Reports of serious crimes on the CTA rail system have doubled since 2015 even as ridership declined and such crimes rose only slightly citywide, according to a Tribune analysis of Chicago police data.
At the same time, the arrest rate for these “L”-related crimes has dropped, suggesting that even as CTA’s rail system has become more dangerous, there is less chance the perpetrators will be held accountable.
The troubling trends have occurred despite the CTA installing tens of thousands of security cameras that city officials have credited in the past for reducing crime on public transportation.
The Tribune analyzed reports of crimes considered serious enough to report to the FBI as “index” crimes, from pick-pocketing to robbery and sexual assault. The analysis focused on crimes reported in the city of Chicago, which houses the vast majority of the CTA system.
While the level of crime on Chicago’s buses has been relatively flat in recent years, the analysis found it has increased markedly on the “L” system, including its train cars, rail stations and platforms.
The total number of reported index crimes on the rail system rose from 1,187 in 2015 to 2,371 last year, an increase of nearly 100%. That includes an 89% increase in reports of violent index crimes, such as robbery. People reported 447 such crimes to police in 2018, up from 236 in 2015.
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Arrests have not kept pace, causing the arrest rate to plunge in those years. For violent “L” crimes, police made an arrest in 1 of every 4 cases in 2015. Last year, it was 1 in 6. For nonviolent crimes, the arrest rate went from 1 in 14 cases to 1 in 50 cases.
The CTA’s crime trends are worse than those for the city as a whole. Reports of serious crime across Chicago rose only 8.5% from 2015 to 2018. And though citywide arrest rates worsened during that time, the falloff was far steeper for crimes on the train system.
In fact, the arrest rate for violent crimes across the city actually nudged up a percentage point last year, while the same measurement for the “L” dropped 4 percentage points.
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The trend translates to frustrating and scary encounters for riders such as Joshua Turner.
Two teens snatched his phone and another rider’s at the Red Line’s Chinatown stop in May, according to a police report and his recollection. Turner gave chase until one teen pulled a gun out of his waistband. Police were called, but officers arrived too late. The teens were gone.
Turner said police later called him to talk about the case, but no arrest has been made. He said he’s since witnessed another phone snatching on a CTA platform.
“This kind of stuff happens every day,” he said.
CTA officials point out that public transportation remains relatively safe. The 2,371 index crimes reported in 2018 occurred as the “L” provided nearly 226 million rides, or roughly 1 crime per 95,000 rides. And roughly 4 out of 5 of these crimes were nonviolent thefts, such as when someone snatches a purse from a seat and darts off the train.
Still, both CTA and Chicago police officials acknowledged the rise in crime on the system and the struggle to solve cases.
While the CTA relies on Chicago officers to police the system and investigate crime, the agency has a security department that monitors the camera system and pulls video for police. It also pays private security guards to patrol the “L.”
This spring, the agency hired a newly retired Chicago police deputy chief, Kevin Ryan, as vice president for security, part of what he said is an effort to work more closely with police to tackle the growing crime problem.
“The CTA is committed to attacking this,” Ryan said.
Police officials said the department has boosted patrols on the “L” and changed how officers are deployed, while strengthening an understaffed detective bureau with more investigators and better access to technology, including CTA video feeds.
“There’s a lot of work being done behind the scenes to take a look at these issues,” said spokesman Anthony Guglielmi.
The department credits the boost in patrols with decreasing crime and increasing arrests this June, July and August compared with last summer. That small reduction in crime, however, has not been enough to offset the significant jump seen in the first five months of the year versus the same period in 2018.
In other words, despite the extra attention being given to the CTA, the Tribune found the overall crime numbers since Jan. 1 continue to track higher than previous years.
Through Aug. 31, reports of violent crime on the “L” were up 55% compared with the number of crimes reported by that date last year. Incidents of nonviolent crime are on pace for 2019 to be the worst year this decade.
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Crime falls, then rises
The CTA’s crime outlook was far different four years ago.
Back then, the CTA’s crime stats for both trains and buses looked like the big hill of a roller coaster. They’d gone up significantly, only to begin dropping in 2014 after thousands of cameras were installed to, in the words of then-CTA President Forrest Claypool, “saturate our system.”
Cameras began to be installed in 2002, with a pilot project in four rail stations. By 2014, the number had climbed to 23,000 — including installation in every rail station, bus and train car. Since then, the CTA said the number has climbed to about 32,000 on its network, with the latest batch being funded with $18 million in ride-share taxes.
Earlier this decade, CTA officials and then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel were quick to credit the cameras for helping reduce crime.
“By installing a camera in every train, we have been able to lower crime and increase security for customers,” Claypool said in a 2014 news release.
