* Patrick Smith at WBEZ…
Throughout her tenure, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the police superintendents who work for her have repeatedly blamed judges when the city’s violence starts to rise. The argument goes like this: If judges would keep more people locked up after arrest, then they wouldn’t be able to commit crimes, and violence in Chicago would decrease. […]
But emails released to the public after a hack of the mayor’s office show that even as Lightfoot and police leaders continued to trot out the talking point, some of the highest-ranking city officials were aware the claim was wrong. And in fact, the leader of the city’s anti-violence efforts repeatedly tried to get them to stop making the claim that decisions on pretrial release were driving Chicago shootings. […]
“Electronic monitoring and low bond amounts given to offenders endangers our residents and flies in the face of the hard work our police officers put in on a daily basis to take them off the streets,” [CPD Superintendent David Brown] said [last summer]. “I will continue to bring attention to the sheer number of repeat offenders who are given little to no jail time and low bonds and … go on to commit more crimes.”
By that point, the emails show, city officials were scrambling to find evidence that would justify Lightfoot and Brown’s claims, but their efforts were largely unsuccessful.
One week before Brown made his comments, in an email thread spurred by a question from Crain’s Chicago Business columnist Greg Hinz, the mayor’s office and CPD were able to find only two examples of bail decisions leading to new gun crimes.
On top of that, Pat Mullane, a top mayoral spokesman at the time, admitted to colleagues that one of the two examples was “kind of weak.” But he said the city needed to provide them “so the [superintendent] doesn’t look like he’s pointing the finger.”
There’s a lot more, so click here and read the whole thing.
*** UPDATE *** Press release…
The following is a statement from state Sen. Robert Peters (D-Chicago), who has spent the past five years fighting alongside community groups to end cash bail and sponsored the Safe-T Act which abolished cash bail and wealth-based detention in Illinois:
“We continue to work in pursuit of real public safety for all and, at least in Springfield, we have made significant progress because we know that public safety belongs to the people. Along those lines, the people deserve the truth from those elected to represent them.
“There is nothing more damaging than a public servant who knowingly contributes to a false narrative, and enables a system that picks and chooses evidence and data-based practices.
“Despite this, and with the support of Governor Pritzker, we were successful in ending cash bail in Illinois, taking the oxygen out of any more declarations from those who choose to ignore the fact that our justice system used to rule by ‘guilty if poor.’”
