This article was produced by Bolts, a nonprofit publication that covers criminal justice and voting rights in local governments, and is reprinted with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.
In the early evening on Feb. 19, two Chicago police officers arrested a 40-year-old man in the Englewood neighborhood. According to their report, the officers cited an odor of “raw cannabis emitting from within the vehicle” to search the car. They didn’t turn up any drugs, but they did find a nine millimeter handgun under the driver’s seat. He owned the gun legally but he didn’t have a concealed carry permit, so the officers arrested him and took him to the lockup at the Seventh District station.
Had the arrest happened anywhere else in the city, the police at this stage would have had to check with the prosecutor’s office before proceeding any further. Longstanding policy requires the Chicago Police Department (CPD) to clear all felony charges except drug cases with the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office before they’re filed. The process, known as felony review, ensures cases meet basic legal and factual standards and allows prosecutors to exercise at least nominal oversight over how police officers are justifying their allegations.
But that’s no longer the process in parts of Chicago’s South Side. A new initiative is being tested in the Seventh District—which covers Englewood and other nearby neighborhoods—that allows police to file felony gun possession charges without approval from a prosecutor. In the Feb. 19 case, the CPD directly filed charges for aggravated unlawful possession of a weapon against the 40-year old.
The program was designed jointly by the CPD and by the county prosecutor’s office, which is headed since early December by State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke. It launched on Jan. 1, according to a CPD directive obtained by Bolts through a Freedom of Information Act request.
In the two months since the initiative launched, the CPD has used it to file at least 22 felony cases without review, the state’s attorney’s office told Bolts. While the pilot only exists in one of Chicago’s 25 police districts so far, officials plan to review the pilot every three months and could expand it city- or county-wide.
The move is one of the clearest signs yet that O’Neill Burke, who took office in December, is looking to adopt a more trusting attitude toward police than her more progressive predecessor Kim Foxx. Elected in the aftermath of a police officer’s murder of Laquan McDonald, Foxx promptly drew heavy attacks from the city’s police union. She rolled out policies meant to better check the police, for instance publicly releasing a list of officers with a history of misconduct and reforming the county’s search warrant policy, even as her office drew criticisms for glaring blind spots.
The CPD has a longstanding legacy of coercion and deception, from fabricated evidence to bogus charges, targeting Black communities like Englewood. Police reformers for years have demanded stronger checks and balances from local and county officials, including pressing the prosecutor’s office under Foxx to devote more resources to felony review and apply the review process for felony drug charges. They’ve also asked the city to reduce the ubiquitous traffic stops in Black neighborhoods.
The decision to instead water down the felony review process gives police more autonomy, trusting the CPD to police itself. Some civil rights advocates and criminal defense attorneys fear that it may lead to unchecked abuse and needless imprisonment in a city with one of the nation’s highest rates of wrongful convictions.
“This is a department with a long history of using coercion and deception to get people charged that shouldn’t have been, a long history of filing wrongful charges against innocent people,” said Rachel Moran, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas who studies police misconduct. “We’re not so far past that history that we should be abdicating the prosecutor’s responsibility to make charging decisions and just leaving that up to a police department with a troubled history.”
Felony review is a first line of defense against unconstitutional stops and searches, flimsy evidence, and other deficiencies that could cause a case to later be thrown out. After police make a felony arrest, they notify the Cook County prosecutor’s felony review division, where an on-call prosecutor examines each case to determine whether the charges are appropriate and they have sufficient evidence. They might review body camera footage or police reports, interview the arresting officers, or even act like another detective on the case, helping police collect evidence and interrogate suspects. Less serious crimes like gun possession are handled over the phone, but crimes like murder require in-person review at the district station.
Chicago police have long complained that felony review is a time-consuming process that keeps them off the streets. In addition, the prosecutor’s office has had to grapple with staff attrition and high turnover in recent years. The process is “extremely inefficient,” said Yvette Loizon, the office’s policy chief. Removing some of the most common low-level felonies from prosecutors’ caseloads will allow them to focus on more serious crimes, she told Bolts.
