wexford is more interested in making a profit than caring for patients.”

The post In Illinois, a Private Prison Company’s Long Trail of Deaths and High-Dollar Contracts 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.

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.

When the Massachusetts supreme court banned sentences of life without the possibility of parole against children in late 2013, the state was ahead of the curve—just five states had taken that step as of the start of that year. 

Today there are 28. In an unusually rapid sea change over the last decade, red and blue states alike have rushed to bar that punishment, which denies someone any possibility of ever leaving prison, for anyone under age 18. That includes GOP-run Ohio in 2021, and Democratic-run Minnesota and New Mexico last year. 

Will a similar surge now shield even more youths from being incarcerated for life with no hope of release?

Once again, Massachusetts is ahead of the curve: The state supreme court issued landmark rulings on Jan. 11 that expanded its earlier holding, and raised the minimum age for a life without parole sentence from 18 to 21. 

In a 4-3 vote, the majority ruled that youth aged 18 to 20 are never beyond redemption, and that they should receive the same consideration as minors due to their continuing mental development. “A sentence of life in prison without parole eligibility review for those up to age twenty-one—individuals with diminished culpability and a heightened capacity for change—is no less cruel or unusual than it is for those up to age eighteen,” Justice Scott Kafker wrote in a concurrence that drew a direct line between the court’s decision in 2013 and its new ruling. 

The decision doesn’t guarantee actual release to anyone. Rather, it grants people opportunities to appear in front of a parole board to showcase their growth—and only once they’ve spent 15 to 30 years in prison, depending on the case. State officials estimate that the ruling made roughly 200 people newly eligible for a parole hearing.

“Emerging adults… must be granted a ‘meaningful opportunity to obtain release based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation,’” Chief Justice Kimberly Budd wrote for the majority, quoting from a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that applied to children. The court was considering the cases of two people, Sheldon Mattis and Jason Robinson, who were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole as 18- and 19-year olds. (All seven justices who took part in the decision were nominated to the court by Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican.)

Massachusetts is just the second jurisdiction to ensure that everyone incarcerated over a crime committed before age 21 has some opportunity for release. 

In 2021, Washington, D.C., adopted a “second look” reform that’s functionally equivalent: People convicted as young adults can ask for a review after serving 15 years in prison. (D.C. does not call this review “parole,” so people in this group can technically still be sentenced to life without parole, but they have a mechanism to petition for release.) 

In fact, D.C. applies that reform all the way to age 25, rather than 21, a narrower definition of who is a full adult in the eyes of the law.

The Massachusetts ruling also builds on other very recent gains for reformers pushing for a higher cutoff age than 18. 

Just over the last twelve months, Connecticut and Illinois both adopted laws to restrict LWOP up to age 21. In Michigan and Washington state, judges banned sentencing rules that mandate life without parole for people under 19 and 21, respectively. Each has important carve-outs: Illinois’ law does not apply to people convicted of predatory sexual offenses, nor does it apply retroactively; Connecticut’s law applies only to people convicted before 2005; in Michigan and Washington, judges still have discretion to impose the sentence as long as it’s not automatic. But each concretizes the same principle as Massachusetts’ ruling: that 18 is not the proper place to set a limit for who gets to be considered a young person deserving of special protections. 

“People who committed crimes at a very young age have the capacity to turn their lives around and become productive citizens,” said Alex Taubes, a Connecticut lawyer who represents people on parole and supports his state’s 2023 reform. 

Preston Shipp, who advocates for such reforms nationwide as policy counsel with the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, says his advocacy work gets easier when he can tell lawmakers that more and more states have acted against juvenile life without parole. “When one domino falls, it causes the next domino to fall,” Shipp said. “These are very important steps that we’re continuing to take on our journey to make sure that people who don’t have fully formed brains are not thrown away and told there’s no hope.”

Reform proponents in other states are already lining up to be next. California’s supreme court heard a similar case in early December; it could prohibit life without parole up to age 26. 

In Washington state, legislation that would end life without parole up to age 25 received its first hearing on Jan. 15, just days after the Massachusetts ruling. Chelsea Moore, an advocate with the ACLU of Washington, and co-founder of Look2Justice, an organization centered on the rights of incarcerated Washingtonians, is championing that bill. “It’s wonderful that we see this acknowledgement spreading across the U.S.,” she said. “It’s very helpful for us to be able to interact with folks in those states, and to point to those states.”

