Kim Foxx’s Office Says CPD Is Arresting The Wrong People To Curb Gun Violence
Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx speaks at a news conference in Chicago in 2019. Her office presented data this week that show that the Chicago Police Department’s gun arrests are increasingly dragging into the criminal justice system people who have no prior convictions and who committed no violent crime.
According to data visualizations displayed by Foxx’s office during the webinar, CPD gun arrests have nearly doubled since 2014. That increase is mainly due to arrests for gun possession, a crime that Foxx’s office deems “nonviolent” because the gun is not used or fired.
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One chart displayed by Foxx’s office suggests that the increase in CPD’s gun-possession arrests owes mainly to street stops of people with no prior convictions. From 2011 to 2016, those arrests never exceeded 300 a year. Each year since then, however, has brought a big increase. By 2020, there were more than 1,400 and Saniie said CPD is on pace to exceed that number this year.
CPD arrest numbers for violent gun crimes, meantime, have trended down over the years, according to the presentation. So has the rate at which CPD solves shootings.
It's so much easier, after all, to prosecute the people who aren't part of the problem.