Crime is Up, Budget is...?

So where are the budget cuts to Dart's jail?

• The Cook County Jail population has dipped below 5,000 for only the second time in nearly four decades, a drop experts are linking to Illinois’ historic elimination of cash bail on Sept. 18.

  The jail had 4,909 detainees as of Thursday, according to Sheriff Tom Dart’s office. The only time since the mid-1980s that the jail’s population was smaller was a 141-day stretch of 2020, as officials scrambled to combat a COVID-19 outbreak inside the facility.

  “We’re always pleased to see that there are fewer people in cages,” said Sarah Staudt, an attorney with the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice, which helped forge the bail measure. “We expect to see some fluctuation in [the jail population size] going forward. But we hope that the courts and prosecutors and everyone else involved stay committed to the law and to applying the law correctly, so that we can see this trend continue.”

We should be seeing millions in savings, yes? And refunds from the County government?

This part of the article made us shake our heads a bit:

• WBEZ reached out to several law enforcement groups and agencies for comment on the jail population drop, but most did not respond. Previously, some of those groups have predicted that many arrestees released due to cash bail’s elimination would find new victims.

No one reached out to us, but we did notice these articles posted by SeeBS the other day:

• An attempted robbery led to a man being shot and killed on Chicago's Northwest Side late Tuesday morning. Two victims, a 50-year-old woman and a 48-year-old man, were in the 1600 block of North Lawndale Avenue around 10:46 a.m. when two armed suspects got out of a white sedan and approached them, Chicago police said. One of the suspects fired a gun, striking the male victim. The suspects then fled the scene inside the sedan without taking any belongings.
• Following three armed robberies near campus, the University of Illinois at Chicago on Tuesday became the third Chicago university to warn students about spiking violent crimes in recent weeks. Spokespeople for UIC said they wanted to make two things clear: the three robberies happened just off campus, and they take safety very seriously. 
• Chicago police are warning residents about a series of armed robberies in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. Police say the robberies happened between the months of August and October during the afternoon hours. In each incident, the offender, while riding a bike or scooter, pointed a gun at victims or threatened to shoot them before taking headphones, money, and jewelry.

The articles were posted in a twenty-hour span covering 10/11 October and detail at least seven armed robberies and a homicide. You can't open up a news website (see links in the right hand column) and not find at least two articles about robberies. We can't prove that the no-bail option is or isn't contributing to the uptick, but we can make an educated guess after nearly thirty years on the job and well over fifty living in Chicago.