Chicago City Council Rules of Conduct for Public Meetings,
2023 to 2027.
Pursuant to Rule 58 of the Chicago City Council Rules of
Order and Procedure, the Sergeant at Arms sets forth the
following rules of conduct for members of the public.
These rules shall be in effect at all times that a viewing
gallery or room is open for a meeting of the City Council or
any of its committees. All individuals and their belongings are
subject to search at entry or upon request.
Individuals must remain seated at all times except,
one, when entering or exiting the gallery.
Two, when providing public comment during the portion of a meeting
set aside for that purpose. Or three, when
asked to rise and be acknowledged by a member of the City Council.
Profane, threatening, harassing, abusive,
or defamatory behavior or speech, which in the
judgment of the meeting's chair or the Sergeant at Arms may
lead to a breach of the peace or disrupt the orderly conduct
of the meeting, is not permitted. Disruptive or distracting
actions, such as the stomping of feet, waving of arms,
throwing any item, whistling, booing, shouting,
or other loud utterances are not permitted when in the judgment of the
meeting's chair or the Sergeant at Arms, such actions are
disrupting or impeding the orderly conduct of the meeting.
Any item that poses a potential safety hazards, as determined by the
Sergeant at Arms, is prohibited in the gallery.
Such items include, but are not limited to, one, any
pointed objects, including knives of any kind.
Two, banners, flyers, or other forms of signage.
Three, food and beverages, including in glass or metal
canisters. Four, backpacks, large bags, and
sealed packages. Clear bags, not tinted in color, that do
not exceed 12 inches by six inches by 12 are
permitted and subject to search. And five, firearms,
ammunition, fireworks, laser pointers, stun guns,
tasers, mace, pepper spray, and toy weapons.
Cell phones and other small handheld recording devices must be
placed in silent modecan only be used while seated
and can only be used in a manner that does not
interfere with the ability of other individuals to view
or hear the proceedings. Individuals or groups
failing to adhere to these rules will be subject to
removal from the remainder of the meeting by the Sergeant at
Arms.
City of Chicago City Council Rules of Conduct for Public
Meetings, 2023 to 2027.
Pursuant to Rule 58 of the Chicago City Council Rules of
Order and Procedure, the Sergeant at Arms sets forth the
following rules of conduct for members of the public.
These rules shall be in effect at all times that a viewing
gallery or room is open for a meeting of the City Council
or any of its committees. All individuals and their
belongings are subject to search at entry or upon request.
Individuals must remain seated at all times except,
one, when entering or exiting the gallery.
Two, when providing public comment during the portion of a meeting
set aside for that purpose. Or three, when
asked to rise and be acknowledged by a member of the City Council.
Profane, threatening, harassing,
abusive, or defamatory behavior or speech,
which in the judgment of the meeting's chair or the Sergeant at
Arms may lead to a breach of the peace or disrupt the
orderly conduct of the meeting, is not permitted.
Disruptive or distracting actions, such as the stomping of feet,
waving of arms, throwing any item, whistling,
booing, shouting, or other loud utterances are not
permitted when in the judgment of the meeting's chair or the Sergeant at
Arms, such actions are disrupting or impeding the orderly
conduct of the meeting.
Any item that poses a potential safety hazard, as determined by
the Sergeant at Arms, is prohibited in the gallery.
Such items include but are not limited to, one, any
pointed objects, including knives of any kind.
Two, banners, flyers, or other forms of signage.
Three, food and beverages, including in glass or
metal canisters. Four, backpacks, large
bags, and sealed packages. Clear bags, not tinted in
color, that do not exceed 12 inches by 6 inches by
12 are permitted and subject to search.
And five, firearms, ammunition, fireworks,
laser pointers, stun guns, tasers, mace, pepper
spray, and toy weapons. Cell phones and other small
handheld recording devices must be placed in silent mode,
can only be used while seated, and can only be used in a
manner that does not interfere with the ability of other
individuals to view or hear the proceedings.
Individuals or groups failing to adhere to these
rules will be subject to removal from the remainder of the
meeting by the Sergeant at Arms.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. The Committee on Public Safety is convened.
We will begin with the roll call to establish quorum.
Vice Chair Yancy is here.
Alderman Chico?
Here.
Alderwoman Gutierrez. Alderman Lopez.
Alderman Curtis.
Is Alderman Curtis... I got you, Alderman. Alderwoman Tavares.
Alderman Cincho Lopez. Alderwoman Fuentes. Alderman Taliaferro.
Thank you.
Alderman Sposato. Alderman
Vasquez.
Alderman Knutson. Alderman Gardner.
Alderman Martin.
Alderwoman Manaa Hoppenworth.
Alderwoman Hadden.
Alderwoman Silverstein.
Thank you. We do have simultaneous committees.
We need to establish a quorum for pedestrian safety.
So any members who happen to be on both committees, you are excused at this
time to establish quorum for pedestrian safety.
We then invite you to come back here.
We do have a full 30-minute list of public
speakers. We had to resort to the drawing to draw 10
names, which I have drawn 10 names for the public speakers,
and the remainder are invited to come back if you wish to testify at
11:30. We have another public safety meeting scheduled then, and
we can put your name back in the drawing at that time.
The first public speaker is Gabriel Miller.
Are we
good to start?
Yeah.
Good morning.
My name is Gabriel Miller. I'm a member of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and
Political Repression.
I'm here to speak against the proposed ordinance that would increase the size
of school zones in Chicago and increase the penalties
for minor drug-related offenses within those school zones.
This proposed ordinance,
there is no evidence to suggest that it would do the things that it says it wants
to do, right? Protecting schools
and
protecting children does not involve
increasing penalties for drug-related offenses.
Imagine a radius of 2,000 feet, right?
That's what we're talking about here, is increasing the size of a school zone from
a 1,000-foot radius to a 2,000-foot radius, which is an
enormous increase. If you're standing at the edge of that
2,000-foot radius circle, you have no idea that there's a
school at the center of that radiusThis is why policies like this don't
actually work to protect children from
supposed drug-related sales. If you don't even
know that you're in a school zone, why would you be deterred by this policy,
right? There's no way to mark specifically where these things, where these
radiuses are. There's also nothing that shows
that these radiuses or penalties won't be in effect when school isn't in session
or when there's not even kids in the school.
So this doesn't actually have any evidence behind it showing that it's going
to help protect our children. What it does show is that it's going to
increase penalties against an entire community.
If you look at a map of Garfield Park with these new radiuses, you're going to see
the entire thing is now covered by this school zone, which means the
entire community is now part and parcel of this
increased penalty. Increasing the minimum
mandatory sentence to 120 days when it was 30, and
increasing the fine to 1,000 when it was 50.
This is not going to help our children.
This is only going to increase police presence and penalties
for Black and brown Chicagoans especially, and for all of us.
There was a study that looked at school zone increases and
mandatory minimum sentences in Massachusetts that showed that this had
no effect. It didn't work. There's decades of research
showing this. If alders in this committee really
care about public safety, they should be supporting the Community Power Over
Policing referendum ordinance. That is what is going to increase public safety for
Chicagoans, is putting more hands in the power of the people
and not in the hands of the police.
So we need this
ordinance to die here in this committee.
It is a bad faith attempt to address public safety.
What we do need is the CPOP referendum.
So stand with the people and give us our democratic right to determine who polices
our communities and how our communities are policed.
Also, we support the Pre-Trial Fairness Act, and it should be defend-
Speaker is
Reese Alexander Coughlin.
Good morning.
Hi. I'm Reese Coughlin. I am a student at DePaul University and
an intern at the Chicago Alliance Against Racist Political Repression.
I'm here to speak against the proposed school zoning ordinance.
I do not believe there is any evidence that this ordinance will protect our
schools or our children. However, I do see evidence that this ordinance
will lead to an increase in police presence and penalties against entire
communities, especially against Black and brown Chicagoans.
A study that looked at mandatory minimums for school zones in Massachusetts
demonstrated that these mandatory minimum sentencings did not work
as a deterrent against drug activity.
If alderpeople really care about the safety of their communities, they should
empower the people instead of their police force. Thank you.
The next speaker is Carmen Gerconey.
Good morning, members of the city council, survivors, and family members.
I stand here today not only as a proud resident of the city of Chicago, but as a
professional with over 30 years of experience in county government,
including 26 years with the Cook County Sheriff's Office and four years running
operations with the clerk of the circuit court.
I'm a graduate of the FBI National Academy and currently train law enforcement
leaders across the country. Although I am working on the Violence Against Women
task force, I'm here today in my capacity as vice president of Women of the
Shield. Women of the Shield is a nonprofit that for over 10 years
mentors, prepares, and supports the next generation of female law enforcement
professionals, specifically women of color.
We have the I Can Be Her Academy, and we are currently heading into our ninth
cohort in partnership with Chicago State University, working with law enforcement
professionals from across the country on the 30 by 30 initiative, which is a
goal to have 30% of law enforcement be women by 2030.
But instead of target numbers, I am much more concerned about the safety
of our young cadets and all young people filling out an application to become an
officer today, especially if they are applying for the Chicago Police Department
or anywhere in Cook County. Why? Because in no other
jurisdiction that I have encountered in my work across the country
have I heard of a jurisdiction with a reported 72,000
outstanding warrants, 3,500 people on GPS, or
335 domestic calls a day, and thousands of unserved orders of
protection. This creates the most dangerous work environment and
culture that law enforcement experts can even fathom.
When we actively ask young women and men today to consider this career, we
must also fight to ensure that government leaders are working to protect
them. For more than two decades in law enforcement and many years in leadership,
I managed units responsible for enforcing warrants, orders of
protection, and firearm seizures.
For 13 of those years, I trained newly promoted Chicago police
sergeants on how to serve orders of protection called short forms.
I understand this work intimately and am considered a national expert.
I'm here to share that the systemic and intentional lack of
transparency continues to drive violence against first responders,
victims, and residents of our communities.
Unserved orders of protection, unenforced warrants, and thousands of GPS
defendants going AWOL puts the police on defense.
They do not know of any of this when they are walking up to a car during a traffic
stop or responding to a fire that was set by a felon with a
warrant.In the past few years, multiple
officers have been killed by those with warrants and during domestic violence
episodes. It is so hard to share this because I do not want to cause
further harm to their families, but this must be shared.
Officer Crystal Rivera, Chicago Fire Captain David Meyer,
firefighter Michael Altman, and Chicago Police Officer John
Bartholomew should be here today.
Each of their deaths could have been prevented if warrants had been served.
Now imagine the number of cases that are not high priority in the media.
The young mother who was trying to flee abuse.
Thank you.
The next speaker is Christopher Ringer.
Good morning. My name is Reverend Christoph Ringer,
representing A Just Harvest and the Illinois Network for Pre-Trial
Justice.
We feed people who are hungry 365 days a
year, and we organize to end the causes of hunger
365 days a year. We began our advocacy to
end money bond because people who were returning from jail,
people who had often lost their jobs, their housing, and
experiencing hunger, were showing up at our community kitchen.
These are persons who were being punished not because they were guilty of a crime,
but simply because they were too poor to afford their freedom.
These individuals we serve are not suffering from a lack of
food because they lack the desire to work or provide for
themselves. They are suffering because our system of incarceration
actively creates food insecurity.
We must not weaken any provisions of the Pretrial Fairness Act.
We don't take lightly any loss of life.
However, the vast majority of people on pretrial release are successful,
and crime in Chicago is down. The data shows that the law is
working. 99% of people on electronic monitoring are
compliant. 94% of people released pretrial have
not been charged with a new offense against any person,
and judges are spending more time and receiving more
information when making decisions about pretrial
jailing.
If we go back to incarcerating people before they have
even been convicted, we destabilize the very
households that are struggling to stay afloat.
We aren't making our city safer. We are creating cycles of
poverty and recidivism.
We want the council to be truly committed to public safety, to
focus on proactive solutions such as robust mental health
services, stable housing, and job training.
Let's hold existing systems accountable for following the
law rather than dismantling the progress that is finally
moving Illinois towards a more just and stable future.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, sir.
The next speaker is May Tuamagala.
Hello. My name is May Tuamankla, and I am the organizing
director at Asian Americans Advancing Justice Chicago, a
member of the Illinois Network for Pre-Trial Justice, whose
mission is to advance racial equity.
I am here today to say on record that our organization is in favor of
the Pretrial Fairness Act.
The Pretrial Fairness Act is public safety
legislation resulting in judges spending more
time and receiving more information when making pretrial release
decisions. Our organization joined the coalition to
advance this policy because we see firsthand how
the economic crisis is impacting those who live in poverty.
The cost of living and access to healthcare and public benefits
continue to be the issue our community is most concerned about.
Our members are most interested in addressing the root causes of
systemic inequities, and keeping those who need assistance the
most incarcerated goes against our values.
Putting more people in jail is not the solution.
Under the money bond system, people who do not pose a
danger suffered in jail because they could not buy their freedom.
Jailing legally innocent people who do not pose a danger to the
community causes them to end up losing their jobs,
housing, access to mental health and other critical
services, and sometimes custody of their children,
ultimately causing families to suffer.
I am a formerly incarcerated person who
experienced how much harm was caused in pretrial detention.
If I wasn't released during that time, I would have lost my job and housing,
and the burden would fall on my family, landlord, and employer.
Something else I would have lost that isn't mentioned enough was my
dignity.
Being released allowed me to redeem myself by focusing on my
education, health, and career, which resulted in a lower
sentence from the judge.
The Pretrial Fairness Act allows judges to
see the humanity in each individual by assessing how
incarceration would impact the support system of that
individual and their own dignity.
The vast majority of people released pretrial have successfully
returned to court and not been re-arrested.
We can't allow a few individual incidents affect the progress our state has
made in both protecting the survivors of violence as well as the rights of the
accused. We must also acknowledge that the implementation
of our new system has coincided with a decrease in
crime.The act ensures that both survivors
of violence and accused people are seen, heard, and valued in our
community. The act of care is contagious and contributes to
public safety. A lack of care for those facing criminal charges will
only continue the cycles of harm we are trying to break free from, which
is why-
The next public speaker is Jasmine
Thomas.
Good morning, y'all. I'm Jasmine Thomas, and this is Brittany
Cooper, and we are here on behalf of Revolution Workshop, a Chicago-based
nonprofit that creates pathways to
mobility
through workforce development and skilled trades
training. We serve individuals facing barriers to employment,
including those impacted by the justice system, by
providing hands-on construction training, life skills
coaching, and job placement support.
Although we have many stories that show the benefits of returning to the
community while awaiting trial, we would like to
highlight Daniel's story, which illustrates both our mission and the
importance of the Illinois Pretrial Fairness Act.
Daniel, a young father seeking
a path to a better life for his son and himself, joined Revolution
Workshop with the goal of joining the union.
Shortly after graduating from our program, he became
justice-involved. He was released pretrial on electronic
monitoring. During this time, Daniel was able to remain in community with his
son, who he had full custody of, continue to build his
skills while working with us, and eventually secure an employment with the
company that sponsored him into the union.
Through his hard work, he is now close to being a journeyman.
Derrick, another young man we work with, had a different experience.
Because he was jailed pretrial,
he lost his job and lost the opportunity to continue to
build his work experience. When he was finally released, he was
not rehired by his employer and had a hard time
gaining another stable job. The Pretrial Fairness Act makes
stories like Daniel's possible. This law allows individuals to
maintain jobs, participate in training programs, support their families, and
continue building productive lives while their cases move throughout the
court system. We need to be investing more in creating
opportunities for people to succeed while awaiting trial, not pushing for
more tough on crime policies, which only gets tougher on
people. At Revolution Workshop, we see every day that when people are given
opportunity and support, they can transform their futures and strengthen our
communities. Thank you.
The next public speaker is Patricia
Puente. Patricia Puente.
Good morning. My name is Patricia Puente.
The reason why I'm here was two, but right now I'm just going to talk about one.
It's regarding the teen takeover.
I have a concern about that. Whoever is
telling these teens to take over are doing
wrong to them. Why? Because once they are arrested, they're
going to have a record. That's going to hurt
them when they want to look for a job.
Not only that,
invite them here
and let them
speak their concern. Why is it
that they want to take over?
What's the reasons?
Let them express themselves here, not
outside, where
people that want to harm these
teenagers
are telling them
to do it the wrong way.
Invite them here.
Let them know that they could speak out here and
tell their concerns. Thank you. That's
it. I would say something else but that's
it.
The next speaker is Danielle Carter.
Hello. So we just had, in almost a
span of a week and a half,
two to three, maybe four mass shootings.
And look at the chambers.
Empty. It was in Stephanie Coleman ward. Where's Stephanie Coleman?
Where is she?
Where's Brandon Johnson?
Because when ICE was in the community and they were just
taking people who were here illegally and going
to deport them back to their country, the chambers were
packed. Y'all had ACLU here, NAACP
here, all the aldermen's here. We had Toni
Preckwinkle,
Kwame Raoul, who we haven't seen to him. Pritzker was here.
Brandon Johnson was here. Y'all had four or five press conferences
everywhere. But in the community
where the citizens are, we are having an act of genocide, and look at the
chambers. So they are showing you who they care about.
Also, Desmond Jansen, we was in your ward, South Shore.
Talk to your citizens over there. We walked down there.
I grew up over there, 68th and Paxton.
All abandoned buildings from 71st and Crandon,
Merle, Clyde, all abandoned buildings.
So this is your affordable, build back better affordable, right?
I said, "Go walk over there. Have you been over there in your community and talked
to the residents and see how they really feel about you and what's going on in that
community? Because I have." And on 51st,
where that mass shooting took place, which took the
life of a co-owner of Chemistry on 51st and
Woods,
Isaac Bradley, I talked to the residents over there.
And I'm just letting you all know, who don't come in the community, they
want more police presence over there. So you all need to go talk to them.
See, we are no longer allowing anybody to talk to us
for us anymore. Go in those communities and talk
to the people. And guess what they said?
They can't stand Brendan Johnson.
They can't stand him because all the resources in their
community is gone. It's a ghost town there.
Go over there and talk to them before you all come here and advocate and
talk about things, the Black and brown.
You don't speak for us because you don't come and talk to the Black and brown.
The Black and brown, we need help.
We need resources in our community that was allocated, but these
crooks stole. But we know that you all don't know because you all don't come to the
meetings and see. So the Black and brown, we're
speaking for ourselves, and we need help.
We need more police presence in our community.
Did you know 246 people on the ankle monitor, they
can't find them? They can't find them. Where are they?
So we see that's not working, a failing system.
So when you want to tell what we want and tell what the people want,
go actually talk to those people that's living in that
community.
The next public speaker is Reverend
Charles Straight.
Good morning.
My name is Reverend Charles Straight, and I'm a retired United Methodist
pastor, a member of the Illinois Network for Pre-trial Justice,
and one of the many faith leaders who help advocate for the Pre-trial Fairness
Act because we believed then and still now
that public safety and justice are not competing
values. As a pastor, I've stood beside
victims of violence and with grieving families.
I've also stood beside people accused of crimes who were legally
innocent and awaiting trials, but they lost their jobs,
housing,
healthcare, and sometimes even custody of their children simply
because they could not afford bond.
The question before us is not whether we care about public
safety. We all do. The question is whether
the answer to return to the policies
that
did not work is where we want to go, and the data
says no. Crime is down in Chicago.
Chicago experienced historic low homicide numbers in
2025, and violence remains lower today than it was
before Pre-trial
Fairness Act took effect. The Pre-trial Fairness Act,
if it was causing crimes, we would expect to see the
opposite happen. The law was designed to make
release decisions for judges more accountable,
giving them more evidence and individual
circumstances around the people that they are releasing.
The thing that money bail did not do.
Judges now receive more information.
They spend more time evaluating cases than they did under the
old system. We all mourn the tragic death
of first responders, we do. And we
reference them in decision-making, but public
policy should be guided by comprehensive
data, not isolated tragedies. Every
system has difficult cases. The question is
whether the overall system is making us safer,
and the data says it does.
If concerns exist around warrants, orders of
protection, and electronic monitoring, then let's address
those operational issues directly.
Let's ensure agencies follow existing procedures.
