Four years after he called Chicago a “hellhole” and lost the race for governor by nearly 13 percentage points, Darren Bailey’s attempt at running a different kind of campaign has included declaring he’s ready to “stop some of the political rhetoric that I’ve been a part of” and trying to avoid being portrayed as a MAGA Republican amid President Donald Trump’s unpopularity in Illinois.
While the GOP nominee in his second bid for governor has tried a different marketing tack even as he holds many of the same positions and is endorsed by Trump, one issue has remained consistent in principle and publicity — Bailey still wants to repeal the SAFE-T Act, the sweeping and controversial 2021 criminal justice overhaul that abolished cash bail in Illinois.
Bailey says he doesn’t object to the law’s effort of keeping people charged with crimes from sitting in jail simply because they can’t afford bail. But he argues it has gone far beyond that.
“It turned into now just anybody who commits almost any crime is free to walk,” Bailey said in April after a gun rights event in Springfield, in a clear overstatement.
Indeed, Bailey’s case against the law has rested on some exaggeration and anecdotes that broader data don’t always support. Chicago has seen steep declines in homicides and shootings in recent years. Cook County court data show the vast majority of defendants released while awaiting trial are not charged with new violent crimes, and the county jail now holds more people than it did before cash bail ended. Even some Republicans familiar with the law, including DuPage County’s top prosecutor, say it should be fixed, not repealed.
Still, Bailey is sticking with the message, betting that crime, long a potent issue for Republicans, and the SAFE-T Act in particular remain vulnerabilities for Gov. JB Pritzker and a Democratic Party that controls every statewide office and holds large majorities in the General Assembly.
“One of the most powerful emotions is fear. And if you can scare people enough, then you can make them do things that they won’t ordinarily do,” said state Sen. Elgie Sims, a Democrat from Chicago’s South Side who was the law’s chief Senate sponsor and served with Bailey in the legislature.
Chicago police statistics tell a different story than the one Bailey describes, especially as violent crime has plummeted statistically throughout the country. Over the past four years, the city has seen homicides drop 49%, robberies 42% and burglaries 24%, while shootings — incidents in which victims are either killed or wounded but survive — have declined 49%, according to official Chicago Police Department statistics through Sept. 20.
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But in early September, Bailey renewed his promise to repeal the law at a bar in northwest suburban Norridge during an event hosted by a local Republican organization.
At the time, news outlets, including the baiduhai, reported the city’s reduced crime numbers, even as some Chicago mayoral candidates sounded the alarm over the city’s crime problem under Mayor Brandon Johnson’s leadership. Asked about those stories after the event, Bailey said, “I don’t trust the reporting.”
“You can make anything skewed to make it look like it is,” he said. “These continued shootings … seem to be growing; more people are getting hurt.”
The 700-plus-page SAFE-T Act, short for Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today, passed by narrow margins in January 2021 — 60-50 in the House and 32-23 in the Senate — reflecting a divide among legislators. Supporters included many Democrats representing Chicago’s South and West Sides, areas more adversely affected by crime, while some Democrats and Republicans representing safer areas, such as the suburbs and downstate, voted against it.
The package of laws includes provisions that require police officers across Illinois to wear body cameras, make it easier for the public to file anonymous complaints against officers, end the requirement that complainants sign sworn affidavits and ensure a more comprehensive system for decertifying officers.
But its most contentious piece is arguably the Pretrial Fairness Act.
Under that provision, judges decide whether to detain someone charged with, but not convicted of, a crime based on whether the person poses a danger to the community or is likely to flee, rather than whether the person can pay bail. Judges cannot order defendants jailed before trial on charges deemed “nondetainable,” which are typically lower-level offenses.
Opponents of no-cash bail argue judges should have more discretion to detain certain defendants, particularly those accused of committing crimes repeatedly. Since its passage, though, opponents have focused less on crime statistics and more on highlighting individual cases.
Bailey has repeatedly cited the case of Dwayne Cortez Milton, who was charged with jumping a fence and finding himself in the backyard of Pritzker’s Astor Street home, with the GOP candidate saying Pritzker got a “taste” of the law’s downside. But the example is far from perfect, as it remains unclear whether Milton would have been kept in jail while awaiting trial on a previous charge prior to the passage of the SAFE-T Act.
Earlier this month, Illinois House Republicans issued a news release attacking the end of cash bail and highlighting defendants accused of violent crimes while they were free and awaiting trial on other charges.
