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Chicago Police Department’s “Gun Offender Dashboard” contains Disturbing Inaccuracies that are Misleading the Public about the Causes of Violent Crime

By Sarah Staudt, Senior Policy Analyst and Staff Attorney on behalf of the Criminal Justice Advisory Committee (CJAC) 

On Monday, Police Chief Eddie Johnson of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) released a website he termed the “Gun Offender Dashboard,” which purports to list the bond court outcomes of people arrested for gun-related offenses in Chicago between May and July 2019. Johnson claims that gun violence remains high in Chicago neighborhoods because, in his opinion, Bond Court Judges are routinely releasing violent criminals with substantial criminal histories pretrial, who then go out and commit more violent crimes.

The narrative is deceptively alluring, because it plays into assumptions we hold about who perpetrates crime. It plays into the public perception that there are sets of “bad guys” in our communities who cause the majority of the violence and that if we simply made sure they were locked up, gun violence in Chicago would be solved.

This narrative has been pushed by opponents of bond reform for years. But, as we have noted repeatedly, there is no data that remotely suggests that bond reform has decreased public safety. In fact, the data strongly suggests the opposite is true. Since Judge Timothy Evans issued Order 18.8A in September 2017 (which led to the release of many more people pretrial, crime has continued to drop and is at its lowest level in 4 years. The violent re-arrest rate for those released pre-trial is tiny – only 0.7% of people released pretrial are arrested for a new violent criminal offense.[1] Johnson’s claim that pretrial releasees are perpetuating a major proportion of the violence in Chicago is simply untrue.

Chief Johnson’s latest push back against bond reform is his “Gun Offender Dashboard.” However, this deceptively uses inaccurate data to try and suggest that people arrested for “gun offenses” are being released in large numbers and perpetuating violence upon release. In this “Dashboard,” Johnson manipulates the definition of “gun offender” to include only those arrested (yet not convicted) of the least-serious gun crimes. These individuals are most likely to be released before trial. Further, Johnson has inaccurately listed some individuals as “bonded” despite the fact they are still in Cook County Jail or confined to their homes on Electronic Monitoring. Using this flawed, biased definition, Johnson says that 62% of “gun offenders” have been released before trial. He is wrong. When he (and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot) suggest that it is commonplace for “gun offenders” with long criminal histories to be released before trial, he misleads the very community he is tasked to serve. More importantly, he is wrong that bail reform efforts are responsible for Chicago’s gun violence.

The first and biggest problem with the “Gun Offender Dashboard” is that it inaccurately lists who is and is not in custody, the very information Chief Johnson claims he wants to be transparent about[2]. The “Dashboard” repeatedly lists people as “bonded” who are still in Cook County Jail. Many have violated a probation or parole order by being arrested and are held in jail on those violations. This is especially important, because community supervision, like probation or parole, is one of the major ways our criminal justice system handles people who are arrested for a second offense shortly after being convicted of or leaving prison for one. By listing those people as “bonded” rather than “in custody,” Chief Johnson is misrepresenting the way that the criminal justice system determines who is or is not released after being arrested for a new crime.

Moreover, the data provided in the “Gun Offender Dashboard” is riddled with inaccuracies that make it unreliable. There is at least one person listed as “bonded” who was shot and killed in May 2019. The data contains only a few people listed as being arrested for murder, armed robbery, and aggravated battery with a firearm – violent offenses where a person actually used a gun to hurt or kill someone or to take someone’s property. Although it is difficult to know exactly how many people were arrested for violent gun crimes between May and today, in the same period in 2018, charges were initiated against 271 people for murders, armed robberies, and shootings.[3] It seems highly unlikely that the “Dashboard” contains a full count of people who were arrested for truly violent gun offenses. Because people with those charges are more frequently detained pretrial, excluding them from the “Dashboard” artificially lowers the percentage of people it states are held pretrial after being arrested with a gun.

