The more we learn about the shooting of two Chicago police officers in the line of duty on Saturday morning, the more outrageous the story becomes.
John Bartholomew should not have died.
Another officer should not be fighting for his life.
The families of the remaining approximately 11,600 patrol officers should not now have added worry about the safety of their loved ones serving the city in the Chicago Police Department.
But due to the SAFE-T Act, based on current reporting from the usually-well-sourced site CWBChicago, a criminal with multiple arrests and convictions was given concurrent sentences with electronic monitoring counting for “time served” for some of his crimes, and was, despite his criminal record, given pretrial release with few restrictions and as of mid-March there was an open arrest warrant as an escapee from electronic monitoring.
Had the SAFE-T Act not given the judge such wide latitude, this man would have been jailed, not free to commit Saturday morning’s robbery and then shoot the two officers after his capture.
When last November, a man on electronic monitoring set fire to a young woman on the Blue Line, there was briefly enough outrage that even Gov. Pritzker acknowledged that there needed to be “a trailer bill or a tweak” and claimed that “everybody is open to listening to what changes might need to be made.”
But then people stopped paying attention, and when Senate and House Republicans introduced five different bills to reform the SAFE-T Act, the House Democrats were not even willing to go so far as to assign any of them to a committee.
This is infuriating. Between the wide latitude the SAFE-T Act gives judges to decide to release suspects to await trial, and in some cases, the restrictions that prevent even good judges from detaining suspects, innocent people are suffering.
We simply can’t continue with “business as usual” where far-left Democrats set the agenda and prevent moderate reforms.
And this is not just a “Chicago” issue — our fate as suburbanites is bound up together with the city’s well-being. Many of us have friends or family who live in the city, and even if not, crime doesn’t respect city limits.
If I am elected as your State Representative, I will push for these sort of bipartisan reforms we sorely need. But whether or not I succeed, next January is too far away. We all need to make it clear to our elected officials that this is intolerable and cannot continue.