Let's improve communication and accountability where it's
needed. But let us not use administrative
challenges as a reason to dismantle or weaken
pre-trial fairness. As people of faith, we believe in
accountability matters. We also believe that every
person deserves due process.
Detention should not be reserved for those whom-
Thank you, Reverend.
And the final public speaker in the time we have allotted is
Sarah Brown.
And please add Alderman Cincho Lopez and Alderwoman Gutierrez to the
quorum roll call. Thank you. Ms. Brown, please proceed.
Okay. Good morning. I want to first thank
Alderwoman Tabarez
for calling this meeting this morning.
My name is Sarah Brown. I do want to say there must be some
confusion.
This is not about pre-trial fairness.
It's about the failing Cook County policies.
I'm going say that one more time, the failing Cook County policies.
I'm a daughter, business owner, and survivor of domestic violence.
I am the co-founder of the All In Alliance, which is a survivor-led
effort to improve access to resources in our communities
and help victims become survivors.
I'm an 18-year
business owner. That's what I do for a livingAll right?
In 2024, we had a higher rate of domestic violence murders than
LA County and New York City combined.
Women are not falling through the cracks.
The entire system is broken.
Sadly, this means that women and their children, like Jayden Perkins,
have been killed due to lack of oversight of the justice
partners. Last year alone, 75% of murder
victims were Black.
Meaning, Black women
and their children have become the cost of the sheer
incompetence of this court system.
With the help of Alderman Silvana Tabarez and Cook County Commissioner Donna
Miller, we have brought together city, county, and state leaders to fix
the system. Together, in just six months, there
has been a reduction in the murder rate in domestic violence cases
50%.
How have we done that so quickly? By putting pressure on the
system's partners to do their jobs, to increase the number of
orders of protection being served by the sheriff, and to collaborate.
Finally, we have Cook County State's Attorney, who has focused many
resources on the victims of domestic violence in criminal
cases. Her efforts to prosecute violent abusers has
helped reduce the number of murders.
Victims in the criminal cases surely have to have an
advocate. I would like to thank the State's Attorney, for
being the only elected State's Attorney out of the four main
offices in the justice system who agreed to
participate today.
Four main offices, and only her office
agreed to participate. To be clear,
most victims of domestic violence have their cases heard in the civil court
system, not criminal courts, and civil courts
do not have State's Attorneys.
In the domestic relations divisions where cases are sent when victims have
children, like my case, court proceedings are not recorded.
And victims, yes, victims of domestic violence are made to pay tens of thousands of
dollars in court fees. But today we are here because of these
priority areas of the court system that highlight the dysfunction
and are causing harm to the victims.
Thank you, Ms. Brown, for your testimony.
Before we return to the regular order of business, I do
need a Rule 59 motion to allow for participation by committee
member Alderman Knudson.
Alderman Gutierrez moves to allow.
Hearing no objection, Alderman Knudson, can you unmute and verify
that you are online?
Alderman Knudson?
Oh, please let the record reflect Alderman Sposato voted no
on the Rule 59 authorization.
And we will come back to Alderman Knudson.
The purpose of this hearing today is a subject matter hearing
on a resolution before this body, Resolution
25213, a call for a hearing
regarding the Cook County Court system's operations and its impact on the
city's annual budget appropriation and resources with regard
to outstanding warrants and the enforcement thereof.
It is presented to us by committee member Alderwoman Tabarez,
and she will open.
Yes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to open with a statement
and then lead into my questions. Good morning, everyone.
I want to thank everyone who supported this resolution, calling for the special
hearing with the leaders of the Cook County Court system to discuss overall public
safety in three critical focus areas: warrants,
protective orders, and GPS monitoring programs.
As the chair of the City of Chicago and Cook County Violence Against Women task
force, I have been encouraged by the recent collaborative efforts between our
governments, which, as of this morning, has resulted in the decline
of domestic murders by 53% in 2026 alone.
This is tremendous progress, yet I also experience the stark
difference between the city and Cook County court system that is not
transparent with the public.
It's not transparent with the public, with stakeholders, nor with the City of
Chicago. Data requests from commissioners submitted months ago were
still outstanding for many departments.
And yet experts all agree that focusing our attention to the specified
priority areas is imperative to safeguarding and
continuing the progress that has been made thus far to save the lives of victims
and survivors.
Sadly, it also became clear to me that the lack of transparency
and data sharing regarding enforcements of warrants, orders of protection, and
GPS are also resulting in the deaths of
Chicago's first responders.
The task force has been told that there are 72,000 outstanding court
warrants. Almost half of orders of protections are not
served, and that GPS programs may be using CPD as their
enforcement mechanism when security perimeters are being breached for domestic
violence cases.
Due to the Cook County courts not being subject to the Freedom of
Information Act and the lack of public information, I
call this hearing. I call this hearing today to begin the conversation
on behalf of City Council with our partners on how we can develop a
unified approach to solving the public safety crisis
caused by these three focus areas.
This hearing
is an opportunity for members of the City Council to receive data and
information to begin a long overdue discussion on
collaboration. This hearing is not meant to deliberate state
or federal legislation, nor any specific litigation
on court case proceedings.
I want to note that due to scheduling conflicts with another hearing today
across the hall, I previously circulated the data request
inAnd asked my colleagues in city council to send over their questions.
We
gathered a list of questions that I will ask our partners today,
but we have also allotted a short timeframe for each department that agreed to
participate so that they can attend and prepare for both
meetings. Any follow-up questions can be emailed to their
departments, and they have shared points of contact that I will circulate to
members of this committee, as well as to our colleagues in the city council.
I'd like to thank the state's attorney and the public defender for participating
today,
as well as the Chicago Police Department.
It is unfortunate that the other Cook County stakeholders have
chosen not to attend, yet their actions impact so many
facets of the City of Chicago and the residents we serve.
Their policies and programs have a direct impact on the safety of victims of
violence, first responders, and our budget.
Concerns about public safety have driven residents and businesses out of Cook
County, which means higher property taxes and less resources.
Everyone is impacted. Yet even as elected leaders, we have a limited
understanding of the court system.
The City of Chicago has a violent crime dashboard updated every morning.
CPD tracks every interaction with the public.
The OIG tracks every 911 call. And there are
layers and layers of accountability for our first responders.
Yet, some simple questions will likely remain after today, such as
how many active criminal warrants and orders of protection are there, and how many
have not been served? What are the plans for the GPS programs?
How can we create a unified approach to public safety and protect
victims and first responders?
Finally, the data that I requested was sent
over weeks ago and was promised by the clerk of the courts.
That data I have not received as of this
morning. We will continue to request data under
this task force, and I will share it with the Public Safety Committee once it's
received. This will not deter our efforts.
We must continue these conversations with the leaders of Cook County.
Now I want to lead to my questions, and I want to start off with the state's
attorney's office.
May I, Chairman?
Yes, Alderman. But just for the record,
we did make a good faith effort to invite all of the
expected participants. We reached out for their offices.
Those who chose not to attend,
chose not to attend. However, I did hear from the sheriff's office this morning,
and they indicated a willingness to respond in writing to
any inquiries through the chair that are presented here today.
Please add Alderman Riley to the attendance roll call.
And also we do have a opening statement
that the public defender wishes to make, but if you want the state's attorney to go
first, and then after that, we'll go to the public defender.
Great.
Okay. Thank you.
Good. So I want to... Yes.
Oh, I'm sorry. Alderman Taliaferro.
Just a quick point of order. And I certainly appreciate
Alderman Tabaris' leadership on this, and I certainly support it as
well. Can you name the organizations that were
reached out to, and all the organizations that were reached out to
and invited here today, and all of those that declined or
refused to show?
So we reached out to the Cook County Sheriff's Office.
They declined. We reached out to the Cook County Chief Judge's office.
They were unable to be here. They had
prior commitment.
We also reached out to the
Cook County Circuit Court clerk.
They can't be here, but they're working on getting us the data that we requested.
We also reached out to the Cook County State's Attorney. They are here.
They are present. We reached out to the Cook County Public Defender. They are here.
They are present. And the Chicago Police Department. Seven.
Seven stakeholders.
Thank you, Alderwoman. And thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Yeah. And the representatives of the Chicago Police Department are here to answer
direct questions and inquiries posed to them, and
that is relevant to their work, but they do not wish to make any type of
statement. But they will respond to specific questions to the extent possible.
So-
Good
... Alderman Tabaris, proceed.
So, to the state's attorney, thank you for attending today.
I want to commend the state's attorney for being very forthcoming about attending
today, and for State's Attorney Eileen O'Neill Burke's
candor when talking about these issues.
I want to start off with warrants.
Can you give us a quick rundown on what the state's attorney's office role is
in the issuance of a warrant, and any data that you may have on how
many warrants are filed on an annual basis?
Good morning. Yvette Loizon, Chief Assistant State's Attorney for
Policy and External Affairs. Thank you very much for having us here today.
In response to your question, I am going to focus on
warrants that are issued as a result of an individual's failure to
appear in court. There are different types of warrants that the state's
attorney's office does have interaction with.
For example, a search warrant on an individual's home.
But I think for purposes of today's meeting, the failure to appear warrants
are what we're talking about. Is that correct?
Yeah.
Okay.
So generally, our role in the process of
obtaining warrants for a failure to appear is that
when we are presented with information that an individual
has either failed to come to court or has
failed to come to court because of some type of violation related to
potentially electronic monitoring or some other
issue, we generally receive that information from
our external partners.
And most frequently, the Cook County Office of the Chief Judge
Pretrial Services Department, if we're talking about a person who's on pretrial
release and is being monitored in some fashion who has not appeared, or if
a person has no pretrial release conditions and they don't come to court,
we have a state's attorney in the courtroom who's aware that they're not there.
In that set of circumstances, it's incumbent upon us to
file the correct paperwork to ask a
courtTo ask the judge to issue a warrant for
that individual's arrest for their failure to appear.
Generally, if it's a violation of pretrial conditions, we do
that through a petition for sanctions.
In other circumstances, it's just dependent on the facts and circumstances
before us at the time, but that is our role in the process.
And then if the judge chooses
to issue that warrant, it's then incumbent upon the clerk's
office to enter that warrant into the correct system
leads so that law enforcement becomes aware that that warrant exists.
Okay. Now I want to shift to orders of
protection.
Can you provide a quick snapshot on what role your
office plays in getting and enforcing an order of protection?
For example,
can you explain the difference between criminal and civil orders,
and what a victim needs to get an order of protection or report a
violation?
Sure. So the Cook County State's Attorney's Office has no
role in assisting individuals in obtaining
a civil order of protection. We do not have state's
attorneys that
are in those courtrooms, and we don't assist anyone
in trying to obtain a civil order of protection.
When it comes to a criminal order of protection, the
individual that we are working with, the victim of the crime, has to
have a police report.
And if that person has a police report and agrees to seek the
order of protection, so as prosecutors, we don't demand that
the victim try to seek an order of protection.
That is driven by the victim's wishes.
Then we will assist them in court in obtaining an order of
protection. All orders of protection are civil in nature.
However, if a person has a police report
and we are working towards a criminal case on that matter, that is
when the State's Attorney's Office is in fact present in court and can step in and
assist in that process. One thing I would like to note is
that if an individual were to come to the Domestic Violence
Courthouse, 555 West Harrison, and provide
information that would suggest that they in fact need a police
report and they don't have one, there are mechanisms
available in the courthouse for them to obtain a police report
while they are there at that time and present.
That's actually a very new development, which was the
result of significant partnership between our office
and the Chicago Police Department to make sure that we could facilitate that
process for people who come in and are in that position.
Okay. Thank you for that. And then finally, I'd like
to talk about electronic monitoring, which is the third focus area on
this resolution. Can you give us a quick explanation of what
role the State's Attorney's Office has in the GPS program,
and if you receive any notifications on violations?
And also, how do you think this program can be
improved?
But prior to a person being placed on electronic
monitoring, if a person is charged with a felony
criminal offense that under the Pre-Trial Fairness Act permits
us to seek detention,
we will make a decision on a case-by-case basis based on the
statutory guidelines and parameters as to whether or not we believe we can
meet our burden of proof of demonstrating that that individual is
either a danger to the community, a danger to a particular person,
or a flight risk. In the event that we believe we can meet our
burden of proof,
we will present a petition to detain that
person before the judge in first appearance court.
If that petition is denied and we believe that that person is
in fact a danger,
we object on the record to explain to the
court that we
are objecting. If the judge orders that person to electronic
monitoring, our objection specifically states
that we object to that person who we have asserted is a danger to the
community or a person being placed on electronic
monitoring because electronic monitoring is insufficient to
protect the public. So that's step one for us.
If a person is on electronic monitoring and they
commit a violation of their electronic monitoring,
we are relying on the Office of Pretrial Services
to provide us with information on
that violation
with all of the attendant details that are necessary for us to have
in our possession to file a petition for sanctions
in front of a judge to advise the judge that that violation has
occurred. We do not direct pretrial services to
alert us to that or to provide that information.
It's incumbent upon them to take their own initiative to do that.
Once we receive that information, it then becomes our
responsibility to file that petition for sanctions if there
has been a violation of electronic monitoring, and then it's incumbent
upon the judge to make a decision as to how they are going to proceed.
Very frequently in those situations, when we are filing a
violation for an electronic monitoring issue,
the offender is not present in court.
So that would be a scenario where we have filed a petition for a
sanction for noncompliance with
pretrial release conditions. If that person is
not present in court at that time, we will generally ask the
court to issue a warrant for that person's arrest, and then it is up to the
judge to decide whether or not they're going to do that
Well, thank you for that information.
I know we have our
public defender here, and I'd like to move on, and I know he has
a public statement that he likes to read.
Sharone Mitchell, can you please read your statement, if that's okay, Mr. Chairman?
We delivered the statement to-
Yeah, we distributed the written statement, too-
Yeah
... but please read it.
Yeah, we delivered the written statement to each of the members, so I don't
think there's a need to read it in full.
May I-
That's fine. Yeah, we'll waive the reading then.
Okay.
It is in the
meeting record, sir, and if there's any questions, proceed.
Okay. Thank you. I do have a couple of questions for our public defender.
Again, thank you for being here today.
Thank you.
Today, we're discussing warrants, orders of protection, and electronic monitoring.
I'd like to get your opinion on how the systems are
currently working, and if you think there should be any changes that need to be
made.
Thank you.
And if so,
what would those be?
Thank you so much
for the invitation here, for bringing us here today.
I'm Sharone Mitchell, Jr., Cook County Public Defender.
I'm joined by our Deputy Public Defender for Policy, Sharolyn Grace.
There's obviously been a ton of back and forth about electronic
monitoring, when it should be used, how it should be used.
That is a decision that the judiciary makes, and we believe
that decision should be made on a case-by-case basis using
the information provided to the judge.
I think one of the strong things about the Pretrial Fairness Act is that it's
expanded the opportunities people have to have conversations
about what should happen to a person.
Before, hearings, back when I was in the courtroom, would take literally 30
seconds, one minute, two minutes when we're talking about bond hearing.
Now those decisions are taken far more seriously, and I think it's
been a great step forward.
Our position at the Public Defender's office has been when somebody is put on
electronic monitoring, that they should have access to the basic things
that we need to keep people alive. Things like food,
things like clean clothes, are things people should have if they're on electronic
monitoring. Quite frankly, that has not always been the case.
I have personal experiences being a public defender when people are put on
electronic monitoring that they don't have the ability to leave their house, they
don't have the ability to go take out the trash.
And we know that
something first that's provided to anybody, even if they were incarcerated.
But also,
it creates issues when it comes to trying to ensure that people
stick with the things that keep them out of the criminal legal system.
Things like school, things like receiving public benefits,
things like receiving work. We want to make sure that the
individuals keep those things together.
I think it's also important to think about the data as well when we talk about
electronic monitoring. There have been certainly
instances where people have been accused of very serious offenses that are on
electronic monitoring. I think oftentimes though, we
don't think about how the vast majority of people do come to court.
And if we do want people, and we want to increase the amount of people that come
to court, even though it's a significant majority, there are lots of things that we
can do.
One of the things that often happen is that when somebody doesn't come to court,
there are really three kind of circumstances.
Either they can't get to court, right?
Many of our cases are either at 26th and California, or they're
from people far flung locations like
Markham or Bridgeview or Rolling Meadows and Skokie, and people have
real issues getting to court. That's a constant issue.
I think the way the court is set up is also sometimes problematic.
You have oftentimes people who have their first court case at 26th Street,
then maybe their next court case will be at Grand & Central, then maybe their third
court case could be at Skokie, and this is the same case, and oftentimes you see
issues with that. I think you see sometimes issues with the structure as
well. The issues of warrants for some judges happens at the
beginning of the court call at 9:00.
If you've ever been to 26th and California, you know there's giant lines outside of
26th and California, and oftentimes people are just
not getting there within moments, and therefore, a warrant is issued, and that
person decides maybe they
may not come to court.
There are things that we can do actively, especially for if the city wants to get
involved budgetarily. Investing in court notification services
is a really good technique. That's something that's been
invested in in other jurisdictions, and that the county's invested in and
continue to work on that. I think improves court appearance rates.
And also thinking about matching the investments made by the Pretrial Success
Act. That was a law that was passed in the state that
helped
provide resources for people to get to court, to make sure they
stay in work, and to make sure that they are abiding by all of the court
rules. Added investment in that
program could also improve
rates.
Thank you for that. We're being told that there are over
72,000 outstanding warrants. Half of them are
criminal. 7,500 of them are for domestic-related
cases. With the current volume of these outstanding warrants,
what do you think can be done to reduce that number to ensure
clients are not missing court cases and risk further
penalties?
Like I said, active steps, and this may be something the state attorney wants to
take on or CPD wants to take on, but I think active steps ensuring
that warrants aren't happening before
they are issued. There's lots of room there.
There's a lot of space to ensure that those warrants aren't
happening. I think it's also important to note that all
warrants aren't created equal. If you have an individual, a warrant
for a minor offense, and that
warrant has existed for five or 10 years, that suggests that person hasn't
had contact with the criminal legal system.
I'm not saying that that person should just never come back, but it does maybe
suggest that the numbers aren't as horrifying as we might
believe. But I think being active about ensuringWhat can we
do to make sure people get to court? I know oftentimes people are frustrated.
People are accused of criminal offenses.
They don't want to make
it
easier for them. But I think that with a city and a county with lots of
resources, we can certainly continue to invest in ways to getting
people, making sure people come to court, whether you're talking about bus
cards, whether you're talking about
thinking about how the
geographic setup is, court system is set up, and other
endeavors.
Thank you for that. I want to move on to the Chicago Police Department who are
here with us today. We have two members of the Chicago Police Department.
My first question is
we've seen that one of the top
arrests
statistically for the Chicago Police Department is for
warrants. That is
the top arrest.
I want to ask, can you give us a rundown on the process
when a
police officer encounters somebody with an outstanding warrant,
and can you speak to how much time these
arrests typically take so that we understand how long a police
officer is off the beat dealing with an arrest as opposed to answering calls
for service in the community? Can you help us walk through that process?
Sure, and thank you. Bless morning, everybody.
My name is Roderick Watson. I am the commander and executive
sponsor for the Chicago Police Department Bureau of Patrol.
So in essence, what happens is, is that once an officer encounters
a respondent or subject who actually has a
warrant, they will first and foremost reach out
to OMC or leads to actually run that
particular individual to make sure that that demographics actually
match, as well as to see if that warrant is active.
Once they secure the respondent or subject, they
actually take them into the station, transport them into the station, and then they
start the processing for the arrest.
Now, during that time, that can, depending on the totality of the circumstances,
that can take anywhere from 30 minutes to over three hours.
And because of a lot of paperwork that are involved with that, we have to fill out
paperwork regarding stop orders and possibly case
reports, as well as other reports that may take time and
processing. And also going through the various remedies that
are attached with that particular
warrant. So that process can take over three hours, in essence.
So we have seen instances where officers have to do
overtime because they make an arrest depending on where their shift is.
That is correct. Especially if an officer near the end of their
watch actually encounters a subject that has a warrant
that can run into over three hours of overtime, possibly, or more.
And can you clarify that when an officer does make this arrest,
they're not answering calls of service for other calls of
service that are happening in the other community because they're dealing with this
arrest report?
