IL: Chicago Transit Authority boosted security spending, but violent crime rate remains above pre-pandemic levels

A gunman’s attack on four people sleeping on the Blue Line last Monday came during a difficult week on the Chicago Transit Authority, highlighting the challenges city and transit officials face in tackling violent crime rates that have remained persistently higher than before the pandemic.

The likelihood of being a victim of violent crime on the “L” remained lower through the first six months of 2024 than highs seen in the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, but a Chicago Tribune analysis shows that reported transit crime has stayed stubbornly above pre-pandemic levels. And reports of gun crimes such as shootings, armed robberies or attempted armed robberies, while relatively rare, have also remained stubbornly high compared to the past decade.

The CTA, meanwhile, has boosted spending on security services in recent years, nearly tripling its security services budget from $23.9 million in 2022 to $65.2 million planned for 2024. This year’s budget would be the highest dollar amount set aside for security since at least 2018, CTA documents show, and already spending ran $12.4 million overbudget through the first half of the year.

The dollar amount includes spending on agreements for police officers from several suburbs and Chicago, as well as spending on private security firms to provide unarmed guards, according to CTA budget documents.

The CTA awarded a contract worth up to $30.5 million in 2022 to politically connected security firm Monterrey and one worth up to $40.5 million to Inter-Con Security, documents show, and now has more than 400 unarmed guards patrolling the system. The agency also awarded a shorter contract of up to $41.7 million to Action K-9 Security later that year for dog teams, though a new one is now under negotiation.

The CTA, in documents, attributed the spending jumps from 2022 to a new agreement with Chicago police and increases in the private security guards and K-9 teams, as well as expected wage increases. The CTA has increased funding for a program that provides volunteer, off-duty officers to patrol CTA, transit officials said.

The Chicago Police Department’s public transportation section also patrols the system at no cost to the agency, and police work in other capacities on CTA security.

Among the CTA’s other security measures are more than 33,000 cameras on its bus and train systems, and the agency recently began testing an AI-based program to detect guns at train stations, though it’s not in use on trains and it only detects guns that have been brandished.

The measures are part of the CTA’s efforts to address crime, and the perception of crime, as it has sought to draw back riders from pandemic lows. But the unarmed guards and technology were not enough to prevent the Blue Line killings in Forest Park, sparking questions from some state politicians about CTA security and transit spending. They also were not enough to prevent other violence that week, including the shooting of a CTA employee outside the Howard station the next day.

“There’s not a simple solution, and it’s not always connected to how much money you’re spending, but it is connected to the effectiveness,” said state Rep. Eva-Dina Delgado, a Chicago Democrat who once worked for the CTA and is a supporter of legislative efforts to reform transit governance.

“Different people are going to feel differently depending on what they’re encountering, so it may be spending on overtime could be worth it if you’re getting a police presence in a station,” she later added. “But there may be other options that aren’t as expensive that could help change that feeling.”

The quadruple homicide Monday, near the end of the Blue Line in Forest Park, took place around 5:30 that morning. Prosecutors have said Rhanni Davis, charged with murder in the shootings, was seen on surveillance video walking up to three sleeping people and fatally shooting them, before moving to another car and shooting a fourth person.

After the shooting, Davis boarded a Loop-bound Blue Line train, and later transferred to the Pink Line, prosecutors said. Chicago police officers, alerted to the shooting, took Davis into custody at the California Pink Line station about 7 a.m. Monday.

One of those killed was Simeon Bihesi, 28. The Cook County medical examiner’s office identified two of the other victims as Margaret Miller, 64; and Adrian Collins, 60. A fourth person, a 52-year-old man, was not yet identified as of Friday.

Hours later, around 1:15 p.m., a 37-year-old person was stabbed by a man on the Red Line near the Wilson Station after a verbal altercation. The injured person left the train at Wilson and was taken to the hospital in critical condition, police said.

The next night, an on-duty CTA switch worker was injured outside the Howard station in a drive-by shooting shortly before 9:15 p.m., CTA officials and police have said.

A week earlier, a 32-year-old man was electrocuted on the third rail. The death was ruled a homicide by the Cook County medical examiner’s office, but few details were available about the surrounding circumstances.

