Disaster in the Making

We can see this ending badly:

• Cook County’s top judge on Monday ordered his fellow judges who conduct bond court to release all defendants who pose no criminal danger to the public, veering sharply away from a cash-for-bond system that critics have long contended unfairly lands the poor behind bars.
  
  “If they are not deemed a danger to any person or the public, my order states that they will receive a bail they can afford,” Chief Judge Evans told the Sun-Times.
  
  “Defendants should not be sitting in jail awaiting trial simply because they lack the financial resources to secure their release,” Evans said, noting that judges will now be required to ask how much a defendant can afford to pay.
  
  On the other end of the spectrum, Evans’ order also calls for judges to stop issuing cash bonds for dangerous people.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Cook County judges aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer. Most are political hacks, put into place as rewards for being mediocre lawyers and excellent politicians. Expecting them to adhere to something like a new bail schedule is like expecting them to follow sentencing guidelines - nearly impossible. They take their marching orders from politicians with the fingers in the breeze of popular opinion, you know, like Kim Foxxx refusing to prosecute statutes passed by the Legislature.

Without a bond, an actual cash guarantee to compel appearances in Court, we see a whole bunch of no-shows in the immediate future. And you can't really have a Bond Forfeiture Warrant without something (like cash) to forfeit. Oh sure, the clerks will enter it into the system somehow and understaffed cops/sheriffs will grab the Warrant List and go looking, shorthanded as they always are, with a backlog of tens of thousands of active warrants. And someone designated "non violent" will suddenly become violent and people/folks will cry, "It was only a shoplifting warrant - why did the police have to use so much force?"