Yes, that is correct. Once an officer is in the station and processed, then
that officer is no longer available to take or respond to any
calls for service.
Another major issue
is orders of protection, especially for individuals who have not been
served. Can you walk us through short form
notifications? What is that, and who is responsible
for serving the order of protection and updating it on
leads?
Thank you. Roderick Watson,
Commander of the Bureau Patrol, Chicago Police Department.
So a short form is actually an administrative tool in which the Chicago
Police Department utilizes to
actually notify or serve a
subject or respondent of an unserved
protective order of protection.
Now, that short form,
actually, that whole process, what happens is that the officer will
reach out to a supervisor or sergeant.
The sergeant will in turn come in and complete that short form
notifying the respondent or subject of the remedies and
everything that the actual
petitioner's information and who's involved.
And once they go through that process of notifying that individual,
then that
information is taken back to the station.
They will in turn
make those proper notifications.
And you can maybe answer that, Deputy.
Good morning. Joe Perfetti from CPD Records.
So as commander was saying, once
our division is notified that a short form has been served,
what we do is we will notify the issuing
agency that the short form has been served via a leads
message.
In addition, we will enter a record into leads
that will show the date and time that it was served and the officer that served
it. And then we will also forward a
copy of that short form notification to
the issuing agency.
So just to clarify, a short form
notification is issued when an officer encounters
an individual who has an outstanding order of protection that has not been
served.
Correct.
And you do the short form notification,
and
you give that to the sheriff's office.
Correct?
Yes. The originating agency, which is-
For them to upload it in leads
So a copy of, yeah, the short form notification is received by our
office. And yes, it's typically emailed to
us from the sergeant, and then we'll take that email, and we
will forward that short form notification to the sheriff's
office if they were the original agency.
But we also go into LEADS, and we update the record to show the date and time an
officer was served.
So can you just confirm, is there a required timeline for
when LEADS must be updated? And do we know if this
is being done in a timely manner so officers and victims have the most
up-to-date information?
So LEADS mandates that whenever you receive a message, that it is
acknowledged within 10 minutes. It doesn't necessarily mean they have to take
action within 10 minutes, but they have to acknowledge that they received that
message within 10 minutes. And then it is required that an agency
take action upon a request as soon as possible.
And if a patrol officer
encounters somebody who has been served and is seen to be in
violation of the order, is that a mandatory arrest?
And if so, how long does it typically take to process such an
arrest?
Roderick Watson, Commander of the Chicago Police Department Bureau of
Patrol. Yes, that is a mandatory arrest.
Once
that is in violation of the order of protection, an officer
will enforce that arrest. And that process
also, depending on the totality of the circumstances,
can also take from 30 minutes to over three hours.
Once again, they would take that
particular individual into the station, ensuring that that warrant
is active and that they're in violation of, and that the demographics match.
And then as they're going through processing and filling out the proper paperworks
and making sure that all those remedies are addressed, that process
can actually go extended hours.
And I just have a couple final things.
It's my understanding that officers, police officers, are being
dispatched to notifications when a respondent's
GPS has breached a protected party's
perimeter. Do we know how many calls
CPD receives annually for these types of calls?
So that we'll have to get through the chair.
I will have to get that information through the chair.
I do not have that information with me.
But pertaining to responding to
GPS, the only calls for service that we actually respond
to for GPS would be the Cindy Bishop Law
ordinance. And if the subject or respondent is in
violation of that order, meaning that they have
breached the 2,500 feet
safety zone, then they're in violation of that order of protection.
What happens is
OMC will notify Chicago police officers to go out and
investigate, and if that particular individual or subject is on
scene and in violation of that, then they will enforce the arrest.
The other
GPS monitors that may actually get activated if they're in
violation that is not under our jurisdiction, that would actually
fall under the Cook County Sheriff's Office.
Well, I'd like to thank CPD for their time.
I want to make it clear that warrants and
orders of protection are court orders. They are court orders.
This means that CPD spends a significant amount of time
enforcing Cook County court orders.
This is something I think we as a council should consider when we're discussing
response times and overtime spending, that CPD is
spending a lot of man-hours dealing with Cook County
court violations.
Mr. Chairman, I just want to say that in closing that I'd like to
thank you. I want to thank you for being such a strong advocate on this issue.
I also like to thank the advocates and survivors who provided
public comment today. Sarah Brown and your mom, Diane Brown, thank you for joining
us today. It's their strength that ignited this discussion
and will bring about true reforms.
I also like to thank the Cook County State's Attorney's Office and the public
defender for joining us today and being open and
transparent about the issues. I'd like to say that we
also invited the Cook County Sheriff's Office and the Cook County Chief Judge's
Office, both who are not here today and declined to send a
representative.
I also want to note that we also invited the Illinois State Police as well,
and they're unable to be here, but we are in close communications to getting
answers to our questions.
Finally, we asked to have this hearing in the spirit
of openness and transparency. We wanted to have an
open and transparent and honest conversation in public
about warrants, orders of protection, and electronic monitoring.
I even reached out to the Cook County Sheriff's Office and the Chief Judge's
Office, even as going so far as sending my questions in advance.
But they're not here today to answer our questions.
Finally, whether you're a sheriff, a judge, or an alderman,
you're a public servant, and you owe it to the public to not hide
information and collaborate to find solutions.
We can't solve big problems without first being open
about the issues.
The Cook County judicial system is not subject to
FOIA per state law. I think the major takeaway
from this hearing is that we cannot move forward without state law
changing to force the Cook County courts into the light.
Thank you.
Thank you, Alderwoman.
Please add Alderman Lopez and Alderwoman
Fuentes to the quorum roll call
andrecognize... Oh, I'm sorry, Felix,
I didn't see you there. Alderman Cardona as well,
and Alderwoman Rodriguez Sanchez.
And then we have a question from Alderwoman Hadden, followed by
Alderman Riley.
Thank you, Chair.
I want to thank Alderwoman Tavaris for bringing this hearing forward
and the resolution, and echo
her gratitude to the representatives
from different departments and levels of government who have joined us
today.
I appreciate the
meat of the resolution and what I'm hearing,
and just wanted to give maybe an opportunity for both the
state's attorney's office and the public defender's office to
comment on this if you're able.
From our public commenters, from hearing people's personal experiences,
and from Alderwoman Tavaris, from your line of questioning, I
understand that many people are trying to solve
a similar issue here.
And that issue is around safety, but also it seems a
lot of this is around our order of protections as well, and what that
service system looks like.
From either department, do you have anything to add on things from the
city council's perspective,
from our constituents' perspective?
Are there
reforms, changes, resources that
could improve this process from each of
your department's perspective? So, what I'm hearing is,
one, issues of orders of protection maybe not being served
appropriately,
and then
maybe questions around
bench warrants. I think, is bench warrants the right term for failures
to appear and warrants?
But especially hearing from some of our public comments around
the number of unserved warrants and unserved orders
of protection,
from your agencies, what
does that look like for you? What are recommendations maybe that you're seeing
in the service of justice, and making sure that whether
you are a
victim of crime or someone going through the justice system
pretrial, what could we be doing differently?
Go first.
Go. You can go.
Oh.
Thank you so much, Alder. It's funny, there's a county
hearing going on right now on this very topic about
service of orders of protections, and I know a couple commissioners are
texting furiously because they want those same answers.
I think from our perspective, we certainly want our clients to be aware if
there are orders of protection, and if those aren't served, then certainly that
could put our clients in a bad place down the
line. I think from our perspective at the public defender's office, we are
interested in thinking about solutions that can reduce the amount of
folks that don't come to court. And certainly, there's going to be a cohort of
people that may just choose not to.
I don't think that's the full group of people, and I think that there are reforms
that we can make. I believe that there are services that we can put in place,
continue to put in place, to ensure that people have the ability to get
to court. The fact that we have a courthouse, quite frankly, that is at
26th and California, and we have this large, sprawling city
and county, I think has an impact on court
appearance rates. So, I think the city and county do have the opportunity to
work together to reduce the amount of warrants that
are issued, and certainly, I think that the county is taking the issue of the
service of warrants really seriously. It's a complicated issue.
They're the big, large criminal legal system with lots of different
stakeholders, but I think there may be some other solutions that folks are talking
about.
Yvette Loizon, State's Attorney's office. Thank you for your question.
I agree with Public Defender Mitchell, and we need
better mechanisms for getting people into court.
I think electronic notification is something that the county board
is talking about, particularly with respect to orders of
protection as another layer of notifying people that they
may have
this issue out there if personal service
has not been successful. And
if that is a mechanism that will help people get into court so that
they can be properly served with an order of protection, the State's Attorney's
Office is certainly supportive of that.
With respect to bench warrants, warrants that are
issued,
that's a
difficult problem to unknot. One thing that the
State's Attorney's office has
repeatedly advocated for in that
space is that when an individual
is on pretrial release, particularly on electronic
monitoring,
and there is a serious violation of electronic monitoring, such
as a bracelet being cut off,
or batteries being allowed to run out, or some other
notification that that individual is
seriously non-compliant,
at this time, there is not an effective
mechanism for law enforcement to be directly
notified that they need to open up an investigation
on whether or not that person has escaped.
And so what we're left with is pretrial services
providing notification to the State's Attorney's Office for us
to bring a petition before the court...
seeking a sanction of pretrial conditions.
It's been the state's attorney's position that that gap in
notification when there has been a serious
violation on electronic monitoring
is problematic. It's
an issue that we have addressed with our partners, and
the chief judge's office, along with all of the other Cook County
partners, are working diligently to continue to discuss
that issue and figure out ways to
overcome it. But so far, there's a gap there
that we have concerns about.
And then just to follow up for that question of the gap,
you mentioned the parties working on it.
Is this something that at county government
legislatively it can be corrected or addressed?
Or is this
something that has to go to the state?
I think that it's probably largely an issue
of county policy and process getting formalized
and shored up in a way that all county partners are
aware of where responsibility lies
to plug that gap.
One of the issues is that the individuals who work for the pretrial services
department are not sworn law enforcement.
And so, their ability to
investigate is just naturally limited for that
reason. So again, this is an issue that everyone in county
government is aware of. We have been discussing it, and
Judge Beach has taken significant strides in making sure that
notifications to the court occur much more
rapidly, and he's done that with the support of all county partners,
including the public defenders. We are working together to solve that
problem.
And from the public defender's office, I guess around this issue,
is this also
your opinion?
Yeah. Thank you. Charlene Grace, deputy public defender for policy at the Cook
County Public Defender's Office.
As Yvette said, there is a new notification
process to the court so that the court can respond to alleged
violations, and I think we would respectfully disagree with the idea
that there should always be a law enforcement response, right?
I think one thing that's important when we're talking about violations of
electronic monitoring, right? It's important to distinguish when a violation of
electronic monitoring constitutes a crime that requires a law enforcement
response, such as
we
heard from CPD about the Cindy Bischoff alerts earlier.
Those are violations that constitute a new criminal
offense, and law enforcement responds to those.
But in many other cases, what we're talking about is a violation of a court order,
and our court system, our state law, and sort of the basic
parameters of due process mean that when a court order is violated like that, we
take that back to the court, and the judge then figures out the nature of the
violation, whether it was willful, what actually happened, and what the court's
response is going to be to that violation.
Thank you both. And, again, thank you, Chair and Alderman Tabares.
Yeah. Thank you, Alderman Hadden.
Before we get to Alderman Riley's question, are there any other
committee members that wish to speak? Alderman Martin.
Vasquez. Anyone else?
And let the
roll call quorum
reflect the presence of Alderman Curtis.
What I'm going to do now is briefly recess this
meeting for a period of not to exceed, let's say, two minutes,
upon which this meeting will reconvene, and we will continue with the
speakers in order of their requests.
In the interim, I'm going to establish quorum for the
11:30 meeting and then recess that one so we can finish the business of
this one. Okay, so this meeting stands in recess for a period of two minutes.
The 11:30 meeting of the Committee on Public Safety is
hereby called to order, and we will establish a roll. Alderman Yancy.
Alderman Chico.
Alderman Gutierrez.
Alderman Lopez. He's here.
Okay. Alderman Curtis.
Alderwoman Tabares.
Alderman Cincho Lopez. Alderwoman Fuentes.
Alderman Taliaferro. Alderman Sposato.
Alderman Vasquez. Alderman Knutson.
Alderman Gardner.
Alderwoman Manah Hoppenworth. Alderwoman Hadden.
Alderwoman Silverstein.
Okay, a quorum being present, and additional public
testimony will be taken. If your name was not called at the 10:00 meeting, you are
still in the lottery for the 11:30, but we will get to that upon
reconvening. This meeting is recessed until the call of the chair.
And the
10:00 meeting is reconvened.
Sorry, Ray.
Okay. Alderman Riley.
Thank you, Chairman. And I also want to thank Alderwoman
Tabares for bringing this hearing together today and
certainly for you hosting it, Chairman.
I wasn't going to speak today, but I
actually made the mistake of reading all of the
statements that were printed and distributed to members of
committee from the various participants on the panel.
And when reviewing the public defender's submission,
there was some material there that was not covered during testimony.
And,
I'll be honest, it
wasConcerning some of the language that
was used in the written testimony.
And some of the testimony, I think you could find it, Chairman, on
what's to be page three
of the public defender's submission.
The header is, "Individuals accused of minor offenses who go on to be accused
of horrible things are the exception to the rule."
And I certainly agree with that statement, but
some of the language that follows that headline, I need
to
bring to light.
There's a statement here that says, "At the same time, in the majority of these
tragic cases, we are talking about individuals who were initially charged with
something like retail theft or trespassing,
then accused of something far more serious."
And
while certainly there are plenty of cases where that is the case,
it's frustrating to me, having read on my way to work this morning
an update from CWB,
which covers all sorts of violent crime across the city,
and especially in our public transit system.
I read about one Nicholas Percastegui,
who was charged with sexually assaulting women aboard an Orange Line
train.
He was already on electronic monitoring for two previous pending CTA sex
offense cases and had been explicitly ordered to stay off
transit.
In this particular case, we also have learned CPD is actually
investigating two more
alleged
sexual incidents and one involving a 15-year-old girl
on a CTA train.
Again, one could argue that's an outlier, but it's not.
We certainly understood what happened to Chicago police officer John
Bartholomew
and his partner
not so long ago back in April.
That was not a
shoplifter who suddenly acted out
unpredictably.
Someone with seven felonies.
Certainly, the CTA Blue Line arson attack
on a young woman,
that offender
had many, many, many, many dozens
of prior offenses.
Serial assault of women in the Loop in December of
2025,
same story.
And to make all of this worse, it's
a concern to me that our brand-new chief judge, who I wish
well, Judge Charles Beach,
has revealed that approximately 20%
of the over 3,000 total participants on electronic monitoring are
actively facing violent felony charges.
And to give you a snapshot,
over 170 individuals are charged with aggravated battery, over 100 are
charged with criminal sexual assault,
21 charged with murder,
and 13 with attempted murder,
and subcategories go on and on and on.
And I would say that probably the most disturbing statistic that I will
repeat here today is when the chief judge
reported to us that roughly 8% of the program's total participants are
currently classified as AWOL.
And an even worse statistic,
32% of those missing individuals are currently facing
underlying violent
criminal charges.
So we are not talking about shoplifters,
and we are not talking about people jumping the
turnstile at a CTA station.
And I think, among other reasons, that's why we're here
today. And so again, these were not
statements that came up during oral testimony.
But the fact that they were submitted for the record in writing
requires me to
add a little bit more context here.
And again, I respect the work of our public
defenders. Theirs is an important role in our judicial system.
And oftentimes they are charged with
defending those who don't have the resources to defend themselves.
And everyone is entitled to a fair trial, and I also believe on the presumption of
innocence until proven guilty.
However, we have far too many individuals who are on this
program
who have already demonstrated a proclivity to commit violent crimes
or are currently accused of committing multiple violent
crimes on multiple occasions. Yet inexplicably, they are
still allowed to be on an electronic monitoring device.
And I would argue there is a reason why the Cook County Sheriff's Office decided
that they could no longer properly administer this program.
It's because of cases like this.
And the worst part is when these folks go AWOL,
what message does that send to their victims
or their future victims?
And so, again, I also want to applaud
the work of our Cook County state's attorney
and her team
for fighting much harder during these
pretrial
conferences to ensure we have fewer of these folks in circulation.
But I can tell you this. This individual we're hearing about
doing all these sexual assaults on the CTA Orange and Pink
Lines repeatedly while on an ankle
monitor,
these things here underscore the reason why
we need immediate reform. And I can tell you this.
Those crimes couldn't be committed were that manSitting
in Cook County Jail.
So, again, I think that this is just one more reason
that the state legislature needs to revisit the SAFE-T Act.
Certainly I'm not advocating for us to incarcerate
nonviolent individuals at Cook County Jail.
That shouldn't be the practice.
But we have far too many examples
of individuals recommitting the same crimes when they should
be detained, and instead are out released to our
streets and our public transit systems wearing ankle monitors
that no one's really keeping an eye on.
So again, Chairman, thank you for having this committee hearing today, and thank
you, Alderman Tavares, for pushing this to a head. Thank you, Chairman.
Thank you, Alderman Riley. And please add Alderman Moore to the attendance roll
call.
And Chair, I'm just tapping in as well. This is Alderman Knudsen.
Yeah, Alderman Knudsen, you were authorized under a previous Rule
59 motion to allow your participation.
So you are now acknowledging, let the record so reflect, you're on board.
Before we proceed,
I want to thank the public defender, Public Defender Mitchell, for
his attendance. He does have another hearing on the county side
of the building that he needs to attend.
So sir, do you have a brief closing statement before you depart?
No, thank you. I'd love to talk to the aldermen about our report,
and talk through some of the issues that we see at the
office. But thank you so much for having me.
Thank you. Alderman Martin.
Thank you, Chairman.
Thank you again, Alderwoman Tavares, for flagging this
important issue that's definitely worthy of conversation.
And would note, Chair, I know that historically we kind of are operating in a
siloed fashion, as evidenced by our public defender
leaving for this other hearing. I think it might be worthwhile to explore a
joint hearing such that members of city council and
the county board could jointly conduct hearings, because
there's obviously overlap between our two jurisdictions.
A lot of members of the public, it's lost on them, the distinction between
our bodies and our responsibilities.
They view government as a single entity, especially at the more local
level. And so would encourage consideration on that in the
future, especially around issues like this that do involve both entities.
One question I wanted to start with was around
Judge Beach. My understanding is that he's implemented a
policy since taking over as chief judge whereby the
sheriff's office can undertake an expedited
execution of search warrants. Obviously, it's
not a perfect process. We're talking about improvements that are underway,
conversations that are happening.
I was wondering if one or both of the representatives in the box can
speak to that change in policy that Chief Judge Beach
has helped usher in since he took the leadership reins.
Yvette Louison from the State's Attorney's Office.
I think that that
particular program for expediting search
warrants
is something that the sheriff's department is still working on.
Unfortunately, I do not have a lot of information to
share on what that program currently looks like.
At a future time, we would be happy to discuss it, but we are
not sufficiently informed to have that conversation today.
Understood. Go ahead.
Hi, everyone. Charolyn Grace from the Cook County Public Defender's Office.
Unfortunately, I'm in a similar position.
The warrants are entered in LEADS, which is a law enforcement database that our
office doesn't even have access to.
So we'd need, I think, other parties here to answer those questions.
Understood. I was wondering if one or both of you can speak to the
piece around how notification of law enforcement occurs in
situations where there is a potentially
significant violation of electronic monitoring.
Yvette Louison, Cook County State's Attorney's Office.
At this time, unfortunately, we cannot speak to
that. That is up to
the Pre-Trial Services Department to make that
notification. And to the best of my knowledge, there is
not currently a written policy or process that I am aware
of that specifically designates the parameters upon which they would
do that, but that's certainly a question for them.
In terms of
an individual who violates conditions of
electronic monitoring where the State's Attorney's Office has been asked
to present a petition for sanctions before the court,
we do that. On those occasions, judges may
issue a warrant for failure to appear at that time.
Once that warrant is issued, like every other bench warrant, it
is entered into the LEADS system that law enforcement has
access to, and that would be the process for alert in
that set of circumstances.
