Who is Getting Arrested

Our friends over at The Contrarian did a deep dive into arrest numbers:

• The Chicago Police Department (CPD) has maintained its arrest records in electronic format dating back to the 1990s. For those who are seeking records prior to 1990, there is going to be some paper required, but electronically, CPD maintains over 6.5 million records.

  Going back 25 years, the number of arrests made by CPD in the early part of the century was fairly consistent. Between 1999 and 2009 the number annual arrests remained steady between 250,000 and 300,000.

  In 2007, however, arrests peaked at 295,876. In the years following, arrests trended downward, and a ten-year decline bottomed out with 142,090 arrests in 2016. This is not a measure of crime — either real or perceived — in Chicago. It is just a matter of arithmetic: In 2016 CPD arrested fewer than half of the number of people it had 10 years earlier.

We're not going to steal their content, charts and graphs (go over there and read it all), but the numbers behind the numbers are a real eye-opener:

• However, an examination of who is arrested and their place of birth becomes more intriguing when analyzing 2021. In the 11 years spanning 2010 – 2020 the percentage of foreign-born arrestees never rose above 12 percent. The peak is 2014 with 11.9 percent. In 2020 it was 10.5 percent. Then, as if there was a sudden change in policy, the rate jumps over three percentage points (and greater than 30 percent) to 13.6 percent in 2021.

  A trend that continued, the rate of foreign-born arrestees rose to 18.7 percent in 2022, and in 2023, it continued to rise steadily to 24.9 percent. Through July of this year, it is running at 31.9 percent. In sum, over the last three-year period, the rate at which CPD arrests foreign-born individuals has nearly tripled.

Shocking....not.