Chicago City Wire

The cashless bail era begins in Illinois on September 18, and has so many flaws, former mayoral candidate Paul Vallas writes in a recent commentary, that it will put “dangerous and repeat offenders back on the street.”

This while Chicago’s crime rate continues to accelerate, a new Wirepoints analysis of crime statistics shows, with robberies and car thefts leading the way.

Vallas says that what’s missing in the cashless bail system, approved by the General Assembly as part of the SAFE-T Act late last year, is the “real ability for judges to separate habitual offenders and require or deny them bail.”

“While the law allows judges to detain arrestees based on charges or criminal history, Illinois does not provide the additional resources needed to manage defendants detained before trial,” he writes.

This doesn’t bode well for an already exploding crime rate in Chicago.

Major crimes are up 34% this year, after a 33% increase last year, Wirepoints reports.

“2023’s crimes are following the same path as in years past, but at a much higher level than before,” the report said. “Each month, about 1,600 more major crimes – including homicides, criminal sexual assaults, robberies, burglaries, major thefts, aggravated batteries and motor vehicle thefts – are committed in Chicago compared to 2022.”

Robberies are running 20 percent higher compared to last year and car-thefts are up by nearly 110 percent, the analysis shows – the report cited a July story by ABC Chicago:

“The armed robberies have happened downtown, and on the North, Northwest and West sides. In each incident, police said the suspects got out of a car with guns and robbed their victims, sometimes stealing their cars and attacking them.”

And the report cautions to take no comfort from the decline in the murder rate in the city over last year; other major urban centers have seen their murder rates drop even more. The Chicago murder rate is down six percent over last year, but the rate in Los Angeles is down 25 percent, and Philadelphia down 23 percent.

Vallas says state lawmakers should approve new legislation that “explicitly allows or even mandates pretrial detention for serious and habitual criminal offenders.”

And the General Assembly should provide courts with the infrastructure and resources needed to make fully informed, fact-based bond and pretrial release determinations.

“That includes staff to run background checks and make recommendations, as the federal courts already have,” Vallas said.