So it's possible that what Chief Judge
Beach's office has in
place right now or is working on could speak to some of those
notification issues of speeding up the timeline whereby
the sheriff's office and/or CPD is notified?
With respect to violations of electronic
monitoring that law enforcement should be notified of,
yes. With respect to warrants that are issued
for failure to appear subsequent to a petition being
filed,
the process is that that is entered into LEADS, and that
would not be a point in the process
where pretrial services would be involved.
Understood.
When it does get entered into LEADS,
how does it work in terms of
whether it's CPD or the sheriff's office,
that someone is
ordered or directed in some
way to be dispatched to effectuate
that warrant?
I'm going to defer to CPD on their processes,
but to the best of my knowledge as a prosecutor,
the entry into LEADS is an alert for law enforcement, is
not a mechanism for dispatch.
Does the sheriff's office have a role to play in that?
The sheriff's office has access to LEADS, like all law enforcement
entities do.
But again, they are not receiving a dispatch notification through
LEADS. They are receiving an alert that a warrant
has been entered.
Do you think, and maybe this is part of what is ongoing
in conversations across departments at the county level,
should there be a formal
directive for someone in law enforcement, some
entity to effectuate that, as opposed to a notification that
someone could be detained if someone from law enforcement comes across them?
I think in a perfect world, yes. But given the
amount of warrants that ultimately are issued, just not in Cook
County but across the state, I think that would be incredibly
difficult to effectuate.
Could we do requests through the chair for our county
representatives, Chairman? Or would you prefer just that we offline those
conversations? I want to be respectful of their responsibilities vis-a-vis
ours.
Yeah, no. We'll entertain all inquiries for through the chair requests, and I've
been told by our county partners they expect them, and they will respond to them in
good faith promptly.
Okay. Well, I would kindly ask through the chair if the State's Attorney's
Office and the Public Defender's Office as well
could elaborate on that point, the challenges
associated with something that involves a sort of directive
to law enforcement at some level of government to effectuate those warrants.
I think when we're talking about certain individuals who are alleged to have
committed serious crimes,
and also problematic situations associated with
their conditions of electronic monitoring not being complied with, it would be good
to know what those chief hurdles are as both the county and the
city look to overcome them.
With
regard to pretrial services,
is it your understanding that there is no policy that exists
in terms of how notification occurs if there's a violation of
conditions of electronic monitoring, or it's just that both of your offices are
unaware whether it exists, but it's possible that it does?
I'm Charla Grace with the Cook County Public Defender's Office.
Pretrial Services is a division under the office of the chief
judge. But as Ms. Lauzon
mentioned, as you mentioned, Alderman, there is absolutely a
notification process that Pretrial Services uses to
bring alleged violations in front of the court and to the attention of
the state's attorney, the judge in that case, public defender's office, or other
counsel who's appointed to that case.
And there has been an increase or a
speeding up of that notification process under the policy that the chief
judge's office announced in January.
We're not responsible for administering that policy.
We're sort of responding once those notifications come into court as our
offices. But it is the case now that those concerns about
major violations, they're heard now every day of the week, including
weekends and court holidays. So previously, they were only heard on business
days. So I did want to make sure that the body's aware of that.
There have been changes made, and those notifications and alerts are
coming in more quickly.
And that is
something that the entire court system has adjusted to, to accommodate that change.
Okay. My last question-- Oh, were you about to say something?
Oh, I was just going to say that we are certainly all aware of the policies that
are in place for presenting violations to the
court, and I agree
with my colleague that there is policy in place with specific
timelines for bringing cases into court.
With respect to any policy regarding notification of law
enforcement upon a significant violation of electronic
monitoring,
I am not aware of that policy. That does not mean it doesn't exist, because
to Ms. Grace's point, that would be an internal
policy within the Office of Chief Judge and the Pretrial Services
Department that we would not necessarily be privy to.
But I am not aware of that policy.
I see. Go ahead.
Yeah. If it's helpful, I would like to make sure everyone is
keeping in mind that there are different forms of electronic monitoring that the
county is administering. So right now, when we're talking about pretrial
services and no direct notification to law enforcement, we're talking about
violations of program rules or court orders that don't constitute a new criminal
offense. I do think it's really important, and the Chicago Police Department
representative spoke to it earlier, that when we are talking about
domestic violence cases or the Cindy Bischof notifications,
a violation of an exclusion zone, that is also a violation of a term of electronic
monitoring. There are direct and immediate notifications to law
enforcement when those violations are occurring because they constitute a new
criminal offense on their own.
I would agree with that, although I am not clear that there are necessarily
direct notifications to law enforcement in the event that
an individual has tampered with or otherwise removed
their electronic monitoring bracelet, which is another
scenario that could constitute an
additional crime.
That is the
area of concern that the State's Attorney's office has
addressed consistently over the last several months, and one thing
that the State's Attorney herself has articulated
publicly. Our source of concern,
with respect to law enforcement
being involved, is not necessarily related to scenarios where
a person is committing what I'm going to characterize as a routine
violation of electronic monitoring.
They were supposed to be home at 5:00, they're home at 5:30.
We're talking about scenarios where the actual monitoring
device has either been tampered with or removed so
that that person is no longer tracked.
In that set of circumstances, there is a potential for an
additional criminal charge to be filed there.
I am not aware of the process for notifying law enforcement
in those circumstances. However, in agreement with Ms.
Grace, when that happens, there are policies that have been
implemented by Judge Beach to ensure that personnel in
the pretrial services department is bringing that
information to the court within a specific
timeframe, as she said, 24 hours during the week, 48 hours
on the weekend, so that the court is then made aware
that there has been some sort of significant
violation involving tampering or removal of an
electronic monitoring device. And that is the discrete set of
circumstances that I'm referring to when I articulate the
concern about there being a potential gap there.
Understood. That's helpful. Last quick question.
In terms of timelines, is there anything that either of you can say
publicly in terms of approximate dates by which
these conversations,
negotiations around new policy are likely to conclude so that we
know when to check back in with you all to see
how that looks in practice?
I think that would be a question for the chief judge's office.
So they're leading conversations, even though hopefully your respective
departments are participating in them.
We have regular meetings on the topic of electronic monitoring
and how we manage non-compliance
issues.
With the chief judge's office?
Correct. With all county partners.
Understood. Okay, no further questions. Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, Alderman Martin. Alderman Vasquez.
Thank you very much, Chairman, and I want to also thank colleague Alderwoman
Tavares for convening this.
I think for me, it's been pretty challenging the last number of months because
Officer Bartholomew was murdered in our ward.
And I think in looking at some of the history of
the individual allegedly who committed it,
it appeared very clear-cut in a way that kind of makes it challenging
to kind of understand it. So I think some of the questions I had really were more
towards the office of the chief judge.
I think both of you all departments, right?
The office or offices, I should say, are doing what you need to do for your
clients or for prosecution. But the fact that we're not
having a better understanding as far as the office of the judge and
how determinations are being made, that seems to be more of
a challenge.
I appreciate, like we all do in kind of government, that
you write policy, you set expectations, and life is life.
Some things are not going to fall as neatly into what's been written, which is
where we need the office of the judge to kind of like weigh in more.
And so I guess, I don't know who could answer this, but I'm wondering if
there's any precedent set where the office of the chief judge does come
before a body to kind of testify on things.
Yvette Lozon, State's Attorney's Office.
The office of the chief judge routinely appears before the Cook County Board on
various issues. That's the only answer I
am fit to provide for you. I don't have
any further information on that.
Sure, yeah.
I think
then I would add a plus one to Alderman Warren's suggestion that both the
governmental bodies kind of convene a joint hearing to be able to have these
conversations because I think
it's somewhat simpler to talk about
anecdotes and incidents and one case or another as
opposed to the larger policy conversations we're having and the larger
data sets, right? So I think, one, I'd ask that,
but this is more of a through the chair for all parties involved.
Again, we see the stories, we respond to those,
but we
have less access, we have less inclination to look at all the data sets.
So are there different portals related to how cases pan out,
how many of the individuals who are on electronic monitoring, what it looks like as
far as prior cases? Also, orders of
protection in general. We've had instances where we had to actually have a judge
move from domestic over to traffic because they were
what I would call light on some of the order of protection enforcement.
But what would be the tools, the portals, information sets that
we all as council members and the public can avail ourselves so that
when we're hearing about one case or another, we're also looking at the larger
numbers of what we're talking about?
The
Cook County government does have a data dashboard that covers a lot
of the Cook County Criminal Court information.
So it has information on the cases that are charged, what kinds of cases,
the numbers,
the pretrial outcomes, people who are released, detained,
the information about the people in Cook County Jail, what their charges
are, how long they stay there, and then also disposition information on
cases.
So
that's all available on the public Cook County dashboard.
And then there's also additional information that's released.
Some of the things
of interest to this body are that you mentioned, Alderman, through the office of
the chief judge.
On the chief judge's website, there's a statistics page that has data
dashboards about both pretrial outcomes, broken down by different
kinds of cases, misdemeanors, domestic cases, felony
cases, and also
demographic information, charge information
about the people under the office of the chief judge
electronic monitoring. And I
just want to add, I think one of the questions about the judiciary,
I do think it's also made more complicated by the fact that our judges are
employees of the State of Illinois.
It's the Cook County Circuit Court, but it's the State of Illinois
courts.
Yep.
And to that end, the Illinois Supreme Court actually announced a new
transparency policy last week in which they will be
collecting and publishing more information, and that's a
statewide policy that the court has issued.
Because again, our judges are employees of the State of Illinois, and they
are, in many cases, independently elected officials as well.
So, there are many different kinds of
potential
policies or levels of policymaking that are going to affect the kinds of
policy we see.
Yeah, I appreciate the context. I think
about two audiences, right? One, our city council in general.
We have folks who it's their first term, folks in second term, who
aren't necessarily aware of all the different contexts available.
And so if we have a challenge, imagine the public.
So,
I think if there were anything you could provide to the chair that is a 101
or here's a toolkit you all should be looking at, here's specific reports to be
pulling, that might be helpful in providing context.
I think
I'm always interested to make sure we're able to amplify that information so that
the public has a better understanding.
Because no disrespect to the Fourth Estate, but
the incentive for news and media isn't always information,
sometimes just views and clicks and keeping people responding, and so that
leads to the most salacious story.
So getting all that information would be helpful so that we can then share with our
constituents to have more fulsome and nuanced conversations about this, so we
can continue making improvements while making sure people aren't just
responding reflexively without the further context.
So that'd be my main question, and then we'd follow up from that.
So thank you for that, and thank you, Chairman.
Thank you, Alderman Vasquez. Alderman Fuentes.
Thank you, Chairman. I have some additional questions on the
Pretrial Fairness Act, as well as electronic monitoring.
The Pretrial Fairness Act retains a lot of discretion.
We all know that for prosecutors, and relies on prosecutors to make judgment
calls about which cases should have detention
or not.
Basically, to identify which cases raises concerns around public
safety. The State's Attorney's Office mandates seeking detention in
many of these cases, from what we have witnessed, eliminating
individual attorney discretion based on facts of the case.
Doesn't that make it a bit harder for judges to know when a
prosecutor actually thinks there's a safety concern versus when
they're just following policy?
Thank you for your question. Yvette Louison from the Cook County State's Attorney's
Office. My answer to that question would be no,
and the reason why is because the
state's attorney who is presenting information seeking
detention on a case is presenting a
myriad of different facts, circumstances,
information, et cetera, to a judge.
Our goal is to make sure when a judge is making a
detention decision on a case that involves a
serious act of violence, that that judge is
getting a comprehensive view of all of the information
that we have available to us, so that that judge can
make the decision that the Pretrial Fairness Act requires him
or her to make as to whether or not the person in question is a
danger or a flight risk.
Our policies on seeking detention also
permit our ASAs to converse and discuss with
a supervisor and seek supervisory approval in the event that they
believe that there are facts and circumstances in front of them that would
not warrant seeking detention under a
particular set of circumstances.
There are some crimes where the conduct is
particularly concerning to the community.
For example, one of the aspects of our policy
requires our ASAs to seek detention in circumstances where a
person has committed a violent crime on the
CTA or on public transit.
In that set of circumstances, a person who is committing those
types of crimes,
we believe a judge should be presented with all of that information
to make that decision on detention.
But ultimately, the decision on detention pursuant to the
Pretrial Fairness Act rests with the judiciary, and
it is our responsibility as prosecutors to make sure that the judge
has the information that they need to make an appropriate decision.
ConverselyThe public defender's office, or whatever
attorney is representing that individual, also has an
opportunity to review the materials that we are presenting to the
judge and present the opposite side of that coin.
So those policies ensure that when there are
cases involving violent crimes, we are
presenting our case, seeking to meet our burden of proof, and giving the
judiciary the opportunity to do what the
Pretrial Fairness Act requires them to do, which is to make a
decision based on the facts and circumstances before them.
Thank you for the response. The State Attorney Burke has
said under the office of the chief judge that electronic
monitoring, if someone violates it, that they cannot be
arrested, and she has said that on the record.
But in fact, the court can issue warrants in response to
violations,
and the police and sheriff can take someone into custody according to
those warrants. In addition, Chief Judge Beach has implemented a policy with the
sheriff for expedited execution of warrants.
Can you explain why your office in particular continues to make these
assertions that if there's a violation of electronic monitoring, that they cannot
be arrested?
I would need context for when that statement was
made by the state's attorney. My guess is that there is some other
information surrounding it. What I will say is
that the concern that the state's attorney has repeatedly
articulated is that if a individual on
electronic monitoring commits a serious violation
of electronic monitoring, which I'm going to characterize as
either tampering with the electronic monitoring bracelet,
removing the electronic monitoring bracelet, or taking some
other action that does not permit monitoring any
longer, that because the pretrial service
personnel is not sworn law
enforcement, they don't have an ability at that
time to investigate and take additional
action as law enforcement would otherwise have,
if they were sworn personnel. So, for example, when electronic
monitoring was being governed by the sheriff's department,
sheriff's department officers are sworn law
enforcement personnel,
and they have additional capabilities to conduct investigations
and
put themselves in a position where they could potentially go out and
look for a person who has absconded and make an arrest.
Pretrial services officers do not have that same capability.
Their capability is doing what they're doing, which
is
not to ensure that warrants are being
expedited in the sense that they are being executed or
someone is out looking for that person.
Pretrial services does not have the ability to do that.
When a warrant is issued and put into leads, there is nothing
expedited about that process other than pretrial
services is taking the necessary steps to present
information through the state's attorney's office to the
court at a more rapid pace to ensure that we are
presenting information of a major violation to the court.
At that time, if the individual is not in custody, the court
can make a decision as to whether or not they're going to issue a warrant.
Once that warrant is issued, that warrant then gets entered into the
leads system so that law enforcement has an alert
that that warrant is in the lead system.
However, that does not mean that that warrant is in some sort
of expedited state where it will be served
rapidly or quickly or anyone is being
designated to go execute that warrant.
That is not happening. What's happening in an expedited
fashion is that pretrial services is ensuring that
they notify the state's attorney's office to present
information to the court in an expedited fashion,
24 hours during the week, 48 hours on the weekend.
Effectuating an arrest from that information is
not something that's being expedited.
That is treated the way all warrants are
treated for failure to appear, insofar as a judge will
issue the warrant and the warrant will be entered into the leads system.
Thank you. I appreciate that. While you're here, your
office has refused to bring charges to ICE agents who have shot,
killed, and assaulted individuals in Cook County, claiming that law
enforcement must first investigate and then refer those cases
to your office. Have you spoken to the state's attorney in Minneapolis
to discuss their approach, and have you all considered
utilizing their process as a model for what we can do
here in Cook County?
The assertion that the state's attorney's office has refused to charge ICE
agents who have committed crimes is not a correct assertion.
Pursuant to Illinois Supreme Court case law,
which was affirmed and ruled upon by Judge Reddick
when she considered the petition for a special
prosecutor, the Cook County State's Attorney's Office and any
state's attorney's office in the state of Illinois has
significant restrictions put on our ability
to investigate crime.
We are not primary investigators of crime in any set of
circumstances, even when it involves misconduct by
federal agents. That is the responsibility of law enforcement.
Once law enforcement has investigated the crime, they can come to
our office and seek investigative support,
and they can also ask us to review a case for
charging. If a case is presented to us
regarding
allegations of criminal conduct by ICE
enforcement agents, we will review that case and make the same
decisions that we make... regularly every day
on whether or not there is sufficient evidence to charge.
That is the process that is in place in
Illinois, and we are following the law on that process.
With respect to what they are doing in other states, I am not
familiar with the restrictions that may or may not be put on
prosecutors in the state of Minnesota, but I am
familiar with the restrictions that have been articulated by our
Illinois Supreme Court.
And so we are following the process that has
been made available to us under the law.
Has the state's attorney asked the Chicago Police Department, Illinois State
Police, or even the sheriff's office to investigate these cases?
At this time, I'm aware that there are,
at least, a law enforcement
investigation being conducted by the Illinois State Police
that has been made public.
We are not at liberty to comment on open investigations
any further than that.
Last question, Chairman. The state's attorney's office has an investigative unit,
and it employs former law enforcement.
Can that unit conduct preliminary investigations?
They cannot conduct investigations of
uncharged crime.
Generally, what the Cook County State's Attorney's Office investigative
unit does
is
work to help support
investigations when a case has been charged.
So if felony charges are
approved and we have made a determination that we are
charging the case, and there is
additional investigative steps that need to be taken on that
case, that is an opportunity for the Cook County State's Attorney's
Office's investigators to get involved.
The Cook County State's Attorney's Office investigators are not the
primary investigators of criminal conduct.
That is not their role, and as I said before, the Illinois Supreme
Court has articulated significant
limitations on the ability of prosecutors' offices
to conduct primary investigations.
So just so I understand,
we are watching ICE agents come to the state of Illinois,
nationally televised. We have ICE agents who are gunning people
down, assaulting them, running them over with vehicles,
hospitalizing some individuals, and in some cases,
we lose lives at the hands of ICE agents.
State's attorney's office cannot do anything unless police
investigate.
The primary investigators in those circumstances have to be
law enforcement pursuant to Illinois Supreme Court precedent.
Yes.
Thank you.
Okay.
Thank you, Chairman.
Yeah, and
I would ask the members of the committee, from this point forward, stay on
topic. ICE is not a topic of this
hearing.
We have a specific resolution that was
before us to authorize this hearing, and I would ask that
we just respect that and stay on topic.
Alderwoman Mendona Hopkenwirth.
Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, Alderwoman Tavares, for bringing this
resolution forward and this hearing,
because it does point to many
gaps in our systems. I'm
interested in hopefully having more conversations about our
electronic monitoring system. Is it technology that
we need to--
It is a form of incarceration in a way, and we need to
understand where those gaps are when there are
supposed violations of batteries run low,
or
if it's broken, how
do we move forward from that in a way that, as
you mentioned, does not call on law enforcement first?
And then I appreciate the conversation around
data and transparency. I think that is something that we as a
council should always be asking for.
I do
have a question about the
treatment and diversion.
And
of course, we want to be in a place where we are
proactively addressing through causes, and so
we do not come to this place.
My question is, the men who started the fires that led to the
deaths of the firefighters both had significant
substance abuse, mental health, and housing needs, and they were charged
with nonviolent, low-level offenses that didn't
indicate any current risk of violence.
Would you agree that it is in the
interest of public safety to use their entry into the
criminal justice system as a path to getting assistance rather
than seeking maximum punishment?
Eva Lozano, Cook County State's Attorney's Office.
Ma'am, I don't have any information at my disposal about
those cases, and so I'm sorry I'm unable
to comment.
And then is it true that your office has
charged a homeless man who started a fire with felony
murder after a firefighter tragically fell to his death when
responding? And do you believe a person in crisis who starts a
fire that eventually leads to someone's death should be culpable as someone
who's intentionally killing another person?
Again, ma'am, I don't have sufficient information at this time to address those
issues.
Regarding police, your office is now allowing Chicago
police officers to file felony gun possession charges without
subjecting them to screening by felony review.
And felony review exists specifically because of the long history of police
violence in Chicago. Your office is also requiring your
attorneys to request detention in many types of
gun possession cases, regardless of the facts of the specific case or the history
of the individual. And this essentially eliminates any
critical scrutiny of cases before someone is jailed.