This momentum reflects the extraordinary changes since the “superpredators” panic of the 1990s, which fueled more life sentences for children. The notion that a young person who commits a crime is particularly dangerous and unredeemable has been debunked, replaced with a consensus that youth is redeeming, a sign that one really could change. But to translate that idea into law would seem to demand drawing a bright line—a legal age that separates youth and adulthood, at least for the purpose of deciding what counts as too young to be sentenced to die in prison. And with different visions of change competing, that task itself is making reformers confront the nuances of age and development, and ponder how to best restrict a sentence that many refer to as “death by incarceration” without leaving too many people behind. 

This sense of an emerging momentum is not just a political boost for reformers like Moore. In the Massachusetts ruling, it actually served as legal evidence.

To justify raising the age from 18 to 21, the state supreme court appealed to the “evolving standards of decency,” an approach to constitutional law that connects people’s rights to contemporary norms, and that’s long been used to expand protections on juvenile defendants. The majority talked about recent laws and rulings in other states—as well as reforms in other nations—to conclude that these standards are shifting. 

Among the reforms the court cites: D.C.’s 2021 law, and Illinois’ 2023 law. 

Bolts asked Lindsey Hammond, policy director of the Illinois-based organization Restore Justice, for her reaction about the Massachusetts court drawing on a law she championed hundreds of miles away. “I think it’s incredible to see this momentum continue to build,” she said. In turn, she hopes that this out-of-state ruling can help her persuade Illinois lawmakers to revisit last year’s law and make it retroactive. 

“It is so encouraging for legislators to know that other states are reaching that same decision that young people are different,” she explained.

Besides these “evolving standards,” the Massachusetts court grounded its ruling on research in neuroscience and psychology that shows that people’s brains continue to develop into their mid-20s. “Advancements in scientific research have confirmed what many know well through experience: the brains of emerging adults are not fully mature,” the majority wrote.

Stephanie Tabashneck, a psychologist and senior fellow at the Center for Law, Brain and Behavior at Harvard Medical School, offers an example: Young adults “can’t regulate their emotions” as well as older adults because their frontal lobes are not fully developed. Tabashneck is not surprised that such findings resonated with the court. She often gives presentations to judges and attorneys, showing them brain scans highlighting the marked differences between younger and older adults; just seeing those images has a powerful effect on her interlocutors, she said. 

Some public officials echoed the science in praising the Massachusetts ruling. “The practice of putting a person behind bars forever, without paying attention to decision-making ability based on age and the science of brain development, should end,” Kevin Hayden, the district attorney of Suffolk County (Boston), said in a statement. Hayden succeeded Rachael Rollins, a reform-minded DA who’d also backed the litigation against life without parole, as well as efforts to raise the age of youth justice from 18 to 21 in other contexts.

But here’s a rub: Much of this research has found that people’s brains continue developing for years beyond age 21, leaving a gap with where the Massachusetts justices landed. The majority recognizes this, writing that “we acknowledge that the scientific record in this case suggests that the unique attributes of youth may persist in young adults older than twenty-one.” 

And here, too, the majority invoked examples from other states to explain how it reached its decision—except this time, it did that to justify not going up higher, say to 25, rather than to support going beyond 18: “The contemporary standards of decency that govern our decision today do not suggest a societal consensus that those aged twenty-one and above should be treated differently from older adults.”

On this point, the dissenting justices harshly criticized the majority for having it both ways. “[E]ven if it could, science does not definitively place the line of brain maturation at twenty-one, but rather suggests that it extends into the mid-twenties,” wrote Justice David Lowy. He accused his colleagues of “manufactur[ing] a new category of individuals entitled to distinct constitutional treatment,” and usurping the prerogative of lawmakers by deciding what he argues ought to be a political question—what is youth for the purposes of punishment. 

“Perhaps nothing speaks louder to the flaws in the court’s holding,” Lowy wrote, “than the court having crafted a line that ends at age twenty-one, thereby engaging in legislative line-drawing inconsistent with the science upon which it relies.” 

If there’s no switch that flips in a person’s brain the day they turn 18, neither is there one the day they turn 21. For Lowy, the seeming arbitrariness of setting a line at one’s 21st birthday was a reason to not raise the age at all. But for some reformers, it’s a reason to think even bigger.

