Boss Toni’s 72-arrest blind spot
Listen carefully to the words of Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle.
What the longtime Democratic boss of Chicago politics is telling you — plainly and without apology — is that she will never break her faith in electronic monitoring and she will never support amending the so-called SAFE-T Act, despite mounting evidence both policies are failing the law-abiding residents of Cook County.
That’s her position.
But if the progressive political class wants to claim the “data” is on their side, then let’s actually look at the data.
Because the case that triggered the latest debate tells us almost everything we need to know.
The 72-arrest problem
The man at the center of the recent CTA horror story — Lawrence Reed — had been arrested 72 times before allegedly setting a woman on fire on a Chicago train.
Seventy-two.
That number is so large it almost stops sounding real.
Out of those arrests, Reed had accumulated 15 convictions, including eight felony convictions.
Under the traditional understanding of criminal justice, someone with that kind of record would be considered a career offender — a habitual criminal whose long history demonstrates a clear danger to the public.
Yet, Reed was not in prison.
He was not in long-term custody.
Instead, he was out on the streets of Chicago — riding the CTA like everyone else.
And, incredibly, he was supposed to be on electronic monitoring at the time of the alleged attack.
Electronic monitoring, for those unfamiliar with the concept, is essentially a GPS ankle bracelet that is supposed to track an offender’s movements while allowing them to remain free in the community.
In theory, it is meant to be a less expensive and more humane alternative to incarceration.
In practice, it often functions as little more than a high-tech hall pass.
The progressive faith in electronic monitoring
For years, Cook County officials have defended electronic monitoring as a cornerstone of criminal justice reform.
Preckwinkle and other progressive leaders argue incarceration should be reduced, cash bail eliminated, and non-violent offenders supervised in the community whenever possible.
That philosophy became state law in Illinois with the passage of the Illinois SAFE-T Act, which dramatically reshaped the pretrial detention system and effectively ended traditional cash bail.
The idea was simple: people accused of crimes should not remain in jail simply because they are poor.
Instead, judges would decide who should be detained and who could be released under conditions such as electronic monitoring.
Supporters claimed the reform would reduce incarceration without compromising public safety.
Critics warned it would do the opposite.
Events like the Reed case suggest the critics may have had a point.
The revolving door
The deeper problem is that Reed’s case is not unique.
Cook County has repeatedly released offenders with long criminal histories, placing them on electronic monitoring instead of keeping them behind bars.
And many of those offenders go on to commit additional crimes.
That’s because electronic monitoring, despite its technological sophistication, has a basic flaw: it does not physically prevent someone from committing a crime.
It only records where they were.
In other words, it is a tool for tracking, not for stopping.
A person wearing an ankle monitor can still ride the train, enter a store, walk into a neighborhood, or approach a potential victim.
The bracelet might record their location — but it doesn’t stop the act.
Which is why the public is increasingly skeptical when politicians insist the system is working.
A failure of common sense
The Reed case illustrates something that most ordinary citizens understand instinctively but that many policymakers seem unwilling to acknowledge.
At some point, the sheer number of prior offenses becomes the most important piece of information.
Seventy-two arrests is not a statistical anomaly.
It is a pattern of behavior.
A pattern that suggests the system failed to intervene effectively long before the most recent crime occurred.
So when politicians insist that the answer is simply to “look at the data,” the natural response is obvious:
What data could possibly be more persuasive than 72 arrests?
How many arrests should it take before the system concludes that a person poses a continuing danger?
Eighty?
One hundred?
Or is there no number that would ever be considered enough?
CTA riders pay the price
Meanwhile, the people who suffer the consequences of these policies are not politicians or policy experts.
They are ordinary Chicagoans riding public transit.
The Chicago Transit Authority has struggled for years with rising concerns about crime and safety on trains and buses.
Riders have reported assaults, robberies, and other disturbing incidents that have contributed to declining ridership and growing public anxiety.
Stories about passengers being attacked — or even set on fire — only deepen those fears.
For many commuters, the CTA is not an optional service.
It is how they get to work, school, or medical appointments.
When the system becomes perceived as dangerous, it affects the entire city’s economic and social life.
And when repeat offenders remain free despite dozens of prior arrests, it reinforces the perception that the justice system is not functioning as it should.
Ideology vs. reality
At its core, the debate over electronic monitoring and the SAFE-T Act is really a debate about ideology versus reality.
The ideological argument is that incarceration is overused and alternatives such as electronic monitoring can safely reduce jail populations.
But the Reed case illustrates the danger of applying that philosophy without limits.
Someone with one prior arrest might reasonably be supervised in the community.
Someone with 72 arrests is a different story.
When policymakers refuse to acknowledge that distinction, they risk undermining public confidence in the entire criminal justice system.
The politics of refusal
Yet despite the growing list of troubling cases, Preckwinkle has made it clear she has no intention of reconsidering her position.
She continues to defend electronic monitoring and opposes efforts to amend the SAFE-T Act.
That refusal is striking because public policy is supposed to evolve in response to evidence.
When a policy fails, responsible leaders modify it.
But in Chicago’s political culture, acknowledging a mistake is often seen as a sign of weakness.
So instead, officials double down.
They insist the system is working — even when cases like Reed’s suggest otherwise.
A question for Chicago's leaders
Ultimately, the debate comes down to a simple question.
If a person with 72 prior arrests and 15 convictions can still end up on electronic monitoring instead of in custody, what exactly would qualify someone as too dangerous for release?
Because if that record doesn’t trigger serious reconsideration, it’s hard to imagine what would.
For the law-abiding residents of Chicago and Cook County, the answer matters.
Public safety is not an abstract policy discussion.
It’s the difference between feeling secure on the train ride home and wondering whether the person sitting across from you is another career criminal who slipped through the system yet again.
Remember who built the system
But Chicagoans should remember something else about Boss Toni.
This is the same political boss who helped engineer the breakdown of Cook County’s criminal justice system in the first place.
It was Preckwinkle who helped propel Kim Foxx into office, ushering in an era of so-called reform prosecution that often looked more like non-prosecution.
And when Foxx finally stepped aside after years of controversy, Preckwinkle didn’t rethink the strategy.
Instead, she tried to install an even more ideologically aggressive successor.
That effort failed — not because of the political establishment, but because ordinary voters finally pushed back.
At the polls, they said enough was enough.
But the broader political machine that produced those policies is still very much alive.
And the person who has presided over much of the fiscal and public safety decline of Cook County is still sitting in the chairman’s office.
Under Preckwinkle’s watch, residents have endured skyrocketing property taxes, chronic fiscal instability, and a criminal justice experiment that too often prioritizes ideology over public safety.
So when she says she will never reconsider electronic monitoring or revisit the SAFE-T Act framework, believe her.
Because that stubborn refusal is exactly how the system got into this mess in the first place.
A chance to end the experiment in terror
Which brings us to the real point.
On March 17, voters will have another opportunity to weigh in.
If residents are tired of policies that treat repeat offenders as social experiments while law-abiding citizens pay the price, then that election will offer a simple choice.
Chicagoans can decide whether Boss Toni’s long tenure should continue — or whether it’s finally time to send her back to live under the same conditions the rest of the city has been forced to endure.
Back on the very streets that, under her leadership, have become less safe and more fiscally unsound than ever before.
And if voters decide they’ve had enough, they can do something the political establishment rarely expects.
They can fire the boss.