Cook County already exempts felony drug possession and distribution cases from this review process, a major carve-out that has existed since at least the 1980s. An academic paper, published in 2022 in the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, reviewed the prosecutorial policies of eight of Illinois’ most populous counties, and found that none of them besides Cook allowed the local police to file felony charges without a prosecutor’s review.
The new initiative, known as the Felony Review Bypass Pilot Program, extends that approach, applying it to gun cases. It is limited so far to instances in the Seventh District where a person’s sole felony charge is one of three unlawful gun possession charges. Once these charges are filed by police officers, they only have to be approved by an on-duty watch lieutenant within the CPD, who is responsible for ensuring that probable cause exists.
For Stephanie Kollmann, policy director at Northwestern law’s Children and Family Justice Center, that’s just not sufficient as a check. “Without a robust review of whether police are engaging in practices that would cause the case to be unlawful or unjust to proceed,” she told Bolts, “you are, in fact, creating cases that clutter up the system, that slow everything down and cause a reduction of efficiency for everyone.”
“It really is, I think, a step in the wrong direction to reduce or eliminate this felony review process,” she said.
Neither the CPD nor the office of Mayor Brandon Johnson, who appoints the police superintendent and oversees the CPD, returned a request for comment.
Loizon balked at the suggestion that police would lie about lower-level charges like gun possession. She said in an interview that police misconduct “generally involve[s] high-level felonies” like murder or aggravated battery. The bypass program, she said, lets prosecutors “focus their attention on those cases where we do need to be worried about those things. That way they don’t waste time on these other cases where we really don’t.”
But headlines of police misconduct have extended beyond high-profile crimes in recent years, and lower-level cases like gun possession charges are particularly reliant on circumstantial evidence and police testimony.
A former CPD detective last year won a multimillion-dollar judgement for retaliation she faced after she uncovered evidence that two of her coworkers harassed and attacked three men and framed one of them for gun possession. At least 20 Chicago cops continued to make hundreds of arrests even after they were flagged by the county prosecutor’s office for dishonesty or misconduct, according to a March 2024 investigation by the Chicago Reader and the Invisible Institute. A 2023 report from the Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts concluded that a “code of silence” among the CPD “encourages cops to lie to prevent scrutiny . . . and protect fellow officers.”
In fact, two of the Seventh District watch lieutenants who approved many of the at least 22 cases to bypass felony review to date have been the subjects of numerous allegations of misconduct, casting doubt on one of the program’s supposed safeguards against wrongdoing. Lieutenant Dean Claeson and Sargent Syed Quadri have collectively been named in 59 complaints, ranging from illegal searches to police brutality to criminal misconduct (only three, all against Claeson, have been sustained).
The Chicago Police Board suspended Claeson for 45 days and the city paid $90,000 to settle a lawsuit over a 2009 incident that involved allegations he punched a 13-year old in the face, threatened to punch the boy’s older brother, and called both boys the N-word. According to the lawsuit, as backup officers arrived, Claeson warned the 13-year-old, who was crying, not to tell other police officers about it.
“I think everyone’s goal is to have a safer city, and this isn’t going to do it,” said Gillian Daniels, an attorney supervisor at the Law Office of the Cook County Public Defender. “If you clog up the courts with even more unprovable cases, it’s our communities that are going to suffer.”
Multiple criminal defense attorneys and former prosecutors who spoke with Bolts suggested that the felony review bypass pilot would lead to a rise in felony charges filed and a corresponding rise in the number of charges dropped.
In the first 11 months of 2024, the prosecutor’s office declined to bring charges in 464 of the almost 4,200 felony gun possession cases presented by the CPD to prosecutors. (The dashboard has not been updated since O’Burke Neill took office on Dec. 1.) That means more than 10 percent of cases were rejected at the outset, many of them because the prosecutors deemed the felony charges to not be appropriate or because police lacked evidence to support their claims.
