Wirepoints has a great story about what Illinois will look like when the new Purge Law fully implements its heinous provisions on January 1, 2023. Just as our analysis has shown, if you want to know more of what it will look like, just look at Cook County.
But don’t look to Cook (rhymes with ‘crook’) County because of the out-of-control violent crime. Look to Cook because they’ve already implemented a “lite” version of the Purge Law locally. And you don’t have to look any further than to Murder City USA to see what that entails.
First, for those held captive on mass transit or those who would like to listen to a great video presentation on the new No Cash Bail / Purge Law, GSL has you covered. Actually, Wirepoints hosted this but you get the idea.
For those who don’t want to listen to depressing news for the better part of two hours, here’s the written Cliff’s Notes from Wirepoints.
What will Illinois look like when the state’s controversial criminal justice reform bill called the SAFE-T Act is fully implemented January 1?
Look to Cook County, which has already crippled its criminal justice system with changes similar to those in the SAFE-T Act.
Too often there, dangerous pretrial detainees set free on low-cash or no-cash bail roam the county and shoot, kill, carjack, rob, burgle, and commit sundry other crimes. Meanwhile the county is on track to exceed 900 homicides for the third year in a row.
900 homicides? That’s about more casualties in gang warfare in a major American city than our nation’s armed forces suffered in most years during our war in Afghanistan. Or Iraq.
The bad results of bail “reform”
Cook County Chief Judge Timothy Evans instituted bail reform in September 2017 to reduce pretrial detention of low-income defendants who couldn’t afford cash bail. His goal was for bail to be used only when completely necessary, and even then in the least possible amount.
The harm done by that approach is clear. There’s been a growing parade of pretrial defendants out on bond but then charged with new crimes. Add to that: far fewer defendants are showing up for court, and even fewer defendants are being detained before trial.
Quarterly reports from Evans’ office show that by halfway through 2020 nearly 9,500 defendants released before trial had been charged with new offenses. By mid-2022 that number had grown to 15,086. That was 18 percent of defendants set loose before trial.
Of those 15,000-plus alleged crimes by pretrial defendants freed pretrial from late 2017 through mid-2022, 2,841 were classified as violent offenses, or “person offenses” such as battery, assault, or child neglect. Another 1,594 crimes were weapons offenses.
Other outcomes are also alarming. Evans’ data shows that by mid-2022, 20 percent of bond court defendants who were granted pretrial freedom from detention failed to appear at subsequent court dates. That rate was much worse than the 9 percent court appearance failure rate after bail reform’s first quarter in late 2017.
Additionally, the percentage of defendants ordered held without cash bail shrank to 4.4 percent of the total by mid-2022 from 8.5 percent in mid-2019.
The bottom line: the Cook County revolving door let too many risky pretrial suspects pass through before facing justice and they went on to earn new charges 4,435 times for violent, “person” or weapons offenses. Including shootings, murders, attempted murders, and criminal sexual assault.
Horror stories tied to the failure of bail reform in Cook County are common.
You don’t say?
Get in the proper mindset. Fire this up on loudspeakers at 11:59pm on December 31st.
But the innocents violated and in some cases killed are a small price to pay for woke social justice activism, ya know. A death is a tragedy. Ten thousand deaths is a statistic.
-
A man was released by Cook County courts to electronic monitoring for a gun store burglary and then released from monitoring before being charged with fatally stabbing a drugstore clerk.
-
A defendant out on bond before trial for attempted murder was then charged with killing two at a video shoot party.
-
A five-time felon out on bond for two weapons charges was then charged with killing two at a house party on the West Side.
-
Members of a carjacking crew, including charged suspects out on bond for repeated offenses, were then charged in the killing of a retired firefighter in a South Side carjacking attempt.
-
A serial carjacker free on bond killed a young father in Chinatown in a failed carjacking attempt.
-
A 17-year-old out on bond before trial on felony gun charges then allegedly carjacked an SUV and slammed into another vehicle, killing 55-year-old Dominga Flores.
-
Another defendant out on bail on a felony gun charge was arrested for murdering a man in a gang-related shooting.
-
An 18-year-old out on bond for three weapons charges, plus theft and carjacking, was charged with first-degree murder and armed robbery after shooting a Hyde Park bartender walking home after work.
But wait, it gets A LOT worse!
The numbers are lowballed
Yet it’s worse than all that, because the full scope of the bail reform problem is actually unknown.
The 15,000 total crimes – and almost 3,000 violent or “person” crimes – charged to defendants released before trial under Cook County bail reform since late 2017 are likely lowballed. There are two reasons.
First, Evans was found to have jimmied the numbers down dramatically in 2020 by not counting certain types of important new crimes by defendants out on bail.
Second, arrest rates in Chicago are paltry, 12 percent for all crimes last year and 6 percent for major “Index” crimes. Most offenders aren’t even getting caught. The count of Cook County defendants free on bail, but committing new crimes before trial, can’t be accurately known if the vast majority of reported crimes never even result in arrest.
It doesn’t stop there. Not by a long shot.
What does it mean? It means more fabulous police body cam video like that one from Decatur where they shot that dangerous sex offender turd down like a rabid dog.