Emanuel and new CTA chief Dorval Carter Jr. announced in 2016 that CTA crime again had dropped, crediting “aggressive efforts” that included doubling the number of cameras.
Soon after, however, CTA news releases stopped mentioning crime numbers on the agency’s system.
In last few years, crime trends on buses and at bus stops have showed little movement. The number of crimes — always fewer than on the rail system — dropped slightly. The odds of being a bus crime victim rose slightly, thanks to declining ridership. But the changes were small.
On the “L,” the trend was far more pronounced — and concerning.
As of 2016, the Tribune’s analysis shows, crime reports on the “L” were on the way back up. The gains included both violent and nonviolent crimes, and they came amid the “L’s” own decline in ridership. Those trends combined to significantly boost the crime rate. The odds of a train rider being a victim of a serious crime — while always low — increased by more than 100% between 2015 and 2018.
Most of the 447 violent crimes reported in 2018 were robberies, but they also include 71 cases of aggravated battery, 36 aggravated assaults and eight criminal sexual assaults.
In a meeting with Tribune reporters last month, CTA and Chicago police officials said pricey cellphones are often the target when crimes occur. They also said a small number of people are committing the vast majority of the offenses in a revolving-door criminal justice system.
As an example, police and CTA officials cite one teen who they say has regularly robbed people at the Sedgwick stop on the Brown Line — one time extending his middle finger at the camera that was catching him in the act.
Cmdr. Cindy Sam, who oversees a special police unit that patrols the CTA, said she keeps tabs on the teen so she can deploy officers to monitor that stop more closely if needed.
“I have to basically call the juvenile detention center and say, ‘OK, when is he going to be out?’ … We know there’s no doubt he’s going back there and he’s going to rob people,” she said.
Police also say more crime has moved to trains than the platforms and stations because the thieves and robbers know police are less likely to ride them. That has prompted police and CTA private security guards to begin riding the trains more.
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But the department couldn’t immediately explain a more fundamental problem: Even with cameras now blanketing the system, the department has increasingly struggled to make arrests for serious “L” crimes.
In a 2014 press release, Emanuel warned would-be criminals: “By expanding numbers of cameras in public transit, we’re making it even clearer to criminals that if you commit a crime in any station, on any vehicle, and at any time of the day or night, you’ll be identified, you’ll be caught, and you’ll be punished.”
In fact, the arrest rate for violent crimes on the “L” system improved from 19.6% in 2012 to 25% in 2015, even as the arrest rate citywide hovered around 17.5%.
But those gains didn’t last. By 2018, an arrest for a violent crime on the train system was even less likely than it had been in 2010, before most security cameras were installed.
Despite all the cameras at stations, platforms and trains, the arrest rate for violent crimes on the “L” has sunk to nearly match the average arrest rate for violent crimes across the city.
A review of the available records suggests that the cameras do not come into play for most crimes committed on the CTA. The agency credits its cameras for helping lead to arrests in only about 200 cases a year, though officials say they may have missed some cases where cameras helped.
A 2017 study of 30,000 cameras at British railway stations and on trains found they were deemed helpful in less than a third of all cases investigated — more so in robberies and serious assaults and less so in weapon, vandalism and theft cases. And there were practical limitations, with crimes often not caught on camera or incidents requiring too much time to pull and review footage.
Criminologist Eric Piza teaches at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice and has studied how crime is affected by closed-circuit cameras — also known as CCTV. He told the Tribune that it doesn’t matter how many cameras a community has if there aren’t enough humans to consistently monitor them, sift through footage of crimes and capitalize on usable footage to identify and track down offenders.
“Despite the tendency of public officials to talk about cameras like they’re a silver bullet, a lot more goes into whether CCTV is going to work than just the conspicuous presence of cameras,” Piza said.
Pulling video
The CTA’s efforts can be traced to a giant security room on the fifth floor of the CTA’s West Loop headquarters.
On the walls are mug shots of career pickpockets and others who have targeted CTA riders. Lining long desks are monitors with direct feeds to a week’s worth of recordings from thousands of cameras in every station. Other computers stand ready to upload the hard drives of cameras retrieved from train cars and buses, where the technology doesn’t yet exist to allow direct video feeds.
In that room, officials said, a handful of CTA civilian investigators often start their days pulling up a computer list of recently reported crimes, working their way down from the most serious cases to see if they can find video.
Late one morning this month, a CTA investigator made his way down the list to a report of a purse-snatching at Central on the Green Line. It had occurred about four hours earlier. Police had yet to fill out a database with details beyond the station address and report time.
