Electronic Monitoring is irretrievably broken
Officials are now admitting that Cook County's pathetic and dangerous electronic monitoring system, a program that is supposed to make sure convicts are properly serving their home-based criminal sentences, has lost track of more than 300 people.
Cook County Chief Judge Charles Beach II said in a statement that about eight percent of those assigned electronic monitoring can't be found. While eight percent does not sound like much, out of the 3,048 convicts who are in the EM system, 244 seem to have disappeared from monitoring in Chicago and the surrounding communities, WLS-TV reported.
"Transparency is not optional — it is a core obligation of this office," Judge Beach said in a statement, according to NBC's WMAQ-TV. "The public has a right to know how this program operates, what the data shows and what we are doing every day to make it stronger."
Cook County State's Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke, who won office a year ago running on a tougher on crime platform, issued a statement of her own calling the Chief Judge's announcement "alarming."
Burke added the data "clearly demonstrates how current safeguards are falling short, particularly when [electronic monitoring] is available to those charged with the most threatening and heinous crimes."
"We should all be deeply concerned that hundreds of defendants placed on EM are unaccounted for." she continued. "This creates the potential for more violence, more victims, more fear and heartache in our community."
The EM program has not just blacked out on petty criminals, either.
The data shows 21 convicts charged with murder, 13 charged with attempted murder, 173 charged with aggravated assault, and 29 people charged with aggravated criminal sexual assault are no longer being tracked by their assigned EM device.
Burke added one policy change she is implementing is to order county prosecutors to ask judges for automatic detention in violent criminal cases, not electronic monitoring.
'If we ask for detention, we make sure we put every bit of information in front of a judge to establish why we believe this person represents a danger. As we did in this case," she said.
The EM debate featured as part of the recent shooting of Chicago Police Officer John Bartholomew, who was murdered by Alphonso Talley, a felon who had been on EM thanks to a previous violent crime.
Beach has made a few changes to the system as it now stands. For one, he has redefined a "major violation" as an unapproved absence of three hours or more, down from the previous threshold of 48 hours.
The judge also changed the former weekends off policy and will now impose the 48 hours timer seven days a week, WTTW noted.
Burke blasted the EM program back in April, as well, in the aftermath of officer Bartholomew's murder.
"The electronic monitoring system is broken," she said, according to NBC. "It does not work."
"Electronic monitoring is not an alternative to detention. It does not keep people safe," she added at the time.
Judge Beach had launched a committee back in December to look into changes in the county's EM program Unfortunately, Beach's changes were not in time to stop convict Lawrence Reed, 50, from dousing 26-year-old Blue Line passenger Bethany MaGee with gasoline and setting her on fire in November 2025.
Reed has a long rap sheet having been arrested 72 times by the CPD. He has 15 criminal convictions and a history of mental illness. Alarmingly, he also has a history of constantly being released by the Cook County justice system and was on electronic monitoring when he tried to murder the CTA passenger.
Fortunately, the Blue Line victim survived her attempted murder, but it could just as easily had gone another way.
The EM system was supposed to be a policy of compassion to allow small time crooks a break from serving time in jail. But Chicago's George Soros-backed former prosecutor, Kim Foxx, used the program instead to put dangerous, violent felons back out on our streets.
Burke is right. Violent criminals need to be locked up, not routinely released to their homes. While it's good to be finally seeing something done about this outrage, the danger won't be passed until these 300 convicts are re-identified and put safely behind bars.
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