Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke’s policy expanding Chicago police officers’ power to directly file certain felony gun charges citywide demands rigorous scrutiny.
For decades, nonviolent gun possession charges have been approved by the Cook County state’s attorney’s felony review unit, which was created to assure there is probable cause to charge a person with a crime.
The new policy removes that review for nonviolent gun possession charges and is being expanded after a pilot in two police districts. According to the office, police will be allowed to approve charges in cases where there is body-worn camera evidence and a commander has reviewed the case. Prosecutors won’t review charges until days later, when the case is assigned to a preliminary hearing or grand jury in Cook County court.
The policy has been criticized by numerous groups as potentially harmful given the department’s history, including racial profiling and unconstitutional searches during traffic stops, misconduct that often leads to the gun charges included in the policy. These abuses disproportionately affect Black and brown residents and undermine trust in the entire criminal legal system.
They are costly as well. Chicago has spent $258 million to settle lawsuits against Chicago police in 2025; recently Mayor Brandon Johnson announced he would borrow a stunning $283 million to cover the expense. In addition, people falsely convicted have lost decades of their lives and faced major economic setbacks and trauma. Detention of those who will be ultimately deemed innocent is also destabilizing. Even a day in jail can result in grave losses.
A court-mandated reform of the Chicago Police Department is underway, but there is much work to do to gain public trust.
Public safety policy should be informed by and responsive to the community most affected by it; several residents in one district where this policy was piloted attended a special town hall meeting to express concerns about it.
These are all warning signs about the need to proceed with caution on a policy change that would give the police even more power. And, importantly, the policy must include an evaluation mechanism to measure its impact.
The stated goal of the new policy is to make charging more efficient and allow officers to return to the street, as opposed to waiting for prosecutors to approve charges, which also means victims and witnesses have to wait hours, at times. In turn, prosecutors will be allowed to focus on reviewing more serious violent crimes. However, no data has been provided to show how the pilot is currently meeting this goal.
The expansion of the pilot, instead, has been rationalized on a review of how often police decisions in the two pilot districts survived a preliminary hearing or resulted in a grand jury indictment, citing a 99% success rate.
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For anyone familiar with the Cook County legal system, this is a problematic and narrow measure of success. Grand jury hearings only include evidence presented by prosecutors, and a preliminary hearing may not include a balanced argument from both sides.
To be sure, we must all continue to work together to reduce gun violence using approaches that are evidence-tested and rigorously evaluated — community violence intervention, youth programing, mentoring and family wraparound services. This new policy ought to be subject to the same high standards.
As it stands, the proposal lacks this essential element of policy change: an evaluation designed by an impartial authority that clearly defines the problem that the policy is designed to address, the metrics by which its success is measured and an assessment of whether the implementation process addresses the problem without causing harm.
Before the policy is expanded, the state’s attorney should establish an outside evaluation to assess the need for and efficacy of this policy by addressing these questions:
- Did the pilot include enough data for meaningful evaluation? Will the 146 cases in the pilot program be evaluated to determine if improved case outcomes or public safety benefits can be attributed to this pilot?
- How does the reported 99% of confirmed police decisions compare to the previous system? Is this even the right measurement? How often do prosecutor-approved cases survive the grand jury or a preliminary hearing? How many police-approved gun charges under the new policy are later dismissed, as compared with charges that were reviewed by a prosecutor?
- Will there be an examination of the strength of evidence in each case charged by police — as opposed to evaluating outcomes alone? A guilty plea is often a person’s effort to bring an end to a case they fear they can’t win, regardless of their innocence.
- How will the policy promise of officers returning to communities for police work be measured? Will anyone track hours officers spend conferring with commanders on charges and hours on the street?
There is time to establish an evaluation process to answer these questions and provide the assurances the public deserves that this major expansion of police powers will not result in civil rights violations and mass incarceration, which reduce stability in neighborhoods and decrease the city’s safety.
Arthur Haynes is program director of the Illinois Justice Project; he previously worked on the consent decree for the city of Chicago’s Law Department and is a former Cook County assistant state’s attorney. Benjamin Ruddell is director of criminal justice policy at the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.
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