The three gun possession charges to bypass review—unlawful possession of a weapon, aggravated unlawful possession of a weapon, and unlawful possession of a weapon by a felon—are Class 3 or Class 4 felonies, the least serious felony charges for weapons. Frequently, they’re the result of pretextual traffic stops or warrantless searches, commonly called stop and frisks. The details matter in these cases. How and why a search occurred determines whether it was constitutional—and it often comes down to one person’s word against the police’s.
That’s all the more reason gun possession cases merit another pair of eyes, Kollmann told Bolts. “The way these cases often unfold, just at [a basic] level, is whether the police officer’s approach of a person was lawful, whether their requests at every step of the way were legally sufficient to conduct the search and find contraband.”
Loizion maintained that all felony bypass cases would still be reviewed by a prosecutor before preliminary hearings, an early step in the criminal prosecution process where the court determines whether prosecutors have sufficient evidence to bring a case to trial. But felony charges are incredibly destabilizing, even for people who avoid jail time. A single night in lockup could lead to someone losing their home or job. Court dates require childcare and time off work, and pretrial release conditions like electronic monitoring create additional pathways to incarceration through technical violations. If a person is detained, they could spend a month or longer in jail only to have their case later tossed.
“Our concern is that, for clients whose case is dismissed or they’re eventually found not guilty, the process has been the punishment by the time their case is resolved,” said Sharlyn Grace, a senior policy adviser at the county public defender’s office. “So, a pilot to bypass felony review and provide even less oversight for the filing of these cases is going in the opposite direction.”
Many of the city’s gun possession charges, by far the most common felony in Cook County, can be traced back to Englewood. The neighborhood is 91 percent Black—a symptom of generations of racist housing policies and criminalization that have left Chicago starkly divided along racial and geographic lines.
A policy of side-stepping felony review in this part of the city alone, critics say, creates different rules for an area that is heavily policed and threatens to worsen racial inequities within the legal system. More than 3,000 people have been arrested for one of the three unlawful possession charges that apply to the gun bypass pilot in the Seventh District since Jan. 1, 2014, per Bolts’ review of CPD arrest data. Of those, 97 percent were Black.
“There are, unfortunately, a lot of guns in Chicago and a lot of people being charged with them, and this really has a chance to spiral out of control pretty quickly,” said Kollmann.
Former Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, who declined to run for reelection last year, was frequently criticized for her perceived lenience on gun charges. But while she did expand pathways for diversion, Foxx also presided over a significant rise in gun prosecutions from the time she took office in 2016, with the number of gun charges approved by the office reaching a peak in 2021; the pace of prosecutions has dropped since then, though it remained higher than when Foxx took office.
Gun prosecutions were a central plank of O’Neill Burke’s platform as a candidate last year. She vowed to crack down on unpermitted gun possession and seek pretrial detention in virtually all cases involving a weapon. At a swearing-in ceremony in December, O’Neill Burke decried the “war zone numbers” of people harmed by gun violence in Chicago.
Soon after she took office, O’Neill Burke followed through on a blanket policy that requires prosecutors to seek pretrial detention for anyone accused of a felony involving a gun equipped with an extended magazine, drum magazine, or automatic switch. Previously, prosecutors evaluated pretrial conditions on a case-by-case basis.
O’Neill Burke has also ordered her office to stop referring gun possession cases to the county’s Restorative Justice Community Courts, which allowed for charges to be dismissed and expunged when a defendant completes a restorative justice program. The move effectively gutted the caseloads of the community courts, of which 83 percent were gun possession cases.
The state’s attorney has said that “we can change the behavior by enforcing the law, and that’s what we’ll do.” But critics doubt that cracking down on gun possession will meaningfully address violent crime. A 2021 report from researchers at Loyola University Chicago found that people convicted for gun possession in Illinois were rarely convicted of violent crimes involving a firearm.
But with a state’s attorney’s office that has vowed to “drop the hammer” on low-level gun offenses, and with the police now entrusted to directly file gun possession charges, Daniels said, “you might have people pleading guilty to something that’s not provable in order to just get their case over with sooner, and that’s not justice.”
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