The Blue Line shooting sparked questions from Gov. JB Pritzker and state Sen. Ram Villivalam, a Chicago Democrat who heads the Senate Transportation Committee, as the Illinois General Assembly continues to mull what transit in the region could look like in the future including whether the CTA should be consolidated with Metra and Pace into one agency and how to address a transit fiscal cliff expected when federal pandemic aid runs out, which could be in early 2026.

A day after the shooting, Pritzker said “the broader question” of why there isn’t enough security being provided on the CTA needs to be addressed, and Villivalam questioned how the region’s transit systems were spending safety money, whether it was working, and whether it could be made more holistic and better coordinated throughout the region.

“There’s no question that it’s going to be impossible for the Illinois General Assembly to vote for funding, even if the service plans for improvement, for expansion, are presented properly, unless people are safe, unless they feel safe,” he said Tuesday.

The comments came after the CTA drew praise from other state lawmakers for the reliable service and clean trains and stations the agency provided as the Democratic National Convention brought the national spotlight to Chicago, marking a test for the agency and its embattled President Dorval Carter.

But crime, and the perception of crime, have been nagging concerns in recent years. The rate of reported violent crime on trains spiked as the pandemic emptied the CTA of many riders, and though the rate has since gone down, it remains higher than pre-pandemic levels.

Through June 2024, there were about 5.1 violent crimes per million rides, comparable to the same time frame in 2023, but well above the years before the pandemic. For example, in the first half of 2019, 2.5 violent crimes were reported per million rides, a Tribune analysis of CTA ridership and city crime data shows.

The raw number of violent crimes ticked up so far this year, from 284 through June 2023 to 310 in 2024. But because ridership also ticked up, the likelihood of experiencing a violent crime on any given ride remained comparable.

The analysis includes only crimes considered serious enough to report to the FBI as “index” crimes. Violent crimes include robberies, homicides and more aggressive assaults and batteries.

Crimes involving guns, such as shootings and armed robberies, followed similar trends. Typically the most common type of gun crimes on CTA trains are armed robberies and attempted armed robberies, with 39 reported through late August. So far this year, more gun-related robberies and attempts have been reported than any year in the past decade except 2022, when the number spiked to 60.

The analyses focused on crimes reported in the city of Chicago, which covers the majority of the CTA system, but would not include the Forest Park shooting.

Visible police presence can help deter some crime, but is costly and police and guards can’t cover every train and every station, said Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, interim dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, who has researched transit security. Cameras are helpful mostly to identify a suspect after a crime, but are often not a successful deterrent because they’re so ubiquitous that people don’t even notice them, she said.

“Transit is such an open environment that it is much more difficult to protect it like you protect, let’s say, airports,” she said.

Crime, especially gun crime, on transit is part of a larger nationwide issue, but one potentially effective option is to undertake measures to preemptively detect guns, Loukaitou-Sideris said. But such efforts are usually expensive, can cause delays in getting riders onto transit, and aren’t feasible everywhere, she said.

Crimes, including robberies and assaults, on the other hand, can sometimes be deterred by measures such as bright lighting and eliminating nooks and corners, she said.

In a statement, CTA officials said the agency has invested more in security measures over the last decade “than ever before.”

“Unfortunately, there is no easy solution to addressing crime on (a) transit system as expansive as CTA — it requires a multi-prong(ed) approach to help both deter incidents of crime and assist local law enforcement in their investigation of crimes that do occur,” the statement said. “CTA’s investments in security are intended to support the efforts of local law enforcement.”

Chicago police, for their part, pointed in a statement to both the public transportation unit that patrols the CTA and a Strategic Decision Support Center, connected to CTA’s security cameras, where police track incidents in real time and relay information to officers on the ground.

Delgado, the state representative, said often the issue is how safe riders feel on the train, whether or not that feeling is tied to recent crime. Ensuring safety should be a broader effort that includes more agencies and a regional focus that doesn’t end at the Chicago city limits, she said.

“CTA, it needs partners in order to address this public safety challenge,” she said.

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(Chicago Tribune’s Jeremy Gorner contributed.)

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