* The Cook County Public Defender’s office has produced some dot-points on the Illinois Pretrial Fairness Act. Click here to read the document.

* WGIL…

[Knox County’s Democratic State’s Attorney Jeremy Karlin] states on Jan. 1, all people accused of committing a crime will either be released or will be held in custody without bond.

But only in very specific cases will defendants be held without bond.

One category of who can be held is those accused of non-probational forcible felonies; things like first-degree murder, residential burglary, and aggravated arson.

But in the case of crimes like second-degree murder, robbery, arson, and kidnapping, a person can only be held if it can be established they pose an immediate threat to a specific person or persons.

Just a general threat to the public isn’t good enough.

* But Karlin admitted in the Facebook post quoted above that people are reading the new law in different ways. Here’s another take from the Loyola University of Chicago Center for Criminal Justice…

Also examined were the proportion of cases going through bond court that will be eligible for initial detention under the Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA), which will become effective on January 1, 2023. Under the PFA there are two groups of individuals who can be considered for initial detention: 1) those eligible based on a “public safety” standard, and 2) those eligible based on a “willful flight” standard. The public safety standard allows for the pretrial detention of individuals charged with specific, detainable offenses who are also found to pose “a specific, real and present threat to a person” (i.e., a risk to public safety). The specific detainable offenses under this standard can be categorized broadly into three groups: 1) non-probationable forcible felonies (e.g., first degree murder, armed robbery, home invasion, aggravated vehicular hijacking, aggravated battery with great bodily harm) and sex offenses, 2) weapon offenses (e.g., illegal firearm possession, unlawful discharge of a firearm, unlawful sale/delivery of a firearm), and 3) domestic violence offenses and violations of orders of protection (VOOP). The willful flight standard allows for the pretrial detention of individuals shown to be a risk for willful flight from prosecution who are charged with either 1) a detainable offense under the public safety standard or 2) any Class 3 Felony or more serious felony offense. The proportion of all cases going through bond court during the study period that were potentially detainable under the public safety standard was 51%, and an additional 26% would be potentially detainable under the willful flight standard.

* ABC7 I-Team…

When someone is in a mental or a behavioral health crisis, a call to 911 can become a crisis in itself.

So what should happen when police, jail, hospital emergency rooms or use of force aren’t the best answers?

New programs with reimagined response teams are aiming to redefine bad or even deadly outcomes.

To deal with the increasing number of mental health crisis calls, police agencies across Illinois are adding social service programs into their departments.

Brain Solache benefited from one such co-responder program in Aurora.

“I probably would have attacked someone just to have the officers be coerced to shoot me,” he explained.

Solache was just 18 years old when he became so despondent he said he wanted to get police to shoot him. Instead, he was talked into living. [..]

Solache explained that an argument with a family member and his unmanaged mental illness sent him spiraling. He had a knife and was he threatening to use it.

“Just cracked… just was done with everything. I was at that point where I was angry at everyone, everything — even myself,” he said. […]

Among the responding officers was the newly formed Crisis Intervention Unit, or CIU, consisting of specially trained police investigators and social workers.

The co-responders spent nearly an hour and a half talking with Solache until he gave up the knife.

No one was injured.

* WTTW…

Chicago’s extended and expanded teen curfew — touted by Mayor Lori Lightfoot as the way to put an end to a spate of downtown violence among young Chicagoans — was enforced by police only four times between May 17 and Aug. 18, according to data obtained by WTTW News.

The city’s curfew starts at 10 p.m. seven days a week and applies to everyone 17 years old and younger.

In effect since 1992, the city’s curfew had allowed teens to stay out until 11 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays and only covered those 16 and younger — until the murder of a 16-year-old in the heart of Millennium Park on May 14 touched off a political firestorm.

No newly covered 17-year-old Chicagoans were reported to have violated the city’s curfew in the first three months that the expanded law was on the books, according to data provided to WTTW News by the Chicago Police Department in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

* From Dan Proft’s People Who Play by the Rules PAC…

According to a Fox 32 report this week, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot cluelessly claimed that the city’s Black neighborhoods are portrayed as more troubled and violent than they really are. In the story by Mike Flannery, Lightfoot told a crowd at a South Side 8th Ward restaurant that “The media doesn’t tell the true story of Black Chicago.” The piece also quoted Chicagoans in crime plagued black neighborhoods, all but begging the mayor for more police presence in their communities. Their pleas are apparently falling on deaf ears.

He are the top ten Chicago neighborhoods by homicide count in Lightfoot’s “Summer Of Joy,” according to heyjackass.com and the latest U.S. Census demographic data available with percentage African-American (unless otherwise noted):

1. 206 homicides plus wounded in Garfield Park, 91%
2. 200 homicides plus wounded in Englewood: 94%
3. 141 homicides plus wounded in Austin: 84%
4. 127 homicides plus wounded in South Shore: 93%
5. 114 homicides plus wounded in Humboldt Park: 52% Hispanic, 42% Black
6. 112 homicides plus wounded in Auburn Gresham 97%
7. 111 homicides plus wounded in Grand Crossing 96%
8. 90 homicides plus wounded in North Lawndale 87% Black, 9% Hispanic
9. 87 homicides plus wounded in Little Village 83% Hispanic, 12% Black
10. 83 homicides plus wounded in New City 62% Hispanic, 24% Black

PBR PAC President Dan Proft: “The story isn’t how the media covers neighborhoods beset by systemic violent crime. The story is the failure by Lightfoot and Pritzker to keep residents of all races in Chicago safe–and that hits black and brown neighborhoods the hardest as they represent the majority of the victims of this lawlessness. Pritzker and Lightfoot are running a race hustle on the residents of Chicago and Illinois, trying to make a safety issue about race and trying to redirect people’s attention away from who is suffering the most as a result of their coddling of career criminals.”

Lori Lightfoot and JB Pritzker’s negligence of Chicago’s black and brown neighborhoods is only exacerbated by their cynical “racism” attacks on their critics, and now the media, implying they are somehow darkening their coverage of violence.

* WTTW…

Per the CPD, homicides in the city this year are down about 16% compared to 2021, while the total number of shootings (1,904) is down nearly 19%. For the month of August alone, there was an 18% decline in homicides in the city, compared to the same month last year (80).

* Tribune…

Though the Chicago Police Department is years into efforts to reform and rebuild trust among communities, young Black and Latino men persist in having negative perceptions of and interactions with Chicago police officers, according to a special report from an independent panel reviewing the department.

The findings of surveys of men aged 18 to 35 paint a “bleak picture of the relationship” between the department and the men, the report said. […]

Participants in the most recent survey reported most of their interactions with police were negative experiences, even when no enforcement actions were taken, and they lacked trust in their local police department.

The report is here.