Chicago City Wire

In an Oct. 12 Facebook post, Rep. Brad Stephens said the criminal justice reform SAFE-T Act should be repealed.

"Democrats should have listened to public safety experts and advocates before they passed the SAFE-T Act to protect Illinois families from this dangerous law," Stephens wrote. "The SAFE-T Act needs more than tweaks, it needs to be repealed today to ensure the safety of our residents and communities across the state."

Stephens posted a link to a Fox News story in which Gov. J.B. Pritzker said at a recent campaign stop that he believes people don't understand the Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today (SAFE-T) Act, so he is open to considering "tweaks to the legislation" and changing the language "so that people will understand."

The story quoted Zack Smith, a legal fellow and manager of the Supreme Court and Appellate Advocacy Program at The Heritage Foundation, who said, "I think the problem is that people understand it perfectly fine and what the plain language of the bill says is disastrous. So this idea that people have somehow misunderstood it, particularly local elected states attorneys who will be charged with implementing the legislation, is rich coming from the governor." 

One hundred of Illinois' 102 state's attorneys have said they oppose the bill, with many other lawmakers and law enforcement officials specifically pushing back against the elimination of cash bail. Critics have also expressed concern over provisions of the bill that they believe will hamper law enforcement and that will allow currently incarcerated people to be released

"I know the governor disputes this but there are currently incarcerated individuals who are going to be released when this bill takes effect," Smith said. "So you're talking about not only the prospective application of this, but also the immediate flood of people that are going to be released back onto the streets statewide when this bill takes effect. And that, I would say, is going to have a very negative impact on public safety in Illinois."

One provision of the SAFE-T Act that took effect in January of this year allows criminal defendants who are awaiting trial on home confinement to move freely, without electronic monitoring, two days a week, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. The defendants are supposed to use that time to look for employment, attend school, undergo treatment for a drug addiction or mental illness, or grocery shop. However, in the first three months of 2022, around two dozen people were arrested in Cook County during their "essential movement" days. 

Democratic Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart has called for an end to the "essential movement" provision, stating, “At a bare minimum, they should say, ‘If you’re charged with a violent offense, and you’re given home monitoring, you don’t get to wander around free for two days a week.”

Defendants who are on electronic monitoring are subject to compliance checks on their homes, and in the first five months of this year, police found contraband at 60 of the 69 homes that had been checked, NBC Chicago reported. Police recovered a total of 84 firearms from 39 of the homes. Sgt. Carl Price pointed to the essential movement days as contributing to the problem. "They have access to go places that they probably couldn't go before the essential movement, to obtain things that they shouldn't have," Price said. 

The NBC Chicago story also quoted Dart who said that the only reason officers aren't performing more compliance checks is because they don't have enough manpower. "I have zero doubt that if we had double the amount of people on the street, that we'd be finding double the amount of guns," Dart said.