Chicago

A college student was convicted of murder for a death he did not cause. Reforms to the controversial law that landed him in prison have not led to his freedom.

The city of Chicago is cutting ties with the gunshot detection firm ShotSpotter. But the product’s parent company—and competitors—now offer so many interlocking services that it’s nearly impossible for departments to cut the cord.

Eighteen people died at the jail last year, and half of the deaths featured examples of inadequate supervision and medical care, an Injustice Watch investigation found. Sheriff Tom Dart blames detainees overdosing on drug-laced paper and says he’s addressed the problem, but experts say there’s a renewed need for oversight.

My husband Nick died from COVID-19 in March 2020 while imprisoned pretrial. Joe Biden has said he’d help others like him before it’s too late. But so far, the president has yet to make good on his promises.

The department reported misses more than 550 times in 2023, and a public safety director complained about a 55-round miss in 2022.

Advocates say the Cook County Sheriff’s Department’s house-arrest policies trap women in unsafe situations—and often force mothers to choose between their safety or their children.

In various offices across two decades, Mayor Lightfoot has failed to bring change to the Chicago Police Department.

Prosecutors across the country have begun declining low-level cases in an effort to reduce racial inequity and to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In many of America’s major cities, the early efforts to reduce incarceration during the pandemic have been reversed.

The move is part of a broader criminal justice reform bill that also ends prison gerrymandering, and mandates body cameras for all police departments.

When election and racial justice protests rocked the city, Lori Lightfoot used raised bridges and shutdown public transportation as crowd control measures, which harmed the city’s workers.

The proposed legislation would expand the city’s public mental healthcare system using funds reallocated from the police budget.

White voices and victims dominate the genre, which can skew the perception of what constitutes a crime.

President Trump and the DOJ are funding federal policing programs in cities like Detroit, Chicago, and Baltimore, but advocates say they’re unnecessary, harmful, and ineffective.

In difficult moments like this, we can’t let bad faith attacks set our community back. What our families need are resources and investment, not more police on the streets.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot has hampered the process of installing a police oversight council, activists say, despite making it a major part of her public safety platform during her mayoral run.

Advocates question why Chicago judges continued to order people to home detention instead of releasing them on their own recognizance.

Prisoners say the jail, which has seen more than 800 confirmed cases, is a ‘death trap’ plagued by sanitary issues and a lack of testing. Their testimonies stand at stark odds with the sheriff’s office, which says it is keeping ‘staff and detainees as safe as possible.’

As infections and deaths mount, state leaders and law enforcement are turning to tough-on-crime tactics in the face of the COVID-19 outbreak.

With one term under her belt as Chicago’s top prosecutor, Foxx says she has more work to do to right a system that has been “unfair, and totally unjust.”

The former mayor issued a city resolution honoring officers for their ‘bravery’ in a shooting that paralyzed Tarance Etheredge, who will receive a payout from a civil rights lawsuit.

According to a complaint, police in Oak Lawn, a suburb of Chicago, subjected Tylus Allen Jr. to invasive searches, all of which turned up nothing.

On Nov. 1, the FBI released a trove of previously undisclosed documents related to a decades-old investigation of police misconduct. In the 1990s, the agency investigated allegations of torture at the hands of Chicago police at the department’s Area 2 headquarters, where heinous acts of violence and psychological abuse were perpetrated against over 100 Black men and women under the supervision of then-commander Jon Burge. 

The mayors of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco wrap themselves in the language of progressivism, but when it comes to the criminal legal system they’re Trumpian.

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx is partnering with a technology nonprofit to expunge tens of thousands of minor marijuana convictions. Other jurisdictions could follow.

How high or low bond is isn’t a measure of how severe the state considers a crime.

Children as young as 4 years old are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result, the complaints say.

A new report shows that a progressive approach, like the one advanced by Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, can help decrease jail populations—and crime.

Outlets ran over 200 articles covering the vandalism. The outsize attention will likely damage young lives.

CBS 2 Chicago relied on police voices and irrelevant data to question efforts to end cash bail.

In 2015, the Chicago City Council passed a reparations ordinance. That ordinance, the first of its kind in the country, was the city’s official acknowledgment that Jon Burge, a Chicago police commander, and detectives under his command, “systematically engaged in acts of torture, physical abuse and coercion of African American men and women at Area […]

Many jurisdictions across the country use video instead of holding bail hearings in person, a practice that often leads to dire consequences.

Chicago hands out millions in settlements and legal fees for police misconduct. Its newly inaugurated mayor should take a dollar from the department’s budget for every dollar the city spends settling with its victims.

With Chicago activist Celia Colón

Cook County has a new contract for juvenile ankle monitors that critics say are an invasion of privacy.

There are more than 2,700 people on electronic monitoring in Cook County, Illinois, alone.

Jason Van Dyke’s sentence for the 2014 murder of Laquan McDonald is approximately half the average sentence for a person convicted of second-degree murder in Cook County, Illinois.

Josie and Clint talk to Cook County’s head prosecutor.

No Cook County judge has lost a retention election in 28 years.

With writer Kelly Hayes.