Again, I normally don't do this, but this is inappropriate.
This is not a grilling of the state's attorney's office.
This is not a budget hearing, okay?
So unless your question is germane to the resolution before
us, which as Alderman Tabares has clearly made, involves electronic
monitoring and pretrial detention and outstanding warrants.
We're simply not going to allow this, and it's not appropriate to do so.
So I would ask the members of this committee to please respect that.
If you would like to politically attack the state's attorney's office, you have
many opportunities to do that. This hearing is not one of
them, and I won't allow it. So thank you.
Alderman Rodriguez Sanchez.
I have some questions around
some of the cases that have been mentioned
on the floor during this hearing.
So I'm going to direct it at both departments and
see what kind of information I can get.
I'm very curious about monitoring and mental
health issues. I think my colleague started asking some of those
questions.
I heard Alderman Riley speak about multiple
cases,
and when I look those over, it seems like many of those
are incidents where there was mental health issues
involved.
We were talking about these are not outliers, but the reality is
that
people who experience mental health issues are way more
likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrating
violent crime. And those are national statistics.
Nobody can refute them. That's what happens with people
with mental health issues. If there are comorbidities and there is substance abuse,
there is more likelihood that a person that is experiencing mental health
issues can
perpetrate some sort of violent crime.
But people experiencing mental health issues are 23 times more
likely
to be victims than perpetrators.
When we talk about these very tragic incidents
that have been perpetrated by people with mental health issues,
how do we go
about those issues when we
know that people are going without
services, and that there could be a
likelihood that they will become one of those
statistics? And how does electronic
monitoring operates when there is-- Is there a distinction,
or do we treat everybody the same, and not take into
account the fact that
they need assistance in order to be able to be reintegrated in society?
Go ahead.
Thank you for the question, Alderwoman.
Sharolyn Grace from the Cook County Public Defender's Office.
I can speak to your question generally, because our office does
represent the vast majority of people who are accused in the criminal
court system in Cook County. We generally can't speak about any criminal, any
individual cases.
I would just start out by agreeing.
I think
we would agree that the best
way to look at and understand public safety is through
a preventative lens. I think
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that what we would all like is to
prevent any acts of violence or harm to other people before they occur.
And that responding after the fact with prosecution is always going to
be less desirable than preventing that from happening in the first
place. And
one general thing I could say is that
it
can be challenging for people who are in
crisis to comply with very strict court
rules.
And so that is a place we can see allegations
of violation and further discussion with the court.
At the same time, sometimes people with serious
mental health needs are released awaiting trial, or they're
placed on electronic monitoring specifically because being incarcerated in the
jail exacerbates the mental health needs that they
have
through exposure to trauma, exposure to violence,
separation from maybe existing treatment in the community.
Ultimately, the vast majority of people are always coming back to our
neighborhoods. And so the question is when they come back from the neighborhoods,
if that's from jail or it's from the Illinois prison system, are they connected
to resources in the communities they're going to return to?
Are they in a position where they're better able to succeed?
So I think sometimes we see pretrial release and sometimes also
electronic monitoring because there is a connection to a service
provider in the neighborhood, or there is a
treatment that is available specifically if that person is released, and
the goal of everyone looking at that case is to try to get
that person stable.
And unfortunately, judges don't have crystal balls.
They can't predict the future. They can make the best decisions at a
particular moment with the information that's available to them.
And I think that's what we see in the vast majority of these cases
is... the information that's available, looking at what might
be possible, and certainly our office's
position is to try when we can
to address those underlying mental health or substance use needs, or
other needs that will hopefully prevent people from coming back into
contact with the police and with the criminal court
system.
Eva Tlouzan, State's Attorney's Office.
I would say that
the Pretrial Fairness Act
is significantly different than the way cash bond hearings were
conducted in the past. Those would sometimes take 30 seconds,
and a judge would be required to make a decision.
The Pretrial Fairness Act gives the state and the defense
the opportunity, again, to present a fulsome
picture to the court about all of the issues involving the
person that is being assessed for pretrial detention or
electronic monitoring or whatever the scenario is before the
court. And,
the system is not perfect, but I do think we are
in a better position to present relevant facts
and evidence to the court so that they can help make adequate
decisions.
So the Pretrial Fairness Act actually makes the
process more thorough, because
before it was a 30-second hearing, and now we spend more time
looking at what the case is and the merits and how
to route that person. Is that what I heard
you say?
Yes, I would agree with that.
Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Chair.
Thank you. Further comments and questions?
Okay. Hearing none, Alderman Tabaras to briefly close.
Statement earlier-
Okay
... Mr. Chairman.
Okay. How about a motion to adjourn, then?
Make a motion to adjourn.
Okay.
The meeting is adjourned, hearing no objection to the motion, and the
next meeting that was recessed is immediately reconvened.
And please add Alderman Yancy and Alderman Lopez
to the attendance roll call and the quorum roll call on the 11:30
meeting. Also, Alderman Napolitano as a
non-committee member who will be presenting.
We do have public te-- Alderman Silverstein, yes?
We do have.
Yeah. We have quorum established. And we do have public testimony.
What I'm going to do is everyone who submitted a witness
slip for the 10:00 meeting and was not called will be
re-entered into the drawing,
and everyone else who wanted to testify for this meeting will
also be entered, and you will have the opportunity to testify.
If your name was not called for the 10:00, you are automatically
re-entered into the drawing for one of the public testimony
spots in this meeting. So we're going to do the drawing here.
120.
Yeah.
All
right.
No, I'm going to come back.
Okay, thank you. We got at least 30 minutes.
Okay.
The first
public witness is Holton Hawkins.
Hmm?
Thank you very much-
You're on
... for the opportunity to come today.
This is my third time speaking in front of different committees within the city, so
appreciate you guys giving me the
floor for a few.
My name is Holton Hawkins, and I am the sales director for
the eastern half of the United States for Mark43, a CAD and RMS
company.
We are currently a vendor within Chicago Police Department
under CPIC, and we have received a PO from
the Chicago Park District Public Safety, Office of Public Safety,
for RMS.
We are here to really continue to talk about
the opportunity for significant overtime
savingsGiving officers time back
to, one, finish their shift on time, and two, be out in
the community working with the public and building community trust,
building excitement, building relationships, versus sitting in the station
house and writing reports.
We also are focused on helping Chicago, if given the opportunity,
if we can expand CPIC, of helping you guys address the
consent decree. The consent decree continues to be something that we
read about, continues to be a significant expense for the city, and we'd love an
opportunity to help you with that.
We've got examples of where we've helped major cities in the US
before on consent decree, Albuquerque, Seattle, Louisville
Metro, and others. So we do have some examples, and we've
been here and we've done this before.
And the last thing that I want to really focus on is the time to value.
Because we are currently a vendor, because we currently have a contract,
that can be expanded very quickly.
I know that the RMS need has been going on.
I've worked on it for multiple companies over the years.
It's something that I just don't understand why it's taking so long.
We are here. We are successful. We are growing within the city.
The Parks District funds or puts Chicago
Police Department officers in roles.
So Chicago PD will be using Mark 43 as they go
and work for the parks for overtime.
So, with that and the Ernst &
Young study that said to expand contracts out,
it doesn't make sense to us why that wouldn't happen here in the city.
You've got a major four consulting
company telling you that that's what you should do.
We've got the ability to speed line and speed up the
opportunity to negotiate. We've got the opportunity to prove ourselves over
the last seven years in CPIC that we work in the Chicago environment, and it
puts Chicago in the best position to be successful,
as we know it works in the environment,
versus buying a technology that hasn't proven itself, a la the CAD,
that's going on six years now. 40-plus million dollars spent with nothing to
show for it.
Again, I appreciate the opportunity to speak.
We'd love an opportunity to expand our footprint and-
Thank you very much, Mr. Hawkins. The next speaker is June Norfleet.
The next speaker is
Emma Corzales.
No? Okay.
The next public speaker is Elida Carazoza.
Oh, no.
Quite
ago.
Good afternoon, everyone. My name's Elida Carazoza.
I'm speaking on behalf of, in favor of Alderman
Villegas' ordinance to expand
the school zone from 1,000 feet to 2,000 feet.
I want to ask you this.
Have you walked 10 minutes in my neighborhood?
Are you able to play in your parks in Lincoln Park surrounding
Depaul University? More police presence, why is
this opposed? Do you live in our communities?
There are people in our communities who have lived there for over 40
years. That's including myself.
And what we're telling our Black and brown children is, it's okay to see young
men and young women selling drugs outside our schools.
Are we going to perpetuate this cycle of systemic
racism, insinuating that a safe community is white, or
you have to live on the north side to be able to walk the streets of your
neighborhood?
Are you a woman or man of color?
When you say you support our people, are you a person of color?
Do you live in our communities?
Increased policing in these communities, those who oppose to this ordinance do
not live in our communities. Many of them present data and statistics.
Unfortunately, again, these are individuals who do not live in our
communities, who are not part of our communities, who do not see
our struggles and our fears.
When you say overpolicing, I ask, when you live in predominantly
white communities and you call the police, they come, but in our communities,
they don't.
They're over-exhausted. They're pulled into the events and unable to
actually support our communities.
Last time, Alderwoman Roxana
Rodriguez was flaying the paper saying, "Where's the
research?" Well, I was able to pull up the
ES5 for Cameron and for Cassels.
Did you know that students on their survey only feel
21% safe walking from home to their schools or
school to their homes?
Whereas Cassels does not suffer much of what the
children in Cameron see,
where they feel 47% safe, safer
than
Cameron.
So please, I ask again. I invite you,
drive over to the vision in Lawndale, Ms.
Rodriguez, and look at these drug dealers.
Of course, walk away.
Come out and see them.Please, help us pass this
ordinance, I ask. Thank you.
The next speaker is Sandy Tran.
Sandy Tran?
Okay. The next speaker is Vincent Variola.
Good morning, Honorable Chairman Hopkins, distinguished
committee members. Thank you for allowing me to speak with you today.
My name is Vincent Variola, and I'm a resident of the 46th Ward.
Firstly, I want to acknowledge the importance of the work that you do.
The decisions that you make are difficult.
The stakes are high.
This is my favorite committee. I'm a big fan.
I'd like to offer a few reflections on the previous meeting
on June 3rd.
At that meeting, there was a big emphasis on evidence-based policymaking.
I think we all share two common goals here.
One, to protect our children. Two, to make decisions based on evidence and
data.
Some of the members
expressed their opposition to the ordinance proposed by
Alderman Viegas, and that's entirely appropriate.
Asking tough questions, demanding evidence, is an important
process of the legislative
process.
I would encourage the committee to apply that same standard,
not only to proposed changes but also to the status
quo.
So if, for example,
a member opposes the expansion from 1,000 to 2,000 feet,
that position assumes that the 1,000-foot
standard is better.
So therefore, the question is not only what evidence
supports the expansion but also what evidence supports
the 1,000 standard.
Evidence-based policymaking
requires us to evaluate both positions by the same standard.
I'd like to briefly touch upon the CPS liaison's
testimony.
Her comments seem to conflate
two very different topics. One, the
punishment of adult drug-dealing criminals, and two, the
lifelong punishment of kids that get involved with drugs.
This mischaracterization, whether it was intentional or not,
completely misunderstood the purpose of the ordinance, which, as I understand it,
to put more distance between kids and drugs.
Now, one can oppose that, and that is fine,
but we will expect you to answer the question why it is that
you think that it is better to keep kids closer to drugs.
And lastly, again, I want to
appreciate your hard work.
I hope that we can
move further to evidence-based practical solutions that make
it safer for everyone in the city. Thank you.
Thank you. The next speaker is Malcolm Weems. Mr.
Weems.
Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman,
committee. My name is Malcolm Weems.
I am the owner and operator of Techquity Partners, a local
partner of Mark43. You just heard my colleague Holton speak.
There's a little bit more frustration in my voice because I think the message that
we've been trying to get across for the last three times we've come is that the
City of Chicago, through OPSA,
is wasting about $280 million of
time in trying to get a new records management system.
They have one. There was an RFP that was conducted by
CPD, and it arrived at a winner, and that was Mark43.
They implemented the system. It works. They're using it right now.
And OPSA was created and then stopped the
expansion of the records management system and said they wanted
to go out to bid for a new records management system.
So the user department, which is the police department, is using us.
Park District's police force or security force is now
using Mark43. But the City of Chicago has, for six
years, been trying, through OPSA, and Dan Casey is their
IT person, has been trying to give this contract to
Motorola.
And so, in doing so, it has taken six years because every
time they-- Well, when they tried to do it, there was a protest that was upheld,
and it was shut down. And instead of replacing those
people that did a bad procurement, they're running the new
procurement. And that's why you keep asking for updates on a procurement, and
they won't give it to you because there's more protests.
There are problems with it. And I say all of this because even if the
city wants to get a new RMS system,
they currently have one that can save them over $40 million
a year. That's in overtime and the $4 million that you pay to
have some judge have oversight because we're non-compliant with
the consent decree. So as a person that ran the budget for the state of
Illinois, I understand that government, everybody has a lot to do.
But this is something that has become really
frustrating because for most of these people here, we're going to
pay higher fees for our Netflix, for our hotel stays, for whatever
fees that have to be raised here, and inactivity
at OPSA is costing us over $40 million
a year. So I'm here, and I'm sounding a little frustrated,
is because we have a product that works.
Even if you were to decide on a new RMS tomorrow, it would
take the City of Chicago three to four years to implement it, and that's if it
works.They got now a CAD project going on that's been going on five, almost
six years, and it doesn't work, $50 million later. Ours works.
So I beg this committee to ask some tough
questions of OPSA, particularly Dan Casey was their IT guy,
as to why they're not using something that was already procured
and they know works. Thank you very much.
Yeah, thank you, Mr. Williams. The issues you raise obviously require more than
three minutes to thoroughly discuss.
If any members of this committee seek additional information, please contact
through the chair and we'll disseminate what was already provided.
The next speaker is Yuko Etim.
Make sure they do.
Hello, and thank you for hearing me out here.
I'm just here
speaking about the school zone being expanded from 1,000 to
2,000 feet.
I live in an area that has primarily
Black and brown students. I just think by opposing this ordinance,
you're just supporting this continuous cycle, a cycle of
normalizing drug and gang culture in Black and brown communities.
There's something very surreal about watching a Safe Passage
employee walk a child across the street where a group of
like three to 10 men are standing there
selling drugs. There's people strung out on the sidewalk, and there's
just people there recruiting the students to join their gang
and to sell drugs with them. That happens every single day outside of Cameron
Elementary, and it's just very surreal to watch.
Now, I'm very sensitive to the struggle of formerly incarcerated
people, the obstacles they face on getting employment.
And it's
interesting listening to some of the arguments opposed to this
ordinance, as they're arguments I would've made when I was probably
in college and before I had my son and I actually lived in
an open air drug market. That is the
Monticello/Grand Avenue area. I don't think
drug dealers are evil people. Some of them are actually very
friendly.
Me and my wife were walking down the street about a month ago, and they came up to
us. One of the guys, he was smiling at me and he said, "You and your wife look like
you're so in love. You guys look like really nice people.
I want that in my life one day." And you can really fall in love with this romantic
idea of just every drug dealer is just trying to just
get by and make it. But in all reality, I'm here
speaking out against this continued pattern
of just
men who are just standing right by Cameron
Elementary School,
half a block away,
cat calling every woman they see,
selling drugs,
littering,
and-
Everybody else
... in conclusion, I just want to say by opposing this legislation, it's
essentially normalizing that drug culture belongs in Black and brown neighborhoods,
and I want to break that cycle. Thank you.
The next speaker
is Diane Hodges.
Three.
Finally.
So according to what's been going on in
South Shore,
I am the team leader of the South Merrill Community Garden,
and I have
advocated for the enforcement of the
drug-free zone for over 10 years. Mainly because the
area that I'm in, we've been able to see
how it has destroyed about three
generations in our community.
I feel like the West and the South Sides are
free to expose children and parents and seniors
to living in gripping fear.
And
71st and Jeffrey is basically a hub of
debauchery.
We have created a situation for decades where
safety
and unaddressed quality of life issues are
paramount in our community.
Enforcement of drug-free zones has really been on a deaf
ear in my community for about 10 years.
This increases the risk of children to
imitate or experience bad behaviors.
It undermines our schools and our houses of worship in
our area.
There's a vape store one block from O'Keefe School.
They've got three citations for selling to minors, and that
store is still open.
This has a psychological effect and impact on our
community.
Social effects, health risks, increased crime rates,
and all we've been asking is to enforce what's already
there. I'm not asking for 2,000
feet. Just enforce the 1,000. We would be
happy with that. When I look at the North Side,
Lincoln Park, Wicker Park, Rogers Park, they seem to have more of a
cohesiveness, and they work with their police
officers, and they kind of monitor this better.
So we're just asking that what's already in
place to let it be enforced and give our children an opportunity.
This is a city of criminality. It's a city of
fearWe have to learn how to coexist,
and one of those things is that to respect us
and respect these children, and respect our right
to be able to live a peaceful life. This morning,
71st and Jeffrey is alive and well with open drug
marketing. People come into our communities to buy
drugs that live in other cities. When they come to tour,
they come to our community to purchase drugs.
We would just like some assistance. Thank you.
Thank you, Ms. Hodges. Our next speaker is Sandy Tran.
No? Okay.
Two Sandys? Yeah. We have T-R-A-N for the last
name. Is she here?
No?
Okay.
Then our final two speakers are Taiwan Sims and
George Blakemore.
Taiwan.
Good evening. Well, good morning, committee. Good afternoon, whichever way.
In regards to a few matters that I'm dealing with,
one of them being the 25120-A69-301,
the 25120458201
matters, where I was under enforcement one whole year
for a trespass that was in this courtroom.
I mean, in this building.
However,
I have to relive this, and as you all speak about it, when I was
14 years old, I was taken off the street and charged with manufacture to
deliver crack cocaine.
14 years old. I was homeless in the street.
They were able to take me to jail and charge me as a AT, which mean a automatic
transfer as an adult,
because it was 1,000 feet, supposedly, from a school.
Charged with being a drug dealer, I was homeless and in need of help.
Did nothing. I stayed in jail in the Audy home at 1100 South
Hamilton for near to a year and a half
fighting this out in Skokie. But they used to take me to county, Cook
County Jail. This is when it was county-county. This is the early '90s.
They used to take me amongst grown men.
Now, trust me, I'm a dog-down fighter.
But imagine being a 14-year-old kid in a cell
with people
6'1", bigger than you, much stronger.
It's the element of it all. But here it is.
I feel like, yet again, we have this opportunity resurfacing,
where instead of seeking out the individuals who are insidious in the
neighborhood,
individuals who are doing what they're doing,
we strike out at the most vulnerable,
children who were like me, homeless, mother smoking crack.
This ordinance is necessary, but however, will it be yet another
repeat of this,
where we see more children dragged off the streets as if it was the vagrancy
law for foundational Black Americans when they were newly released
into the United States?
I want to understand this. I want to advocate for it also, because our
kids do need to be removed from this.
However, that needs to be a comprehensive way we do it,
a better way to do it.
More data-driven, if that, because that's what it seems to be linked
on, data.
Well, I'm the proof that it doesn't work and does not work, and that
opportunists, people who are out there in the streets who masquerade as law
enforcement will drag a child off the street just to see a quota
made.
And
let us be real.
Let's make this make sense
instead of the individuals who get to come in and just talk.
Our final speaker is George Blakemore.
Public safety.
You have recessed this for three times.
What's going on here?
Why would you do this?
Why would you continuously recess this
meeting?
And you have this meeting,
like right now,
you're carrying on a conversation with this lady.
There's something wrong
with this system.
I have been coming and participating in government
for 30 or 40 years. I've never seen it
so low.
So low, even though they had corruption and Burton and Daley and
all of them, but never like this.
Even though they were a Democratic
corrupt machine, but not like this.
Why would you do this?
Who are you?
Where do you come from? Who are all of you?
What's going on? Recess and say for
no quote, information only. I never heard a mess like this.
Never!
Never.