Among them was Lawrence Reed, who is accused of setting a woman on fire in an apparently unprovoked attack on a Chicago Transit Authority Blue Line train last year while he was on electronic monitoring in an aggravated battery case. The release also cited the April fatal shooting of Chicago police Officer John Bartholomew and the wounding of another officer inside a North Side hospital, allegedly by Alphanso Talley, who was also on electronic monitoring on unrelated robbery-related charges.
Supporters of the law say such cases, while tragic, are exceptions. From Sept. 18, 2023, when the pretrial provisions took effect, through early this month, 94% of defendants released before trial in Cook County were not charged with “any new violent or person crimes,” according to data from the Circuit Court of Cook County. A little more than 80% were not charged with any new misdemeanor or felony.
Of more than 177,000 defendants released before trial in that period, 85% made their scheduled court dates, the data show. As of Friday, Cook County Jail held slightly more than 500 people than it did the day before cash bail was eliminated in 2023, according to data from the Cook County sheriff’s office.
Sharlyn Grace, deputy public defender for policy at the Cook County public defender’s office, acknowledged that it’s hard for supporters of the Pretrial Fairness Act to get their message out about its benefits when heinous individual crimes dominate the news and sway public opinion.
“I think everyone here acknowledges that there are individual tragedies. But what we’re doing as proponents of reform, we’re arguing for safety and fairness, safety and justice at the same time,” she said. “Because behind these claims that Darren Bailey or other reactionaries lean on is this fantasy world that any kind of system, any kind of set of laws, will prevent 100% of tragedies from ever happening. And we know that’s not true.”
The Reed case prompted Pritzker to signal his openness to changes to the Pretrial Fairness Act, but none has been made. Sims told the Tribune he isn’t aware of any changes planned for the fall veto session after the election — scheduled for three days in mid-November and three in early December. He said, though, that lawmakers will keep “reevaluating” whether any are necessary.
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DuPage County State’s Attorney Robert Berlin, a Republican who worked with lawmakers on tweaks to the Pretrial Fairness Act a few years ago, said the law is mostly working as intended, with defendants accused of violent crimes being detained ahead of trial. But he said it could be strengthened to give judges more discretion to hold defendants in custody on other offenses that are now nondetainable.
Berlin also wants lawmakers to consider tougher consequences for defendants who skip court. Before the Pretrial Fairness Act, he said, a defendant who failed to appear in court had 30 days to return before a judge issued a warrant, and the person could be charged with violating their bail bond. Now, he said, the maximum sanction for skipping court is 30 days in jail.
“I want to make it clear. I’ve never been one to say, ‘Oh, we need to repeal the law,’ because I don’t believe that’s the case at all,” he said. “We fixed a lot of the issues. There’s still a few more that I would like to see.”
David Olson, a Loyola University Chicago professor who has researched the outcomes of the law’s pretrial provisions, said the number of people held in county jails statewide before trial fell immediately after the pretrial provisions took effect, for reasons that include judges’ inability to order defendants held in custody if they’re charged with non-detainable offenses.
Workloads for prosecutors and defense attorneys in these cases have grown, Olson said, because both sides now present far more evidence at hearings, making judges’ detention decisions more deliberative. Bond hearings that once took three or four minutes can now last four times as long. Also, the new law especially affected rural counties that often have a scarcity of defense attorneys, an issue that advocates hope will be eased with a new statewide public defender office.
“I think the system’s working the best any system can that tries to balance the (rights) of individuals and (tries) to ensure public safety in an environment where predicting human behavior is … very difficult,” Olson said of the Pretrial Fairness Act. “Unfortunately, there’s always instances where decisions are made, and in hindsight, people question whether or not it was the right decision. But whether, you know, pretrial detention or being placed on electronic monitoring would have mitigated that is difficult to prove.”
Olson said he’s trying to pore through data to determine whether recidivism rates have changed under the Pretrial Fairness Act when compared with the old bail system. So far, for what he described as “a large urban jurisdiction,” he’s seen data showing there appears to be no change in the likelihood someone is charged with another crime, including a violent one, after being released from custody and awaiting trial.
“I don’t suspect that the rates of new arrests for violent crimes will change a lot,” he said. “It was already very low before the law. Might some people be more likely to be charged with other crimes like drug possession or retail theft? … We have to see. … I guess the jury’s still out on that.”