Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart’s office typically doesn’t deal with public transit. His office is usually occupied patrolling suburbs and running the jail system.
But that’s changed recently.
Dart’s deputies have begun patrolling CTA trains to address stubbornly high violence — making hundreds of arrests and issuing thousands of warnings in the last two and a half months.
And Dart is personally leading a transit task force — created under the state’s newly enacted transit law — that will decide early next year whether to recommend creating a unified police force to patrol the Chicago Transit Authority, Metra and Pace.
Creating a new police force would be one of the largest changes to how transit operates in Chicago. But it’s still early in the process, and Dart says there’s still a lot of talking to do before his working group makes a recommendation to the new Northern Illinois Transit Authority.
“I’d be lying to you right now if I’m wedded to one thing, but [making a unified transit police force] would be the easiest,” Dart said this week during an round of interviews with reporters.
All it would take is a lot of money. And Dart is worried about runaway costs he’s seen in Los Angeles, which recently formed its own transit police force.
“I’ve just been watching [L.A. and] how those costs have been ballooning. And it worries me,” Dart said.
Whatever the task force recommends, Dart is clear that it won’t be the current system where policing is split between Metra police, Chicago police on CTA, and many suburban police departments responding to Pace.
“This cannot be some just bifurcated thing where there’s no accountability at all because no one knows who’s running what thing,” he said.
Dart said the new transit police system, whatever form it takes, will have a single security chief in charge, in accordance with the NITA law signed by Gov. JB Pritzker and enacted at the start of June.
The new police system also can’t rely on officers volunteering for overtime, which is what CPD’s recent surge in officers relies heavily on, Dart said.
“That’s not a plan at all. That doesn’t work. So it’s going to have to be either a standalone department, or something that’s more nuanced … like certain areas (have) a standalone department,” Dart said.
All of that still needs to be worked out in the task force. And that will take time. Dart says the task force hasn’t officially met yet, though his office has been talking to other transit agencies and police departments for months.
Learning from CTA patrols
Those early talks initially prompted sheriff’s deputies to begin patrolling CTA trains, Dart said, even before President Donald Trump’s administration pressured the CTA to increase patrols or risk losing federal funding in March.
About 50 deputies have been patrolling CTA trains each day, Dart said. They initially started on Red Line trains on the South Side, but have since expanded to riding all other train lines. Dart said they’ve already learned lessons about deployment and enforcement that will be shared in their task force report.
The CTA has said the patrols are working. Serious crime on the Red Line was down 70% in April, though batteries across the whole system remained at historic heights.
In these patrols, Dart said, the deputies’ main goal is reintroducing an atmosphere of enforcement. And that started with applying basic rules like fare enforcement, Dart said.
Some train stations had a fare evasion rate of upwards of 80%, Dart said.
“Virtually no one was paying,” he said.
So they started placing deputies near the entrances to watch over turnstiles and issue verbal warnings.
Fare evasion “really sets the mindset off of an individual,” Dart said. “Do you think they’re only concerned about smoking? … about drinking? … about urinating on the train? No, it just sort of lets everything sort of spin out of control.”
Deputies have also been focused on addressing homelessness and mental illness, issues that often intersect on transit.
The NITA law calls for unarmed, trained “transit ambassadors” to begin assisting passengers next year. Dart says they will be a welcome and necessary addition to the system to offload some of the work being placed on officers who are being tied up responding to mental health emergencies.
“If our officers had to spend the vast majority of their time just dealing with that issue, we’d do no other thing,” Dart said.