Never heard of
F-H-I-ish.Look,
recess it, recess it again, and you have them at
the same time, and you get up and do musical chairs, and you
run over here, and you run over here. I say for information only.
Burke wouldn't have nothing like this.
Oh, the Daley, even though they was terrible men, but
you all have hit the bottom of the pit.
I never, never could imagine that it could get so low.
Low down.
All of them.
Black ones, white ones, Hispanic, Asian.
At one point, it's just low down.
I've never seen this city functioning like it's functioning
today. And the reason you get away from this and you can do
this is no citizen participation.
The citizens are letting you do this.
So I shouldn't beat up on you.
You citizens deserve the government you get, and you get the government you
deserve. Look at these empty seats.
The people.
It's terrible.
It is totally a cesspool
down here.
And they all Democrat. They were Democrats when Daley was doing his thing and
Ronnie made... but not like this.
I've never seen no mess like this.
Okay,
so we will now proceed with the first item on the agenda.
It is proposed ordinance
21698, amendment of the municipal
code regarding enhanced penalties for offenses committed in
student safety zones, parks, and playgrounds.
Here to open is Alderman Villegas.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I want to thank the community
for coming down here to provide testimony as to what's
occurring, not just in my ward, but throughout the city of Chicago.
It's unfortunate that we're here as a local level
government to have to address an issue that, quite frankly, should've been dealt
with in Springfield. Despite the fact that meetings have
taken place
with members of the General Assembly around this issue and trying to figure out a
way to responsibly figure out how to close this loophole, they've been
very much unsuccessful. I thought we had a
path this year. Unfortunately, the Bears stadium took the
oxygen out of Springfield. And so here we are at a local level, trying to figure
out how to deal with this issue. Let me go back for a second.
So this is an area that has been experiencing open-air drug markets for
the last 10 years.
And when we talk about open air, we're talking about specifically around cannabis.
Now we know that selling cannabis in Chicago is illegal.
We know that you could not go out right now in front
of City Hall and sell loose cigarettes,
loose cans of beer, have shots of
hard alcohol on a corner and sell this.
We saw just last weekend on Michigan
Avenue, where you had folks that were selling fruits
and other types
of junkets
that were there selling it, and the police made them leave.
So they cleared that area up right away,
which begs the
question: what's the difference between
having an illegal stand, a fruit stand,
and selling hats versus selling illegal cannabis?
And so this is a reaction from local government trying to
figure out how to deal with an issue that, quite frankly, Springfield should've
dealt with. And so
I heard my colleagues loud and clear.
The original ordinance that I introduced
was a first step.
I want to thank my colleagues for putting forward
recommendations on what to remove from the ordinance in order to
deal with the issues that we're trying to deal with.
And so in front of you, Mr. Chairman, is a substitute
ordinance that addresses some of
the concerns that were brought forward, and then also
having some discussions with the administration as well. So, Mr.
Chairman, I would ask that the substitute ordinance be introduced and
passed so that way we can speak directly on that.
Yeah, thank you. The substitute has been distributed to all members.
Alderwoman Silverstein moves to substitute. Hearing no objections so ordered.
That is before us. Okay.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Continue.
So the substitute makes the following changes.
Narrows the scope of penalty enhancement.
The substitute removes violations of Article 2 of Chapter
7-24, Drug Paraphernalia, and Section
8-4017, Narcotics-Related Loitering, from the scope of
offenses subject to penalty enhancement.
The new penalty for first violation.
The substitute establishes a new penalty for first violation of 100 community
service hours or participation in restorative justice.
And I would remind my colleagues that under the city code, we already have
definitions of what restorative justice means, and so this would be in
line with the code that's already existing.
And then lastly, increases judicial discretion.
The substitute allows for greater judicial discretion in imposing penalties for
violations subject to this ordinance by allowing the decision-maker to
choose and impose some or all of the various enhanced penalties,
as opposed to requiring all enhanced penalties at each step.
Again, wanted to make sure that there was some flexibility.
Before you, you'll see some boards of activities that are occurring on a
daily basis, 365 days a year.
Half a block down is a school where, on a daily basis,
parents are having to dodgeThese men and women that are selling
cannabis.
And then you'll see another
board that has two gentlemen that jumped out with an
AK-47. And that's why the urgency here,
because I'm trying to get ahead of a situation where this corner, which
has proved to be very lucrative, has put the
people that are trying to live their life
in a dangerous position. And so trying to get ahead of
it.
So, Mr. Chairman,
I know that there's some
other folks that here that want to potentially ask questions or have
opinions on this.
But I can tell you that
I'm committed to making sure that we're going to put an end to
this open-air drug market.
And we've got to work together to figure out, as a body, how to go down to
Springfield and talk with them about some of the unintended consequences
that have come out of
this decriminalization of cannabis, and at least have some
progressive consequences. That's all I'm asking for.
In the city of Chicago, if you get two or three tickets
for your vehicle, you get the boot.
Here,
folks are allowed to sell cannabis, and there's no
remediation or no path that CPD can take in order to
address the issue. And so we've got to have
Springfield put forward some legislation that puts a clearer
path to dealing with this issue, because this is just
not occurring in my ward.
People have contacted us since the last meeting that this is
occurring throughout the city of Chicago.
And there's some members here in the city council that can also attest to it
because they're living with this on a daily basis.
So again, I'm not trying to lock them up and throw the key away.
I'm not. But there's a void here and, unfortunately, I'm
trying to figure out, at a local level, what lever we can pull to address this
issue so that way we're making sure that the folks have a great quality of
life, and that we're also making sure people are following the law.
That's all I'm trying to do here. So, Mr.
Chairman, thank you for those opening remarks.
I'm prepared to answer any questions, as well as Justin from the law
department is here as well.
Yeah. Questions for the sponsor from committee members.
We'll start with Alderman Taliaferro.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Alderman, is this
ordinance strictly applicable to minors, the sale
of cannabis to minors, or is this applicable to,
for example, if we do have an adult selling to another
adult in a restricted area or in
an area that
has enhanced penalties? Would it be applicable under that second
circumstance as well, or just to minors?
Justin? I'll have Justin from the law department respond, please.
Justin Nudge, Assistant Corporation Counsel, Department of Law.
Thank you for the question.
There is no distinction made here either in the
individual violating
the sections that are covered offenses here,
or the person to whom they may be selling.
There's not a distinction made.
Okay.
So there are other sections within the quasi-criminal section of the
code that do make some distinctions in those areas.
I believe,
in fact, it's come up lately, I believe,
come
forth in council's consideration of some other topics, but
not in these.
The substitute that I'm looking at,
it states, "The following enhanced penalties shall apply to violations
of Section
8-16-060," which is a
violation of
the possession and use of cannabis by minors
prohibited,
as well as sales provisions for
transfer of cannabis to minors prohibited.
So it appears that Section
8-16-060
is applicable to minors, or am I reading this wrong?
No, you're not reading that wrong.
I apologize for the-- I realize that I misunderstood your
question. What I was trying to speak to was that there was
no added layer of...
With this enhanced penalty ordinance here that we're looking at, there was
no added layer of consideration. But the underlying charges, yes,
anything that exists in those does.
So, yeah, you're absolutely correct about that, Alderman.
Great. Thank you.
Yep.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Additional questions?
Alderman Lopez.
Thank you, Chairman, and good afternoon members of the committee.
And thank you to everyone who stayed to make sure that no games were played this
week, as we saw last week on this item.
How many places would be impacted by the implementation of this law
if we keep it at 1,000?
So there was a map that was put together around
2,000 feet, which would have, in essence, covered
almost the entire city. The 1,000 feet is an area
that
is currently in existence. And you heard from a speaker
that if we just went ahead and made sure
that the
police officers would make sure
that the 1,000 feet was carried out, that we would be in a good
position. Unfortunately,
again, because of the fact of and the lack of action from Springfield, we find
ourselves in this position where police officers are having
to try to arrest
people that are selling cannabis and then, unfortunately, they're back
out on the street, and there is no progressive discipline.
So that's what we're trying to accomplish here.
And would it be fair to say that the current law basically covers
roughly half the city of Chicago, with doubling it covered the entire city of
Chicago?
I would say probably a little bit more than half of the city, Alderman.
So at present, a little more than half of the
city
would be covered under
this with regards to student safety
zones. What exactly is a student safety zone?
Is that a school?
Yes.
And is CPS here in support of this?
CPS is here, and
the 1,000 feet already currently exist, and so they're okay with
the 1,000 feet.
Can I hear from CPS?
Mr. Chairman?
In support of this.
Chairman.
Yes, please.
Good morning,
Chairman Hopkins and members of the Committee on Public Safety.
For the record, my name is Jamel Chambers.
I serve as the Executive Director of Intergovernmental Affairs for Chicago Public
Schools. Also joined by Allie Fendrick, who's our Policy Liaison in the
Department of Intergovernmental Affairs.
At the committee's previous hearing, there were several questions raised
regarding what Chicago Public Schools is doing to address substance
use and the impact of open-air drug activity near our schools.
So I appreciate the opportunity today to return and to provide additional
information about the work that CPS is undertaking to support student
safety and well-being. First, I do want to acknowledge that
Chicago Public Schools does not have jurisdiction over public streets,
sidewalks, parks, or other areas surrounding our schools.
Addressing an open drug market requires coordinated response
amongst multiple agencies and stakeholders.
And while CPS cannot independently solve these challenges, we remain
committed to working in partnership with the mayor's office, Parks,
CPD, Office of Community Safety, and other organizations to
address concerns impacting students in our school communities.
One important component I want to highlight is our Safe Passage program.
Safe Passage workers serve as additional eyes and ears in the communities before
and after school days, and often identify safety concerns affecting
students as they travel to and from school.
When concerns arise, they are elevated through our Office of Safety and Security,
which then works closely with CPD and other agencies to
assess the situation and coordinate an appropriate response.
Additionally, CPS prioritizes restorative behavioral health
approach to student substance use that focuses on prevention,
intervention, and support rather than punishment.
In 2024, CPS adopted a comprehensive student substance use
prevention and intervention policy developed in response to the state and
federal mandates, including House Bill 3924,
which requires schools to provide instruction on opioid
use and effects of fentanyl. Subsequently, CPS provides substance
use prevention curriculum across all grade levels in the district,
and more than 1,000 CPS students participated in this substance use prevention
education program between the timeframe of July 2025 and
April of this year. And teachers have the flexibility to adopt lessons to
meet their needs. So I do appreciate
the sponsor, Alderman Villegas,
for making an amendment to this bill. Stuck in Springfield, sorry.
For introducing the substitute ordinance.
I know there's more conversations to come.
We look forward to working with him, this committee, and our partners at the CD
to work to find a solution to rectify this situation.
Chairman, if I may, can we have that statement shared amongst the committee?
Yeah, certainly.
And-
We'll transcribe it. And now please add Alderman Coleman and Alderman Burnett to
the participation roll call.
Mr. Chambers has it typed, so if we could probably just get it copied if he has it
available for us.
But I guess the question is, so was that a yes or a no?
We have no opposition to the 1,000 feet
zone that already exists.
Okay.
Our only con-
So if I may then,
because your
three pages of commentary said that you work with partners.
Now,
that partnership includes Chicago
Police Department, correct?
Yes, sir.
So when the city's police department sees
an open-air drug market in a school safety zone that
is
captured by cameras of the school, do you readily turn
over the video surveillance that the school collects
to assist in identifying who those participants
in that open-air drug market or illegal activity is?
I can follow up with our Chief of Safety and Security.
I can tell you the answer is no.
Chicago Public Schools actually makes
CPD get a warrant
for this information.
Every other sister agency willingly shares
information,
but for outdoor-facing
cameras
that deal with the public way,
Chicago Public Schools refuses to voluntarily turn over
information.
So I have a problem when I hear one of the most
impacted locations say that they're going to work with us,
but doesn't.
Do we have individuals from the Park District here, Chairman?
Either chairman.
I believe we do.
I have too many chairmen here today.
We do not?
No.
Okay. No. Yeah, they were here at the previous-
That's correct
... meeting. We don't have them here today.
And if I'm understanding correctly, Park District gave a through-the-chair
response stating thatThey are
much the same, ambivalent to this?
To the 1,000? Yes. And so, Alderman Lopez, I also
requested through the chair,
the
programs and the activities that they have done thus
far in order to deal with this. And so we're still waiting for that information.
So that information has been asked, requested from myself, and it will be
provided through the chair to the committee.
So forgive me, I had to leave the last meeting.
So the Chicago Park District, which also has a policy of
allowing for Park District space to be used as
open air homeless encampments where drug activity is
very noticeable,
is not taking a position and has not provided information as requested from the
previous committee meeting?
They have indicated their intention to respond to our request, but they
have not provided the answer yet.
Okay. So we have two prongs
listed in the very first section of this who are either
unconcerned or uncooperative,
and I think
to the sponsor's credit, yes, we do need Springfield to take action.
Absolutely.
They created a monster when they legalized cannabis but didn't do
it with what we know are our real-world experiences for street sales, and how do
you
try to put the street seller out, which we knew
was never going to happen as long as you have your tax rate being double what the
price of regular marijuana is. 100% understand that,
and they should correct that. But at the same time, our own sister
agencies and partners
don't share our
need for trying to address this in our communities.
They should be ashamed of themselves, as anyone else who thinks that this is
a normal way of life.
Children going to the park trying to play a soccer game should not
get a contact high simply because people are at the other end
smoking weed like they're reenacting a Cheech and Chong video.
This isn't Get High 2.0. This is the city of Chicago.
And when you have schools that won't help you, when you have parks that won't help
you, we can't be in an island to ourselves.
So I think, yes, we need to have progressive discipline.
Yes, we need to make sure that we are going after the bad actors.
But sometimes the bad actors, Mr. Chairman, means
recognizing our own friends who act more like
frenemies when it comes to addressing these issues.
And I think that at certain point, as they come back to this body for
money, help, and support, this has to be yet another thing that we have to
ask them, just like we do with the tickets. Are you holding your weight?
Are you benefiting the city of Chicago, or are you contributing to the
cockamamie nonsense that we're all seeing in our neighborhoods that they are
helping to promulgate by turning a blind eye every
single day? Thank you.
Thank you, Alderman Lopez. I've just been informed that the Park District
representative who was scheduled to be here today is in fact in the
hospital, in the maternity ward, delivering a baby.
So I think that's probably an excuse we could all accept.
Was that Ish?
Alderman Curtis.
Thank you, Chairman. I just want to address something that
my colleague in 15 Ward was talking about,
playing in games that was played
with the last ordinance. And I do have two
questions to ask.
This will
be
the entire boundaries of the Park District school,
Park District or the school,
front, rear, back,
the entire boundaries. Nothing like
the Board of Election where we have to be
100 feet from the front door. This will be the entire
boundaries of the school, park,
or whatever it is that we're trying to protect. Correct?
And times.
Will the school or park have to be open at that same
time?
So Alderman, it would be from lot line to lot line,
and it'd be 1,000 feet if you think of east, north, west, and south.
That's correct. And then,
as it relates to the hours of operations,
I would assume that it's 24/7, but I can get further clarification
from
Justin from the law department if you need, sir.
I'm just hoping it's 24/7, but-
Yeah
... we would like to hear from Justin.
Okay.
I'm sure
Justin. So the question,
Justin, was,
as it relates to the enforcement hours, is it
24/7 when we're talking about any types of sales within
1,000 feet?
I don't believe so, but I need to actually look into that and get
back to you through the chair.
I will, while we're here together, message a colleague and see if I can get
you an answer while we're still here discussing the issue.
I am nearly certain there are time
restrictions. I don't know them off the top of my head, so let me work on getting
you an answer for that.
So Alderman, I see CPS would maybe like
to chime in, Mr. Chairman?
Right. Yes. I'm Allie Fendrick for the record. I'm with CPS.
And so the school safety zone definition technically is from 6:00 a.m.
to 7:00 p.m. on school days and then also
on buses. So when we talk about a school safety zone, it's not
24/7. So when you're talking about this, it could
beUm, after that time period, I don't think it would be
applicable.
And I just confirmed that with
one of my colleagues from Department of Law, so thank you very much for that.
Thank you. That was it, Chairman.
Thank you, Alderman.
Okay. Thank you, Alderman Curris. Further questions?
Now hearing none, we will entertain a due pass motion on the substitute
ordinance for 21698.
Moved by Alderman Lopez.
Hearing no objection,
all in favor, aye.
Opposed.
Motion carries. Thank you, Alderman Villegas.
The next item is presented by Alderman
Napolitano.
Proposed ordinance 18155, a
donation of surplus materials to the
City of Waukegan Fire Department.
Alderman Napolitano, please present.
Thank you, Chairman. I'll give you a quick synopsis of what we're trying to do, but
I appreciate this opportunity, sir.
This is
kind of a good thing that we're doing here.
This would be considered a municipal partnership.
And what we're doing is a proposed transfer of explosive storage magazines from the
Chicago Police Bomb Squad to the Waukegan Fire Department Bomb
Squad. Inter-agency partnerships are critical to the
success of public safety operations, particularly within the
bomb technical community. Collaboration between bomb squads
extends beyond operational response and is equally
important at the training level.
Given the current elevation of threat environment and the continued
concern regarding terrorist activity, maintaining strong working
relationships between regional bomb squads is essential
to ensuring pre-readiness, operational
readiness, and public safety.
The Chicago Police Department Bomb Squad works closely with the Waukegan Fire
Department Bomb Squad, which serves as a primary bomb squad for the
northern suburbs. Through our long-standing partnership, Waukegan
provides us valuable training opportunities and operational support.
In turn, the Chicago Police Bomb Squad supports major
events through the regional by providing manpower and
resources through our partnership with the Federal Bureau of Investigations.
The Chicago Police Department Bomb Squad technician, Adam Paulsen, has been
working directly with John Calabrese of the Waukegan Fire Department Bomb Squad
to coordinate this transfer. Upon approval, the Waukegan Fire
Department Bomb Squad will assume full ownership,
responsibility, liability of the explosive storage
magazines.
Here's an important part. The transfer will be completely at no cost to the
City of Chicago. The magazines will be transported by a truck
company funded by the Waukegan Fire
Department. Once transferred, they will be relocated to the Bomb
Squad range facility in Zion, Illinois.
The magazines will be primarily used for provide overflow storage
capacity for explosive materials and the items awaiting disposal
by the Waukegan Fire Department Bomb Squad.
The Chicago Police Department originally purchased replacement explosive storage
magazines using grant funding due to the increased volume of
explosive material collected and disposed of annually by the
CPD Bomb Squad. As a result, the
surplus magazines are no longer needed by the Chicago Police Department Bomb Squad.
The Waukegan Fire Department Bomb Squad will be the primary designee accepting
ownership of the magazines. And I respectfully request the full
consideration of this committee on the approval of this ordinance.
And Chairman, just to let you know, this is the type of things that we should be
doing at a greater scale because, as we know, in past mistakes that we've made in
our country, when we're not sharing intelligence or we're not sharing
resources or we're not sharing training resources, we're
just weakening ourselves as a country, as a state, as a county, and as a
city. So I would love to have this committee's full consideration on this.
I know there's other things we're working through before this is
completely over and done with, but I appreciate the opportunity, sir.
Thank you, Alderman Napolitano. We have a substitute for this matter before us.
Motion by our resident firefighter, Alderman Sposato, to
accept the substitute. Hearing no objection, the substitute is before us.
Any further questions on this matter on the substitute ordinance?
Can I get a copy?
It has been distributed, but if you don't have one in front of you, we can get you
another one.
Alderman Napolitano, you want to briefly touch on the substituted matters?
Yeah. So there is just one of the
issues that we're working through, too, is anything that is done through the City
of Chicago that incorporates grant funding or money given through grant
funding for materials or training material usage just has to be
clarified for that to be okayed to be transferred over, and
that's what I'm told by legal.
Sure.
So that's just the last couple of hurdles we have to get past.
I guess that's common practice. It happens from time to time with different stuff
like this.
Okay. Further questions on the matter?
Now hearing none, Alderman Sposato moves due pass.
Any objection?
All in favor, aye.
Motion carries. Thank you, Alderman Napolitano.