Within about 15 minutes, the CTA investigator had pulled camera images of two men who had run from that station around that time, then traced their paths back to the station where they had gotten on, at Pulaski. He’d also made a note of which train car’s video should be delivered to the room — on the assumption that’s where the crime occurred.
The CTA said it typically takes a day or two to pull the bus or train video, about the same amount of time it takes for a detective to be assigned a typical case, officials said.
Ryan, sitting nearby, said the purse-snatching case offered a textbook example of how helpful the cameras can be. CTA records show the agency’s videos have helped identify suspects in cases ranging from a sexual assault in Wicker Park to the slaying of a taxi driver in Ravenswood.
Far less is known about the cases where video hasn’t helped lead to an arrest.
Any video that’s pulled becomes one more piece of potential material sent to a detective bureau that, police officials acknowledge, struggles with staffing. The Tribune reported last year that the number of detectives had shrunk and that they often lacked training and access to technology.
It’s unclear how often short-staffed detectives attempted to take advantage of cameras to investigate CTA crimes.
Chicago police told the Tribune they don’t have information about the crimes for which they have sought videos from the CTA, or what the CTA provided. The Tribune asked the CTA in June, under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act, for any such logs it may have kept, but the agency has not provided the records.
Even if CTA staff or detectives do scour video for particularly helpful frames, police may still be left with a picture of someone whose face isn’t immediately recognized. Chicago police do have a program that tries to match unidentified offenders to mug shots of prior arrestees, but it requires a clear, head-on facial image — something not always captured by the cameras.
The Tribune filed a Freedom of Information Act request in June for any logs police may have kept about how often material was submitted to be matched, and how often matches were made. The department has not provided any records.
Complicating things further for CTA crime, sometimes victims — particularly if they’re out-of-towners — may not want to pursue a case after filing a report, police and CTA officials said. That means there are times police are confident they’ve identified a suspect, perhaps with the help of video, but it doesn’t lead to an arrest.
For high-profile cases, the department regularly issues public alerts, or notices about unsolved crimes that are sent to the news media and posted on the department’s website, often with suspects’ pictures. But alerts remain rare despite all the video potentially generated for CTA-related crimes.
A Tribune analysis of available alerts could find them issued for only 13 of the 377 “L” violent index crimes committed last year that have yet to result in an arrest. Police said they don’t track how often they issue alerts.
Chicago police said that they generally issue public alerts after exhausting law enforcement methods to try to identify a suspect — and sometimes they don’t use them out of fear they’ll scare away suspects who may not know police are looking for them.
Pledging fixes
The CTA and Chicago police say they know crime is up on the CTA this year, and they say they’re addressing it.
This summer, the police added 44 officers to the public transportation unit, bringing the total number to 214. The department now says it plans to make that total permanent, extending what was originally a summer-only initiative.
That staffing is still less than it was in the late 1980s, when the Tribune noted the unit had 239 officers.
“It’s been effective,” Sam said. “They’re riding throughout the city. The days that they’re off, we see sometimes a spike in crime at different locations, because we don’t have people at those locations.”
Off-duty officers can volunteer to work overtime shifts to patrol the CTA as well, adding more officers in uniform. But Sam noted that the system is large and “they’re spread thin throughout the whole system.”
As for the CTA, Ryan said the security staff uses images captured of crimes to create more than 1,000 internal bulletins a year that it distributes to police and the CTA’s private security guards.
CTA staffers also are working with Chicago police to monitor live video of problem spots more closely and dispatch officers if there are signs of trouble, he said.
“We work very closely with (the) mass transit unit,” Ryan said. “It’s the old adage: Putting the right people in the right places at the right times. … The big difference is there’s a little more pro-activity going on, on both ends of the spectrum.”
Chicago police said they’ve restocked the detective bureau with 300 more detectives in recent years, which would bring the total to levels roughly equivalent to those seen in 2009, and said they’re working with the University of Chicago on a study of staffing levels across the department.
“We’re going to be doing a lot more to the detective division,” said Guglielmi, the department spokesman. “When the superintendent started, we focused on patrol first. We made some investments in technology, in patrol, and now we’re on to the detective bureau. And we’ve got to take a hard look.”
The department this year set up technology centers for detectives to more easily get access to and help with analyzing video. Now, detectives can directly upload CTA station and platform video. Train and bus video will be available once the city converts to 5G wireless technology.
“It’s really a time saver,” said Jonathan Lewin, chief of the department’s bureau of technical services.
The department and CTA also point to improvements in the camera system as another tool to reverse the crime trends. The city spent about $18 million of the ride-share tax now paid by Uber and Lyft riders to add 1,000 cameras and upgrade 3,800 older ones.
The CTA finished installing the new cameras this spring.
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jmahr@chicagotribune.com
mwisniewski@chicagotribune.com