Moore, the Washington advocate, feels a twinge of concern that if politicians and judges settle on 21 as the new age for juvenile justice, it may make it trickier to push bills with a higher age cutoff—like her state’s proposed legislation, which goes to 25, closer to what scientific studies envisage. “Just like the age of 18 was socially constructed, I think the age of 21 is also socially constructed,” she said. “We’re hopeful that we will continue to move past these social constructions of what we see as mature, into what we really know in science.”

Still, Moore is confident that, no matter how a particular reform defines who counts as young enough, it’ll pave the way for still more change down the line. Since Washington state abolished life without parole for teenagers under 18 in 2018, “We have people running nonprofits, we have people doing anti-violence work,” she said. “It’s so impressive what folks have done.” She points to a study conducted last year by two University of Washington scholars that showed low recidivism among the incarcerated people whose petitions were granted. 

“We just know that that model can be replicated if we bump the age up to 25 for those folks serving life and long sentences,” she added. “Those folks can come home safely and our parole board can determine when it is safe to return to their homes: They’re already doing it, and so they would be able to do it for this other group of folks.”

James Zeigler, who leads the Second Look Project, a D.C.-based group that championed D.C.’s reform and has helped implement them, questions if an age cutoff is needed at all. “If you have to draw a line somewhere, identify when someone becomes a full blown adult for culpability purposes, [25] probably makes the most sense, and it makes more sense than 18 or 21, which are both ages after which people continue to grow and develop quite a bit,” Zeigler said.

But “developmental maturation process doesn’t end at 25 for anybody,” he pointed out. “While it may slow down as a kind of general rule, everybody continues to kind of grow, change, and mature… I have seen it in my work that plenty of people who commit crimes and make serious mistakes well into adulthood, past the age of 25, past the age of 30, can still grow and change in the way that we are talking about, that you hope for in people.”

Katy Naples-Mitchell, a special litigation advisor at Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Institute, also wonders how to draw a rigid line as to when one enters adulthood, when the characteristics that make humans capable of change don’t just disappear as one ages.

As the Massachusetts supreme court considered the Mattis and Robinson cases, Naples-Mitchell co-authored an amicus brief in support of ending life without parole for young adults in Massachusetts. The brief focused on the huge racial disparities in who’s serving life without parole in Massachusetts, finding that Black youth between ages 18 and 20 are sixteen times more likely to have received that sentence than white youth.

“People of color are facing more extreme charges for less serious conduct,” Naples-Mitchell told Bolts, explaining that Black people in particular are more likely to face a charge that triggers life without parole. Research by the American Psychological Association has found that people perceive Black youth as older than they are, making judges more prone to treating Black defendants as full adults than they are with white defendants.

Those disparities also apply across age groups, though. According to research conducted by the Sentencing Project, an organization that researches criminal justice, the majority of people serving life without parole in Massachusetts as of 2020 were Black and Latinx; those groups make up less than one-fourth of the state’s overall population. Studies nationwide show prosecutors and judges use harsher charges and sentences for people of color.

For Naples-Mitchell, the debate over young adults should be a gateway for a broader reckoning with how we dole out punishments. “This is an opportunity to reshape norms about life sentences more broadly, beyond the categorical approach in the brain science,” she said. She described the neuroscientific research as critically important to understanding the need for reform but also says “the brain science is a window for the public to access new empathy.”

“There are lots of ways to build on that,” she added, “whether it’s to build to another later-in-life bright line, or to think more holistically about sentences of life without parole, and whether that is something that public policy should promote.”

D.C. underwent just the trajectory that Naples-Mitchell envisions. It first provided an opportunity for release to anyone convicted as a minor. Then, in 2021, it extended that approach to offenses committed up to age 25. And then, the local government chose to expand its reform yet again by guaranteeing any incarcerated person a judicial review after a lengthy term in prison—no matter their age at the time of the offense. That ordinance was part of the omnibus package that was blocked by Congress and President Biden last year. 

State Senator Liz Miranda, a progressive politician from Boston, wants Massachusetts to take the same route. She is sponsoring legislation that would repeal life without parole sentences regardless of the age at which someone commits a crime. Under the bill, anyone incarcerated in Massachusetts would receive a parole hearing after 25 years of incarceration.  

At a hearing for her bill, Miranda talked about her brother, who was murdered in Boston, explaining why she opposes life without parole as a punishment for his alleged killer. “I believe life without parole is death by another name, and I do not believe in death sentences,” Miranda said.

The post A Wave of States Reduce “Death by Incarceration” for Young Adults  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.