Okay, the next matter before us is the subject matter hearing
on the resolution dealing with ShotSpotter and the
record management system and the computer-aided dispatch system.
Did we fix the presentation?
Starting with
Professor Villegas.
Vargas, okay.
We have a PowerPoint presentation from Professor
Robert Vargas at the University of Chicago.
You've seen their media coverage on this matterSuggesting that
ShotSpotter's removal resulted in an improvement of
the response time to 911 calls.
Well
I can.
Okay. Yeah. We'll allow him to present.
Am I
good to start now? Okay. Good afternoon,
everyone. Thank you, chair and members of the committee.
A quick word about who we are. The Justice Project
exists to hold powerful institutions accountable and give cities
the tools to make change.
The ShotSpotter work is part of a line of work where we bring independent evidence
to policy questions that worry people the most, like how Chicago
draws its ward boundaries. Could you go to the next slide, please?
How Chicago draws its ward boundaries.
What were the real forces driving the 2021 spike in carjackings?
We try to bring data rather than speculation to respond to fear.
Next slide, please.
Let me start with the study that got us here.
In a peer-reviewed study, economists Michael Topper and Toshio
Felezaris found that ShotSpotter made Chicago police respond
slower to priority one calls. These are the most serious
911 calls for help that often involve responding to violent
crimes in progress.
Twenty-three percent slower for call to dispatch, 13% slower for
call to arrival on scene, and a 9% decline in the
probability of the ShotSpotter alert leading to an arrest.
The mechanism is simple. Every ShotSpotter alert sends officers
somewhere. Most alerts produce nothing.
While officers work those alerts, the calls from people in crisis wait,
and the queue backs up.
Next slide, please.
To run the study, the economists used the following data sets they obtained
via Freedom Information Act.
CPD's 911 dispatch data, records of dismissed ShotSpotter
alerts, and data on arrests connected to ShotSpotter.
A data journalist named Matt Chapman read the study
closely and noticed something.
The researchers used data that Sound Thinking had said it did not
maintain,
and data that was missing from the ShotSpotter dashboard the company shared
with the public.
Next slide.
So Chapman did what any good journalist would do.
He filed a public records request for the same records that Topper and Felezaris
filed for.
He expected to get them.
Next slide, please.
He did not,
and it's how he was denied that should concern the city
council.
The denial was shaped by a letter dated March 19th,
2024, addressed to the Chief Assistant Corporation Council of the city's
law department, written by a senior director at Sound Thinking.
Next slide.
Let me read to you the most important lines highlighted in the handout in front of
you.
You don't have a handout. First, at its core, the real issue is that
Chicago should not have created and released the various documents for any of
the noted requests, nor did Sound Thinking know Chicago was doing so.
The requester never should ever receive the, quote, "many years of worth of alerts
that he apparently believes are and should be the norm."
The next quote, Chicago should not have created any of those reports
and provided them as public records because the data is owned by Sound
Thinking, not Chicago.
So sit with that last point for a second.
Data about gunfire in Chicago,
those data do not belong to police or victims of gun violence, but to a
company headquartered 2,000 miles away.
Next slide, please.
The only reason we know about delayed priority one calls and
dismissed alerts was because of a chain of FOIA accidents.
California-based economists happened to obtain the right data
by accident.
It was Topper and Felezaris' findings about delayed priority one
calls that led my team at the Justice Project to focus on priority
one calls in our study on Chicago after ShotSpotter.
When the city turned off the microphones, many were rightfully
concerned that homicide would climb and police would be slower to reach
people in danger. And these concerns are what my co-authors and I
set to examine.
Next slide.
We compared the first nine months of 2024, when ShotSpotter was running, to the
first nine months of 2025, after it was gone.
We also did a pre- and post- six months.
Response to priority one calls improved by about two and a half minutes faster
from the 911 call to dispatch, and more than three minutes faster from
dispatch to an officer arriving on scene.
And over that same period, homicides did not rise as predicted.
To be clear, I'm not telling you that turning ShotSpotter off is what produced
these numbers. A single before and after comparison cannot carry that
weight. But what I can tell you is that the predicted catastrophe of
slower response times and more death did not arrive.
Next slide, please.
Looking ahead, city council time would be better spent asking how to improve
procurement contracts. Because if we go back to the letter Sound Thinking sent
to Matt Chapman, Sound Thinking was legally correct to deny
Chapman's request.
When the letter says the data belong to the vendor and not the city, it's reading
the contract accurately.
The company is enforcing rights that Chicago handed it.
Which means the real question, and I think the productive question moving forward
is, how can Chicago contract better with technology?
Next slide, please. So according to page eight of the actual contract signed in
2018 with Sound Thinking, it states pretty clearly
that, quote, "City data is the property of the city, and gunfire data is the
property of the contractor."And then the contractor,
quote, "Owns and reserves the rights to store, copy, publish,
display, adapt, modify, translate, make works derived from, and
transfer and sell, offer for sale, and to use such
gunfire data."
Next slide, please.
So what would a better contract have?
Well, it could have pre-specified performance benchmarks with real
consequences.
It could have independent audit requirements.
As it stood in 2018, there was no way for anyone outside the company
to verify its accuracy.
It had no city ownership of the gunfire data that Chicago was paying to generate.
When you put those three absences together, you get a situation we're in
now, with no predetermined benchmarks to evaluate this
technology. Next slide, please.
This problem is not unique to Chicago.
It's not unique to any one technology.
A legal scholar documented a broader pattern of how
technology vendors are abusing trade secrets provisions in
procurement contracts to put public safety tools beyond independent scrutiny.
Tech companies assert secrecy even when disclosure would cause
no real commercial harm.
Tech companies resist sharing data in discovery and hide behind protective
orders, even in criminal cases where someone's liberty is at stake.
And tech companies price private access to their data so high
that no defendant, no journalist, and no researcher can reach it.
The common thread here is tech control over knowledge and tech
control over whether the public ever gets to find out if their products work.
Next slide, please.
And this is all about to matter a lot more in the new age of
artificial intelligence.
Illinois Senate Bill 315 is an Illinois-wide AI regulation
that would require independent third-party audits of large AI
developers.
Policy makers are trying to steer the AI industry toward independent
verification, and this bill, to my understanding, is on Governor Pritzker's
desk.
Without procurement modernization, Chicago will be back here
debating in circles over its technologies.
Next slide.
In conclusion, we're sometimes told this is a contest between caring
about victims of gun violence and evaluating technology.
That is a false binary.
The communities on the South and West Sides deserve both a serious
response to violence and the right to know whether the tools deployed
actually work. Both can be done well, and modernized procurement
can help the city do both.
The status quo gives nearly all the power to the vendor.
And fixing that is not pro-technology or anti-technology, and it's
not pro-police or anti-police, it's pro-Chicago. Next slide.
Thank you. If you want to see any of the documents that I cited,
feel free to
use the QR code on your phones to be able to access.
We have links to the contract, to
the Chapman FOIA denial, and the code from
the study we did. Thank you.
Thank you, Professor. Our next subject matter
expert will be participating remotely,
and we do have a slide presentation as well.
He's been given administrative capabilities to unmute himself.
Hopefully, that works. Robert VerBruggen from the
Manhattan Institute. Mr. VerBruggen, are you able to unmute?
Yes, sir. Can you hear me?
Very good. Okay, please proceed, and we will control the slide presentation and
advance them as you signify.
Okay.
Should I wait until I see them on my screen? Oh, there it is. All right.
So my name is Robert VerBruggen. I'm a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute.
Apologies for the wrong date. I forgot to update that part in my slides.
My job involves learning about policy issues and explaining them
to the public.
Last year, I wrote a report called "Thinking Through the ShotSpotter Debate" that
went over a great deal of the research and spoke with a number of experts to
form my opinions on it. About a week ago, I also wrote a column about the
University of Chicago analysis that's been the
subject of a lot of debate, including at this hearing now.
So if you go ahead to the next slide.
So I think the first thing that I really want to drive home is that when we talk
about evaluating ShotSpotter through academic research, there
are several distinct issues, and I think we tend to talk
past each other when we conflate them or forget that some of them
exist. One of them is whether ShotSpotter improves
responses to gunfire and gets police to the scene faster and more
effectively. Another is whether ShotSpotter affects crime and clearance rates
in the areas where it's deployed. And the third one is whether the alerts distract
from other non-gunfire calls. And I'm actually going to start with that last one
because that was one of the main subjects of the University of
Chicago report because, as discussed earlier,
the authors removed gunfire calls from the data and focused on non-gunfire
priority one calls. So if we can go to the next slide.
So the key context for when we're thinking through this issue of whether
ShotSpotter affects response time for other types of calls.
First of all, ShotSpotter does generate additional work for police.
There are a lot of ShotSpotter alerts that are not accompanied by 911 calls, so
these are new incidents that police are learning about.
And by definition, that uses up some time that could be spent on other priorities.
The question isn't so much whether that ever happens, as
how big of a problem it is and whether it's worth that trade-off.
Some key numbers that I brought up in my column on this
topic was if you look at the ShotSpotter data from when Chicago had
ShotSpotter, there were about 2,000 to 3,000 alerts
each month without a caller, as compared with about 30,000 to
50,000 priority one calls. And all this workload is divided up
across more than 11,000 officers.
So I think that that ratio should make us skeptical of extremely large effects on
response time. But that said, ShotSpotter alerts are concentrated in
areas and at times of the day where police are already pressed for
time. If we go to the next
slideSo the headline
finding from the University of Chicago Justice Project, it wasn't focused on
much in the previous presentation, but it's still at the top of their online
report, was actually a more than four-minute decrease in priority one
non-gunshot response times in the areas where ShotSpotter was
deactivated. This original version of the analysis compared response
times in the six-month periods
between when it was before and after it was deactivated in September.
So you had essentially the spring and the summer before activation versus the fall
and winter after.
In my view, the big problem with that is that priority one calls, like crime in
general, are seasonal. Crime has also been falling nationwide.
So when you're comparing two completely different times of the year and two
different periods
of time, you run the risk of simply comparing apples and oranges
in times of the year when you wouldn't expect the
response times to be the same regardless of what's happening with ShotSpotter.
And I don't think that that number really tells us much about
ShotSpotter at all, and we can't conclude whether or not ShotSpotter had anything
to do with it. Next slide, please.
However, there was an update to the analysis that was referenced during the
previous
presentation that I thought was very helpful.
I think it's a big improvement. Essentially, they compared response times in the
first nine months of 2024 versus 2025, and they
also noted the change in the areas that did and didn't have
ShotSpotter. So that addresses that seasonality problem that I talked
about, and it also gives us a control group that we can use to compare what
happened in the ShotSpotter areas versus the areas that never had ShotSpotter to
begin with. In the new analysis, the ShotSpotter beats had a
2.4-minute improvement versus a 1.1-minute
improvement even in the areas that were never covered.
So that's basically a little more than a one-minute difference between the
treatment and the control group as opposed to the four-minute difference we were
talking about before, which to me strikes me as something that's a lot more
plausible given the mismatch we discussed before
between the sheer sort of workload of priority one calls versus the
ShotSpotter alerts.
And as also was discussed during the previous presentation, it's in line with a
different study finding around a one- to two-minute impact, depending on how
response times are calibrated or are defined.
So I think the one big remaining question is whether this is apples to apples.
Because ShotSpotter areas and non-ShotSpotter areas are not the same.
The ShotSpotter areas were deliberately chosen because they were places where a lot
of gun violence happens.
So I think there's a lot of work to be done yet to determine
whether those are really comparable.
The authors do provide a lot of their data online for further analysis, so I have a
few things I wanted to share from my experiences digging into it.
If we can go to the next slide.
Okay, so first of all, if you look where the two-minute versus the one-minute
improvement come from, the ShotSpotter areas had higher response times to
begin with. There would be obviously much more crime in these areas.
Police have more to deal with. They started out at about a little
above a 15-minute response time versus 10 minutes for the non-ShotSpotter
areas. And in percentage terms, it was a 15% reduction for the
ShotSpotter areas versus a 10% reduction for the non-ShotSpotter areas.
So that's a fairly small difference.
And because they're such different areas, it is, I think, a little bit difficult to
say how much of that is due to ShotSpotter.
And lastly, before
I conclude with the University of Chicago study, if we could go to the next
slide, it's possible to do a similar run of the data
on the crime data.
Interestingly, the violent crimes fell by about 10%, both in
ShotSpotter and non-ShotSpotter areas.
However, the homicides only declined in the former ShotSpotter areas.
But this is an area where the differences were huge.
The ShotSpotter beats had several times as many homicides on average
beforehand than the non-ShotSpotter beats, again, because they were
specifically chosen for being places with very high gun
violence.
If we can go to the next slide.
And I wanted to circle back here to what I said at the very beginning, which is
that there are several distinct issues here, and we can't lose sight of the
different ones. So I wanted to very briefly go over what some other research,
including on Chicago, has found about ShotSpotter.
In my view, some of the best work on this has been done by Eric Piza and his
co-authors. They analyzed the impact of ShotSpotter as it was
installed in Chicago as opposed to when it was deactivated.
In general, Piza finds procedural benefits where the system leads officers to the
scenes of gunshots more quickly than 911 calls.
Again, this is the gunshot calls as opposed to the non-gunshot calls.
It also increases evidence recovery, including firearm recoveries.
In another study, he found that ShotSpotter in Chicago, quote, "Did not create
additional racial disparities in arrests and stops beyond those already present in
standard police responses to gunfire." End quote.
Which I think addresses another common criticism of the technology.
However, he fails to find benefits to crime or clearance rates, and I think that's
one of the biggest sticking points to ShotSpotter, is that ultimately when we're
trying to help police with more information and trying to get them to the
scenes faster and trying to collect more evidence, the ultimate goal is to reduce
crime, and arrest people who've done bad things.
And that's where it's been very difficult, I think, for a lot of departments to
translate the investigative benefits of ShotSpotter into concrete reductions in
crime and increases in clearance rates.
So final slide, please.
So the big things I wanted to leave you with is that, first of all, I think
the updated analysis that addresses seasonality, while still not
quite a perfect apples, apples comparison, it suggests smaller
changes in response times and it is more believable than the 4.2 minute
result that we were discussing a couple of weeks back.
Any changes to response times do have to be weighed against the benefits of the
technology, which apply to gunshot calls and not to the non-gunshot calls.
And in general, my read of the evidence is that ShotSpotter can improve police
response to gunfire, but it can be difficult to translate into crime and clearance
improvements.
And calls that don't lead to evidence may distract from other work.
I don't think that's an unreasonable point to make or an unreasonable thing to be
studying. Thank you all very much. And that's all I have.
Thank you, Mr. VerBruggen.
Now I'm going to open up the floor for questions.
Are there any questions from the body?
Going once.
Alderman Moore?
Okay. I'm kind of confused. How do
you
take into account
calls
that are not being made?
Where's the guy at? He's gone? Is he still online?
Or was that just a video?
Mr. VerBruggen, are you there?
Yes. Is the question for me or for Professor Vargas?
For you.
So my thing is, I think an incident just occurred, and it was so
weird because I was thinking about what happened in my ward on 79th
and May, right? When those guys got out and started
shooting at this car, killing a woman, and thank God the baby didn't
get killed. So while everybody was ducking, no one
could call 911 because they were busy ducking.
But
once that shot had gone off, had it gone to the
DSS center,
and they could have saw it, they could have immediately activated a
car. So how do we account for that,
no calls being made? I'm lost. And I think another
incident just occurred in somebody's ward the other day where the police,
I just saw on the news, just found a man laying down after so
many hours or days and stuff like that. Probably hours, though.
I don't want to misquote. So how do you account for that in
the study?
Yeah. Well, the study wasn't mine. It was by the University of Chicago.
I did have some reanalysis of their data there.
Can you go slow? That's too fast. I don't even know what you said in all that.
I'm sorry.
The study isn't mine. The study was done by the University of Chicago.
I was just commenting on it, and I had some other analysis of their data that I
discussed there. But basically, they're analyzing data that was
provided to them through a FOIA request and by the City of
Chicago. So if a call isn't in the data, it's not in the data.
That's not accounted for. And I think the point that you're making is extremely
important. ShotSpotter does lead police
to the scenes of a lot of
noises where they can't find anything, but it also lets them know about
gunshots that they would not have known about otherwise.
I know, I think CWB was mentioned earlier, and they've been keeping track
of all the shootings that have occurred in areas that had
previously been covered by ShotSpotter.
So I think what you're raising is a very important issue, and I think it's a key
benefit of ShotSpotter is that it lets police know about incidents that they would
not have known about otherwise.
Right. And I just wanted to-- And I'm saying the name of the room
wrong. Help me out,
Chico. The DS what room?
DSCC.
SDSC. Thank you.
So what's happening in those instances, and I want to
make sure that this is on record when you say that because when they
do go to the SDSC room,
that camera watches. So sometimes the police
didn't respond because they're looking at the camera, and they're
not seeing anything, and then they may go a little
later. Versus like on 78th and May, had they
saw that, they would have responded.
So when you take into account their response time,
once they go to that room, and that's why we have technology.
Once they go to that room, then they're looking at
that spot. They're not seeing anything, and so right then and there, they're
not sending anybody quickly, but they may send somebody later.
So I just want to keep into account
this data that's being talked
about in terms of slow response time, faster
response time because truly it's not apples to apples.
Truly it's not taking into account every
different scenario. I appreciate the work on this, but
it's just sometimes there's a thing called common sense.
And you can do a lot of data stuff, and common sense shows
what the truth really is. And it's not just trying to be an
advocate for sound thinking or anybody
else, but we have other now up-to-date technology with
drones, people that are in this city that can
produce that type of stuff that we need to be looking at
over and beyond even
what we were doing previously. And I just don't want this to
be ignored because of this
report. Thank you, Chairman.
Thank you, Alderman Moore. Alderman Chico.
Thank you, Chair.
Routinely I talk about the
times when nobody calls 911,
and that's an issue. We see that being an
issue citywide.
Since the last time we met and had this hearing,
and I talk about the incidents where we see a body laying on the ground, nobody
calls. Another one happened in my ward.
Take you back to May 30th, between 2:00 and
2:30 a.m.,
there were shots fired.
Nobody called.
The resident who lives right next to an empty lot
heard them,
told the police.
They didn't call.
Woke up next day to go to work at 11:47
a.m.,
he goes out to his car,
finds a body right next to his
homeWe talk about slower
response times, we talk about faster response times, but I want to talk
about the no response times. That's what we're getting at here.
When people do not call
911 and report shots fired,
this is becoming a regular and all too often occurrence.
We just seen it two weeks ago in my ward.
This is unacceptable, and it goes back to the
process.
Can anybody from the city answer,
what do we have in place for situations like this,
that gunshot detection is not in place?
What do we have in place when nobody's calling the police and bodies are
laying on the ground?
Yeah.
I'm not sure if we have anyone in the witness box who's-
Can I offer an attempt at a response?
Yeah. Go ahead, Professor.
I very much appreciate Alderman Chico's concerns and
agree with him entirely, and I think
what's missing here is a benchmark, a way
for the people who want this technology to be able
to test and see the number of times nobody calls
911, and to be able to examine it. And what makes it
challenging is that the city doesn't have
ownership of the data, so it can't
share with researchers or communities to verify any of this.
So just as a quick example, the last time I testified
here, SoundThinking presented
124 cases where
aid was rendered to someone found with a
gunshot at a ShotSpotter alert, and
95% of those cases had an accompanying 911
call, which meant that they found only six instances, to
Chico's
point, six instances where someone was not
rendered aid.
And I think that
the
argument that's often made is that any one individual
life saved
makes the technology worth it, but
that was not established at the
outset, right? Initially, the technology was marketed as a crime reduction
tool, and then when a study came out showing it was something else, they marketed
something else. And I think what's missing here is just the ability
to vet all of these claims that the company's
making in order to know whether or not
the technologies are actually effective.
Chair, respectfully, I think it's a matter of common
sense. It's a matter of common sense.
The situation I just laid out,
when nobody called. They acknowledge they heard shots fired, and they
don't call, and hours and hours later, they leave their home
and see a body. That's just common sense.
Anybody could see that we need gunshot
detection for these situations. I just have a hard time
understanding
that logic there.
