Frequent CTA riders may have noticed a change lately: a visible presence from the Cook County Sheriff’s Office. Officers have been patrolling the trains since the end of March as part of a large effort to make the transit system a safer experience.
Sheriff Tom Dart has a message for anyone who takes public transit: His office is not letting the small stuff go anymore, including smoking, crossing from one car to another or jumping the turnstile to avoid paying.
“We’re not going to tolerate that, and we are obsessed with making your riding experience what it should be. You paid to go on here. You didn’t pay to sit there while someone’s blowing smoke in your face, listening to loud music, committing crimes,” Dart said. “That notion that somehow you would ever have to accept that, that’s insane.”
Last year, lawmakers voted to overhaul northern Illinois’ transit system and combine CTA, Metra and Pace into one agency called the Northern Illinois Transit Authority, or NITA. They asked Dart to lead NITA’s law enforcement task force in cooperation with the Chicago Police Department and other agencies.
Dart began researching transit systems in other large cities.
“Between COVID funding that was drying up and ridership that had not bounced back since COVID, a lot of systems around the country were cratering, and ours was there, too,” Dart said.
The trains are staffed with about 50 officers per day, primarily on the red, green and blue lines. NBC 5 Investigates got the opportunity to ride the trains and watch officers in action. We watched officers detain someone for crossing between train cars, but they let him go with a warning after searching him and making sure he didn’t have any warrants.
Since the sheriff’s office started the initiative on March 27, officers have issued more than 1,500 warnings for offenses that would normally be violations, like smoking, loud music, passing through the emergency doors between cars, open alcohol and drinking. Officers have made 225 arrests, including 74 people who were wanted by law enforcement. They arrested 10 sex offenders who failed to register.
Additionally, they’ve found 10 missing people on the trains and helped riders get connected to housing and mental health resources.
“The CTA gave us data recently that shows that along the Red Line, there’s been a 77 percent drop in (violent) crime since we have been out there. We do not take all the credit for that,” Dart said.
The Federal Transit Administration threatened to withhold federal funding from the CTA over safety issues after a woman was set on fire on the blue line last November. Dart said he had already been asked to create the task force by that time, but the incident was a wake-up call.
“I think that drove home to people, ‘We don’t have time to sit and put … a two-year think tank together,'” Dart said. “We need to be fixing it while we’re doing it.”
Over the course of about three months, the sheriff’s office has spent more than $3.1 million on the initiative.
The task force has six months to put together a report with recommendations. As for whether officers will still be involved after the end of the year, Dart said that is still up in the air.
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