Chicago’s struggles around public safety were the subject of many Chicago Tribune editorials in 2025.
As part of our annual look back at the editorials of the year, today we focus on both the politics and the human costs of violent crime and our collective search for solutions.
Paying an excessively large settlement to the survivors of those killed after violently attacking cops sends a few unmistakable messages. In the more immediate sense, the message sent to the officers involved in the Reed shooting, who remain suspended while they await the outcome of COPA’s investigation and the departmental response, is that the city already considers them responsible. That’s inappropriate.
But, more broadly, the message delivered to all the other men and women on our streets putting their lives in jeopardy each day to try to make Chicago safer is that they put their livelihoods and reputations at risk when they use deadly force to protect themselves against someone shooting at them.
SPARs aren’t used for the most serious cases of questionable police behavior, those involving use of deadly force, for example. They’re the primary tool for instilling day-to-day discipline in the ranks, addressing problems like officers failing to activate body-worn cameras or neglecting to appear in court to testify in cases in which they’re witnesses.
We don’t think readers should conclude from this statistical surge in 2024 that Chicago police performance is slipping. Rather, it’s evidence to us that CPD leadership, starting with Superintendent Larry Snelling, is strengthening internal management. In other words, the increase in recorded officer infractions looks to us like a positive development, strange as that may sound.
Chicago has 185 shelter beds. New York has 3,000. Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston, has 336 beds. While Chicago experienced 59 domestic-violence homicides in 2023, New York had 23 and Harris County had 38. Pyron points to these numbers as evidence that providing sanctuary for victims works.
“If you look at neighborhoods where domestic violence homicides are highest, you’ll see a lack of visible domestic violence services,” she said. “These incidents are lowest where people have physical, accessible services.”
More shelter and services for victims is a priority. Failure to invest in protecting the vulnerable likely means the current awful trends will continue. Let’s commit to better safeguarding our vulnerable mothers, sisters, daughters, friends and neighbors and the people who love them.
The state’s attorney’s office, which has a current-year budget of $187 million, badly needs a bona fide case-management system, and that will cost millions. Money well spent, we say, because the public would have access to this important information, and the office itself could make better decisions about resource allocation and — critically — move criminal cases through the process much faster than the current woefully slow pace of prosecutions.
But that’s not all. If anything, we were more shocked to hear that our local prosecutor’s office essentially has no internal forensics unit. Cook County is virtually the only major urban local prosecution office in the nation without one. In this day and age, DNA analysis, drug content analysis and of course fingerprint analysis are integral components of most felony cases. The office currently has a single scientist handling its forensics needs. Veteran lawyers with significant forensics-evidence experience left during the previous administration, we’re told. An effective forensics team needs to be established as soon as possible.
There are statistics, and then there’s the way people feel. Do they feel safe when they walk the streets, particularly at night? On that score, anecdotally at least, we don’t believe many Chicagoans feel any safer now than they did a year ago when statistics told a different story. Statistics offer no solace to victims of crime. They offer cold comfort to those who regularly hear gunfire from their homes.
That’s why it’s unwise for Mayor Brandon Johnson to routinely remind Chicagoans about the decline in violent crime rates and even more questionable to claim his policies are the reason. Chicago clearly is benefiting from a nationwide trend that no doubt has multiple causes. Johnson’s victory laps also appear insensitive when they’re followed by events like Wednesday night’s horror in River North. While we understand the mayoral desire for credit when crime rates fall — especially given that the blame comes hard and fast when they rise — mayors before Johnson have at least been a bit more cautious about their roles when crime stats dip.
That’s because it takes just one horrific incident to make such claims look ridiculous.
Chicagoans can breathe a sigh of relief. Allowing passengers on CTA trains and buses to carry concealed weapons is a recipe for making an unacceptably unsafe transit system that much more dangerous. Imagine riding in a crowded “L” car and seeing a rider, feeling threatened, brandishing a firearm in their own defense. Would that make you — the unarmed passenger — feel safer? With the prospect of gunshots in a confined space striking people other than the intended target?
Keeping guns off trains and buses as much as possible clearly is in the public interest, and we’re confident the majority of Illinoisans agree. But that doesn’t mean public safety is where it needs to be, particularly on the “L.” Ultimately, the best argument against those agitating to bring more weapons into public spaces is to make those spaces safer.
We believe the public at large is generally unaware that there’s now effectively no timely enforcement for those who violate or ignore conditions of release under the EM program. Given that EM has become the main alternative to incarceration under the SAFE-T Act when judges opt not to detain those accused of serious crimes, the currently lax state of EM enforcement obviously is a serious threat to public safety. Tim Evans, a fierce proponent of criminal justice reform and the SAFE-T Act over his 24 years as chief judge, will be chief judge only until the end of the month, having been defeated in September in his bid for reelection by Cook County Judge Charles Beach. At the top of Beach’s list of priorities when he takes office on Dec. 1 must be an overhaul of the EM program to ensure that dangerous people who violate their terms of release face timely repercussions.
The Nov. 17 horror on that Blue Line train was preventable.
These programs are difficult to manage given the inevitability that participants — both workers and those getting the assistance — are intimately aware of street life in Chicago’s grittiest neighborhoods. Most don’t come by that knowledge without having been involved somehow or another in activities that are unsavory, whether criminal or otherwise.
Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke, who met with the editorial board on Tuesday, recounted for us riding with one of the CVI groups and watching as an unarmed worker leaped out of their car to break up a heated face-off on the street in which at least one man was wielding a gun. “It definitely has utility,” she said of CVI.
She made the point at the same time that “some organizations do this (work) better than others.” We agree and a few months ago called on the CVI sector, for lack of a better term, to strengthen its management controls.
That said, combating violent crime in Chicago, a scourge that has held the city back in multiple ways, is a complicated effort. The battle requires law-and-order measures, but it also entails making would-be criminals aware there are alternatives and there’s help available in pursuing them.
Ald. Brian Hopkins, whose 2nd Ward includes much of downtown Chicago, deserves the city’s thanks for striving repeatedly to find a means that will pass muster with our mayor to control mobs of teens who “take over” the Loop and cause mayhem and sometimes death. The issue has resurfaced with the downtown shooting death of a 14-year-old last month after the annual tree-lighting ceremony. With two days’ notice that a large teen gathering was planned, police appeared to take all the right steps to keep things under control. But tragedy ensued anyway.
We think Ald. Hopkins finally has hit on the right way of giving the Chicago Police Department the tools it needs to stop these mob events before they get started. A new proposed ordinance he filed earlier this week would allow CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling, in consultation with Deputy Mayor for Community Safety Garien Gatewood, to declare four-hour curfews for minors within discrete areas with at least 12 hours’ advance notice.
The minimum 12-hour lead time Hopkins now is proposing gives minors and their parents more than ample warning to stay away from a specific part of the city at a specific time. Arrests for curfew violations, rather than for failing to respond to dispersal orders outside of curfew hours, don’t go on teens’ records and thus don’t affect anyone’s future prospects. Those arrested are held until picked up by a parent or someone else responsible for them.
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