Alderman Quinn on a point of clarification, and then-
Thank you, Mr. Chair
... or Alderman Chico, if you're not yield.
Alderman Chico, I think the answer to your question is when the city of Chicago
stopped utilizing the gunshot detection technology,
they offered, we call police signs in its absence.
That's the answer to your question.
We call police signs, which is complete nonsense.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you. Alderman Chico, did you have additional questions, or are you going to
yield?
Yeah. Looking at some of the data presented,
between 2 and 3,000 alerts each
month.
That could be between 80 and 100 alerts per day,
and when you couple that with the amount of, or the lack of
calls coming in to 911 that follow an alert,
that's just unacceptable. It's unacceptable.
I want to
switch gears a little bit,
and my questions are toward procurement.
We didn't get to them, or I didn't get to them last time.
In our resolution,
there was mention of reports of
potentially improper bias and political
interference in the procurement process.
Have you seen these reports,
Commissioner?
Sharla Roberts, Chief Procurement Officer.
I'm not aware of the reports that you are
referring to, Alderman.
Okay.
Well, there's been several newspaper articles and media outlets reporting
on
potentially improper bias.
So to your knowledge, just want to put it on the record, you're not aware of
anything improper that went on during the process?
There's anything
improper as it relates to the procurements that we oversee at the Department of
Procurement Services, yes, Alderman.
Okay, thank you.
As I close,
Chair,
I want to reiterate. I was just at two beat meetings this week,
and
they're watching all the coverage.
My residents, as is all Chicago, watching all the coverage around ShotSpotter.
They want to know where we at in this process.
They want to know timelines. They want to know if we missed any
benchmarks. They want to know where we are at.
And
we are going to continue to fight until we find out.
It's been over 20 months
... since it was decommissioned. And the residents, the 10th Ward, and the city
do not feel any safer. So thank you.
Yeah. Thank you. And just to clarify, in response to
your question, Alderman Chico, about any potential complaints,
I want to give the chief procurement officer a chance to amend her answer just in
case she didn't understand.
Can you comment on any pending protests or
challenges that have been filed in association with any of these pending
decisions? If there are, in fact, protests that have been filed, I
think you should correct your answer to reflect that.
Thank you, Chairman. I'm going to defer that question to
my counsel, Courtney Del Giudice.
Hi. Good afternoon. Courtney Del Giudice, managing deputy procurement officer.
There is one protest pending related to the gun violence detection
technology, and that response will be
given by the department later this month.
Thank you.
Alderman Curtis.
Thank you, Chair. I had a meeting upstairs, but I wanted
to...
Something I didn't understand
when he was giving his statement earlier.
If the City of Chicago pays a
company for
its services, detection, data,
whatever, why wouldn't the city own that data?
Why would that data only be
the company's and not the City of Chicago?
If I'm paying you for the data,
why wouldn't the city own that data?
I think that's a legitimate question that applies in many similar
circumstances beyond just the issue of gunshot detection.
It's something we're debating going forward with the license plate
readers and other forms of technology that we utilize private
contractors who have expertise that no one in city
government has. So if we want to use the technology, we have no choice but
to contract with outside experts, and their expertise is
proprietary. So whether or not they are inclined to share
the results of their work with us is largely contingent upon the legal language
that may or may not be in the contract.
It's an issue that comes up for every contract-
Sign a contract like that.
And actually, I want to address this to the chief procurement officer because there
is standardized language that can be used
to address this question
of data ownership. What is the current status
of trying to resolve this
in general so we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time we
have a contract up with a potential third-party data provider?
Thank you for the question, Alderman.
Each procurement, especially RFPs for information technology,
all contracts are treated differently.
However, these contracts are negotiated with the Department of Law,
and all the comments and concerns regarding data protection, we do have data
protection language in our contract documents, and I will defer
Courtney, legal counsel, to answer the remaining question.
Courtney Del Giudice, managing deputy procurement officer.
With respect to data protections, there are standard ones in our contracts, which
would,
generally before negotiation, that data would be considered city data.
So what was shown on the screen would have been a negotiated term in that
contract. It's not one that will necessarily appear in the new contract.
Every RFP will have a sample terms and conditions for those
vendors to review, and the sample does designate it as city
data. It has not been fully negotiated yet, so I can't say the final
way this contract will read. But that is not our just
standard for city data. The city data usually would be something that the
city owns, and then would,
at the end of the contract, be the remaining.
I'm not an attorney, but I'm just wondering,
if I'm paying you to give me the data,
why can't I
have the data? Why wouldn't the data belong to me to do
what I need to do with that data?
Yeah. Professor, go ahead with your response.
Yeah. So
it's an empirical question. It's a great question that a lot of legal scholars have
been thinking about. And one of the reasons why is
because companies don't want to be independently evaluated.
They want to hire their consultants to do the work for them and
to create the appearance that their products are effective.
This is a classic problem when it comes to pharmaceuticals.
It's a classic problem when it comes to all sorts of health devices.
And cities like Seattle and New York are trying to leverage
their market power because all of these firms are competing to do business with
cities. And one of the things that some legal scholars are saying is
for cities to assert their market power and to say that, "Okay, we're
not doing business with anyone unless we own the data." And I think that's
something that the city needs to seriously take into consideration
moving forward for all technologies, whether it's gunshot detection or not.
Yeah. On that point, Professor, we agree, and I know the Manhattan Institute has
also done some research on this. Mr.
Verburgann, can you opine on this further?
I'm about the farthest thing from a contract lawyer.
But yeah, I agree with basically everything that's been said.
The reason that the data don't belong to the city is that the city signed a
contract saying they don't. And I think it's an entirely legitimate question when
you are in a decision-making role in the city, like you folks are,
to say, "If we're going to sign a contract and we're going to pay millions of
dollars to have this technology deployed in our city, we want to make sure that we
have access to all of the data that we would need to analyze whether or not it's
working."
Yeah. Thank you. I think it's notable to state at this point
to our procurement team,
you're hearing about the closest thing you're going to hear to consensus from this
body perhaps today, that I think we all agree, if we do
have a new contract with a new gunshot detection provider,
it needs to have a provision in there making it clear that we own the data
that we're paying to collect.
So keep that in mind as you go forward with your continued
evaluations. Any other questions from committee members before we
go to non-committee members that are indicating they wish to speak?
Alderman Cincho Lopez.
Thank you, Chairman, and
appreciate the hearing.
My question is for Professor Vargas.
In terms of the
study after study that
comes out, the ShotSpotter changes the benchmark, and
in terms of the response times and all that Menchaca mentioned,
concerns about the response times.
But I think those false positives really are concerning.
I think you reported 87% are false positives, which make it
really difficult to
respond and improve those times. So at what time does the city stop?
At what time does the city look for other ways to address this?
Yeah. A couple of things. I think that
for one,
I agree that a lot of things appear common sense, but there's a lot of things
that I think are commonsensical. And when I pursue research projects, truly,
95% of the time I'm wrong.
And that's the value of bringing evidence to bear.
And I think that aldermen like Peter Chico deserve to have data
just owned by the city precisely to show everything, and to show to his
constituents whether or not the technology is actually delivering on
what it's saying and what it's not.
Like definitively, make it clear, crystal clear.
And part of the reason why it can't do that right now with the way that the
business was done with Sound Thinking is that Chicago doesn't own the data.
CPD doesn't even own the data. Look at the FOIA letter that I
shared. It was a mistake by CPD FOIA
officers that they got access to the, quote, "insight database," which
was different from the dashboard that ShotSpotter put
out.
And
yeah, that's what I'll say about that.
Thank you. My follow-up question, this is the last one.
In terms of cost-benefit analysis, I do agree with Alderman Curtis
about accessing the data. It's important that we're
making such an investment that the city has control over that data.
In terms of cost-benefit analysis, and again,
this is expensive software, and Sound Thinking,
in my opinion, yet to prove that this has been an effective use of
tax dollars.
In your opinion, Professor Vargas, what is the
cost-benefit analysis of such investment?
Are there other ways where we can address concerns that what Alderman
Chico has mentioned? I think we all care about public safety.
I think to me is, are those dollars well used?
Are we making a good investment that is making those response times
adequate? And are there other ways that we can address this
issue, the issue of response times, again, when the false positives are a huge
concern, and perhaps there's also reference to this in the last inspector
general report as well.
Yeah.
I think rightfully, many people in the South and West
Side communities are tired of having professors from the University of Chicago
do cost-benefits analysis for them, and that's a very valid critique.
And so before I even answer what that cost-benefit analysis is, I think that the
city needs to gather with its communities to define what the
costs are and to define what the benefits are, and to
not let a company define that for the city and for its communities.
Thank you, Chairman.
Okay. Thank you. Further questions from committee members?
Alderman O'Shea?
No? Okay.
Alderwoman Rodriguez Sanchez.
Chair.
I want to share first that I am a little concerned about what I'm
hearing
on the floor, because it feels like there is a
tendency in this body to conflate
anecdotal evidence with evidence that
comes from research and hypothesis that have been
tested,
and conclusions that have been reached after a very
rigorous research process.
Those two things are not the same, right?
And I hear anecdotes, and we think about these
specific incidents, and we say, "We need this tool because
of this," but we are actually not looking at the whole picture, and how we are
actually investing resources, and what are the benefits that we
get from those investments that we are
making. Maybe this has been asked already, and I apologize if it
was, but
Ms. Roberts, can I ask you if we actually have a
definition of what we're looking for?
What
does this RFP says in terms of
what are we looking for?
It's a technology for what purpose?
What is the city of Chicago looking for?
Thank you for the question,
Alderman. CPO Roberts. The
RFP calls for an evaluation of gun violence
detection and the technology in the marketplace.
But we are not asking what is it that this is going
to accomplish, just that we are replacing the technology
that we had before, and we are looking for proposals from
different companies that can provide the same service?
No, we used an RFI. Thank you for your question, Alderman.
We used an RFI to determine what was current in the marketplace
to compile an RFP for services that the
office of OPSA was looking for to provide the
service for the replacement of the gun violence detection
technology.
And we know what the original
RFP was when we first got the contract?
What did we get this technology for?
Yes, I do believe I have that information. Just give me one minute.
It's okay.
We use a reference contract for gun violence
detection.
Was that the name of it, Courtney? Hold on.
I think that if we have clear measures of what is it that we're looking for, are we
looking to reduce violence? Are we looking to improve police response
time? What are we looking to
do with this? I am confused because we are pushing the city
to do a contract, and we don't know what we want it for.
I don't think that we do. Based on the conversation that we're having on
this committee right now, I don't think that anybody knows
what this technology is supposed to do because the studies
that I have seen say that it does not reduce
violence,
it does not improve police response time, but the opposite,
based on what we have seen.
And what I am hearing is that we need something in place if nobody calls the
police, but we don't have numbers for that.
So we don't know what the extent of the problem is and how we need to
address it. So my main concern here is that
we are going by
incidents
and talking about common sense, which it is beyond me
what every single person or each person in this
council seems as common sense because we don't seem to agree on that
ever. There is not a common sense in the Chicago City Council.
What I think is common sense, I have colleagues that think that it is
absolute nonsense, and we talk about that
endlessly in this council. So
just for my sanity, I just need to understand what we're looking for
with this technology and what we're willing to pay and what
the result is supposed to be. I don't think that this is
good science.
We went through this in COVID. Some people had the experience
that a family member got sick after getting the vaccine.
That doesn't mean that the vaccine was killing people, and
we know that because the science told us that. A lot of people were saved, right?
So when we talk about isolated incidents or we talk about a specific
incident and then we attribute that,
the ability to define what we need this technology for
when we don't even know. I really want this information
if I can get it. If it needs to go through the Chair, that's fine, but
I
feel like we're having a hearing that seems to be
to push the administration to finalize a contract that we don't know what it is
for.
Thank you, Alderman. I can provide you the detailed definition through the Chair
that we put out an RFP for.
Okay. I am just very concerned that nobody on this floor has been able
to actually have clarity on that. So I do not
know why we are pushing the administration to get this contract.
Thank you, Chair.
Yeah. Thank you, Alderman. I guess I would just have to point out that
the mayor himself, in public comments, has indicated a
desire to seek a replacement for Sound
Thinking. We all know his criticism of Sound Thinking.
I'm not going to reiterate that. But when it comes to the concept
of automated gunshot detection,
it was the mayor who initiated this process.
So I can pass on your concerns to him, but you know you can talk to
him directly probably more readily than I can.
So if you want to get an answer as to whether or not he is still
committed to finding a replacement for the
canceled contract with the gunshot detection-
With all due respect, Chair-
You could do so
... this contract was canceled, and the council
pushed
to get it reinstated.
So this came from council, and we need to be clear about that, and I do not
understand what we're looking for. Thank you.
Thank you. And I will also
agree with you on something,
which I know you and I don't agree on much, but
your opening comments about the elevation
of anecdotes and lived experience to replace sound
data, I think does not serve us well. So I agree with you on that.
But it does raise the issue of what you do with data and
the integrity of presenting data that's collected to draw
conclusions.
And I just want to point out that
the professor did provide an amendment to his initial
report, and I just want to read one sentence from it.
"We have been clear from the start that this descriptive analysis and
before-and-after comparison is intended to document
what happened, not establish definitive
causation." And yet it was reported otherwise.
ShotSpotter's removal resulted in
improved police
response times. That was the media coverage, and that is simply
not true. And the professor himself acknowledges that
causation could not be established definitively
by the work that he did. So it's important to all of us as
we try to use a more objective
approach to deciding what is appropriate and what is not.
We should at least agree on the ground rules, and
we should at least agree on the methodology,
and make sure that there's an integrityThat informs
academic work and the way its conclusions are presented in the
meetings. So those are my comments for the day.
Alderman Quinn, and then Alderman Chico, if you would then make a
motion to adjourn.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. My motivation for being here,
and the technology has to do with response time.
The 13th Ward is inside the Eighth District.
There's 250,000 residents that live in the Eighth District.
It's the largest by population by 50,000 people.
Response times could be upwards of 45 to 50 minutes.
And so my residents, many of which are Chicago police officers,
want the technology. They've shown me on their phones, they've downloaded
the technology. They use it on a regular basis.
And so I think it would be
unwise to ignore what the professionals
that we hire and spend a lot of money on,
their expertise, to ignore their thoughts relative to the
technology. So that's what brings me down here.
I'm grateful for the conversation.
In terms of procurement, do we have a timeline that has
been established that could be shared?
Thank you so much, Alderman. We do for a complex
procurement of this nature,
with a two-year timeline-
Mm-hmm
... for a fully executed contract from the time the RFP
was let until there's an award.
Okay. So
if you could ballpark that,
two years from?
From the date the procurement was let, and let me give you that date.
Which date?
The procurement was let on February 3rd, 2025,
so roughly two years from that date.
Right around election time. Election day.
I don't-
Coincidence.
A coincidence, for sure. Right.
Politics
aside, right? And I think that's what our mayor's primary motivation is here,
is to cancel this because it's a political thought.
I believe that in the Eighth District and the 13th
Ward,
this technology will serve the residents very well. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you. I will recognize Professor Vargas
for-
I could-
... a rebuttal
... I could defer. It's fine.
Okay.
There was another alderman who had a question.
All right. Alderman Moore.
Thank you, Chairman. I don't want anything to go unanswered
since the floor was addressed. First and foremost,
we deal with tools, and my knowledge and
recollection is that the superintendent says any tools
that are available that he can use to help
solve crimes, to protect police officers, and to protect the public
are tools that we need.
A
system that does that, whether it is
ShotSpotter or whether it's something else with drones, whether it's something else
that somebody introduced, that I appreciate the mayor for
allowing us to... or coming up, and should I say it, let's look at some
other ideas, which was a great idea to do.
And so you start seeing people respond with
other
technology that we could use other than the
sound
thinking,
but to
measure it all. And part of that is, one,
to protect police. So what is the purpose of all of this?
To protect police,
one, because when I talk about this
going straight to the strategic decision support centers,
instead of getting a phone call all the time saying, "I heard
shots," they don't know if it's a .44 or
a gun that has
one of those clips on it that's shooting multiple
shots. So that can protect our police.
That's what can happen. Two, it can say,
"Hey,
this the number of people that's out there that's being impacted, that we can get
some ambulances out there
when it hits that room." And more than anything,
for it to protect the public. And when my constituents say that this is
what they need and
this makes them feel comfortable, that's what I'm going to respond
to. And so that's the purpose from my
standpoint, as a tool to do those
things, and probably even more.
Thank you, Alderman. Professor Vargas, for a please brief rebuttal.
Yes. Yeah
And then Alderman Chico to close and adjourn.
Yeah. I just want to, in the context of thinking about finding a new
technology,
make a push for relying on evidence and resisting the urge for
common sense. Because when I debated this with former police chief
Eddie Johnson, one of the things we agreed on was that there's no shortage
of firms in the law enforcement marketplace that are trying to sell police things
that they don't need and things that don't work.
And I had coffee with a police detective and
presented to him, because he was in favor of all
sorts of technologies, and I asked him, "Don't you think it's a little strange that
these technologies are largely unevaluated, and we're asking
officers to use these technologies?" Think about it, a surgeon has
a scalpel, has all these devices that are evaluated by the Food and
Drug Administration, right? And I think we owe it to officers
that they are using technologies
that actually work. And I'm not talking about this specifically with ShotSpotter,
because I recognize that people aren't going to change their minds on that.
But I think that's important to consider when weighing any future technology.
Okay. Thank you, Professor. I appreciate your presence here.
Also to Mr. Verburgann, the expert testimony that you
provided and the perspectives that you brought today I think are extraordinarily
valuable and important for us to consider going forward as we have this
debate. We may not agree, in fact, clearly we don't, but
it's important to have these voices amplified and
questioned. And you both shed some light on some things today, so I appreciate
it.
For my point, I will just opine that the data is relatively clear,
regardless of what your opinion is of the effectiveness of ShotSpotter's tool, that
there is a vast disparity between the amount of gunfire
incidents that occur in the city and the corresponding 911 calls
that citizens take upon themselves to initiate.
The data suggests it could be as high as 80%, even allowing for a
generous margin of error. It is clearly the
majority of gunfire incidents in the city of Chicago
today do not result in a corresponding 911
call. That is a fact, and you can feel in a variety of ways about
that fact. But speaking of common sense, when we present this common
sense question to voters in polls, which we have done, and
we say to them, "Imagine yourself home at night and you're
awakened by the sound of gunfire on the street outside of your house.
Would you prefer the police know about it, or would you prefer
the police do not know about it?"
And the overwhelming number of Chicagoans who respond to those polls indicate
that they would prefer the police know about it, and that indicates the need for
some type of automated ShotSpotter or whatever company
to provide that service, since people are not calling 911
for a variety of reasons. And I think that's a great question for a sociologist.
Why are people not calling 911? We could probably have another six-hour hearing
on that subject matter alone. But nevertheless, I appreciate
you coming here to present your work. And again, Mr.
Verburgann, thank you for the analysis that you provided.
Alderman Chico, you were the one that initiated this resolution in the first place.
Closing remarks and a motion to adjourn.
Thank you, Chair. I want to thank everybody for providing their testimony today
over several days. Appreciate that, appreciate the remarks from my colleagues.
When we talk about data, data is definitely important, but also lived
experience is important, too. When
we talk to Chicago police officers, they support this
technology. They understand that it puts them in a
position to be more effective out in the street and to respond
quicker, and that's what we're looking for.
We are down thousands of police officers, as I talk about all the time, that we're
not getting back. So to provide them with tools that's going to give them an
advantage to serve the residents of the city of Chicago
the best is definitely something that we need to continue.
Also, when we talk about
anecdotes or isolated incidents,
when these things continuously happen
and they're happening at a normal rate,
that's a problem. They are no longer anecdotes.
They are no longer isolated incidents.
They are something we need to look at and deal with.
So
once again, we have had a robust conversation, robust debate.
But gunshot detection,
in my opinion, does give our Chicago police officers an advantage to
dealing with the gunshots and serving our
residents more effectively.
And?
Well
We can adjourn.
So motion on the floor to adjourn this meeting. All in favor, aye.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Appreciate your participation.
This surprisingly
constructive.
I was expecting it to get a lot more ugly, but