All in all, the “Dashboard” does not list people who have been arrested for perpetrating violence. 99% of the “gun offenders” listed in the “Dashboard” are charged with gun possession offenses, which means that they are alleged to have had a gun without the legal documentation necessary to have it but were not alleged to have fired or used the gun in any way. People end up arrested for gun possession in a variety of ways. These arrestees run the gamut from passengers in cars where guns were found in the trunk (who may or may not turn out to have known the guns were there), to people carrying illegal guns for self-defense, to people who are entitled to own a handgun but simply have not completed the paperwork for their gun licenses correctly. Insinuating that everyone arrested in Chicago for gun possession is a violent criminal responsible for murders and violence is misleading and irresponsible. Gun possession arrestees are a varied group – which is part of the reason why 42% of gun possession cases end in a dismissal or a verdict of not guilty at trial.[4]

Lastly, the “Dashboard” does not say if a person released pretrial is being detained or monitored via alternative means, such as Electronic Monitoring. Gun possession arrestees are disproportionately released into Electronic Home Detention programs. Under these programs, they cannot leave their homes without specific permission from a judge or the Cook County Sheriff. If they break the rules of the program, they are charged with a new felony. It is simply false to suggest that everyone released from Bond Court is immediately sent back into their community with the same privileges and freedoms they had before they were arrested. In fact, many pretrial arrestees are subjected to a variety of onerous reporting and monitoring requirements after being released on bond, including curfews, check-ins with pretrial officers, treatment programs, and home confinement.

Chief Johnson is apparently attempting to use his “Gun Dashboard” to suggest that if we simply held people pretrial who had been arrested, we would solve gun violence in Chicago. Mayor Lightfoot has echoed this argument, suggesting that people are being released who have long criminal histories and gun possession charges. But even the gun possession arrestees with the most extensive criminal backgrounds are rarely arrested for further violence while they are released pretrial. 301 people with high criminal activity risk scores and new gun possession offenses were released (either with or without Electronic Monitoring) between September 2017 and May 2019.[5] Of them, only one was arrested for a new violent offense pretrial. In that same period, there were over 4,500 shootings.[6]

Everyone wants to find easy scapegoats for Chicago’s violence. It would be simple if the police and courts could identify and arrest all the “bad guys” in order to solve gun violence in one fell swoop. The truth is much more complicated and requires much more sophisticated strategies. People who perpetrate gun violence don’t have one specific criminal history pattern, arrest history, or demographic profile. Finding and prosecuting people who commit violent crime, and successfully preventing violent crime from happening in the future, requires deep community engagement and reinvestment. CPD’s abysmal relationship with the high-violence communities they are obligated to serve and protect prevents them from making the community connections necessary to solve violent crimes. In 2017, CPD solved only around 17% of the homicides committed and their clearance rate for nonfatal shootings was only 5%.[7]  Instead of advocating for proven violence prevention strategies like providing jobs, education, diversion programs, community-based conflict resolution, and reducing the total flow of guns into Chicago, CPD is again returning to the suggestion that we can use jails and prisons to detain our way out of our gun violence problem. We have tried to arrest and imprison our way out of violence for decades and have come no closer to building strong relationships between police and communities or to healing the trauma, poverty, and disconnections that contribute to gun violence in our city.

Chicago leaders need to focus on telling the truth about what we can do to understand, prevent, and respond to the violence in our communities, instead of using misleading statistics to try and give themselves an easy way out.

[1] Office of the Chief Judge of Cook County. Bail Reform in Cook County – An Examination of General Order 18.8A and Bail in Felony Cases http://www.cookcountycourt.org/Portals/0/Statistics/Bail%20Reform/Bail%20Reform%20Report%20FINAL%20-%20%20Published%2005.9.19.pdf

[2] “City, County Officials to Hold Crime Summit” (August 7, 2019). Quig, A. for Crain’s Chicago Business at https://www.chicagobusiness.com/government/city-county-officials-hold-crime-summit

[3] Data drawn from the Cook County States Attorney’s Office public case level data on case initiations, available at https://datacatalog.cookcountyil.gov/Courts/Initiation/7mck-ehwz

[4] Data drawn from the Cook County States Attorney’s Office public case level data on case dispositions, available at https://datacatalog.cookcountyil.gov/Courts/Dispositions/apwk-dzx8

[5] Drawn from The Chief Judge of Cook County’s Bond Court Data, Available at http://www.cookcountycourt.org/HOME/BailReform.aspx

[6] See Chicago Tribune, “Tracking Chicago’s Crime Victims” https://www.chicagotribune.com/data/ct-shooting-victims-map-charts-htmlstory.html

[7] See Chicago Tribune, “Why Chicago Violent Crimes Go Unsolved” https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-clearance-chicago-violence-shootings-murder-20180824-story.html