CTA Crime is....

So this happened the other day:

• The Chicago Transit Authority has ended a multi-million dollar contract that paid for hundreds of unarmed security guards, saying it is redirecting those funds to officers and other trained professionals “better equipped” to keep riders safe.

  The cuts to private security were made suddenly on Friday evening, according to Monterrey Security, which got word from CTA that roughly 250 full-time guards working on bus and rail systems should stop working that night.

  It was a surprise to the company, which says the CTA had signed a one-year renewal to its contract three weeks earlier.

There's the usual political fallout that happens when someone's graft dried up.

But then we headed over the CWB site and found this:

• A man’s decision to smoke while riding the Red Line was all it took for Cook County Sheriff’s Police to strike up a conversation and discover he was carrying a loaded firearm, officials said Monday. He is at least the third person arrested by the agency for possessing a gun on CTA trains since its officers began patrolling Chicago’s rail lines late last month.
• Less than two weeks after Cook County Sheriff’s Police arrested Vincent Jones for allegedly having a gun on the Red Line, his pretrial release went up in smoke Monday when they arrested him again at the same station — this time for allegedly carrying what amounted to a portable cannabis dispensary in his backpack. And yes, it happened on 4/20.
• Chicago police officers seized two firearms and arrested two men during a single incident at the same CTA station in the Loop on Sunday morning, the latest sign of progress in a reinvigorated push to reclaim the city’s train lines from criminals and ne’er-do-wells. 

Three of the top four stories on CWB are about weapons being seized on the CTA indirect violation of the "No Guns" signs that appear everywhere....no, wait, the stories are about actual police and sheriff officers taking over for unarmed security guards and effectively patrolling the CTA trains and platforms for criminals - something that should have been happening all along.

Granted this is being done to prevent the feds from taking a shitload of misappropriated money from the CTA - we actually saw a brand new Ford F-150 pick-up with a CTA paint job the other day....and it had the leather interior trim, which isn't something you normally see on a CTA pick-up truck unless someone else is paying for it.

Let's see if it continues.