IL: CTA brings in Cook County sheriff’s police to patrol trains as it looks to appease feds

Police from the Cook County sheriff’s office will patrol the CTA as the mass transit agency tries to head off threats from the Trump administration that it must shape up on crime or risk losing millions in federal funding. 

The partnership with the sheriff’s office is part of the CTA’s second attempt at a safety plan to satisfy the Federal Transit Administration, which in December issued a blistering order telling the agency to lay out a crime-fighting plan or lose up to $50 million in federal funding.

The CTA quickly announced a crime reduction plan in response to that directive, saying it was boosting the numbers of police and privately contracted K-9 security guards on the city’s buses and trains. But the feds slammed that plan as “materially deficient” and promptly rejected it. 

The FTA, part of the U.S. Department of Transportation, gave the CTA until the middle of March to submit a new plan. 

The CTA’s updated plan, which it submitted ahead of deadline, will boost policing hours on the CTA by 75% overall, the CTA said Tuesday. 

That will include the sheriff’s office police officers, who will be deployed on the CTA’s rail system specifically. Those officers will provide 4,400 staffing hours on the CTA each month, the agency said. 

The plan also calls for doubling the number of Chicago police officers who volunteer to work overtime on the CTA, the agency said. The CTA’s original security plan also called for beefing up the hours put in by this team, as well as an increase in the number of privately contracted security guards on the system. It was not immediately clear if the security increases in Tuesday’s plan would be instituted on top of, or instead of, the increases laid out in December’s plan.

The Chicago Police Department will also increase the staffing hours provided by members of its public transportation units — which currently number around 180 officers – by 34%. 

The CTA’s previous safety plan did not include an increase in the CPD’s mass transit units. The police department, not the CTA, makes staffing decisions in those units. 

“In this updated security plan, CPD will have more officers patrolling the rail system to both deter crime and respond to incidents more quickly,” Chicago police superintendent Larry Snelling said in a statement. “This builds on the progress we have made throughout the past year to hold criminal offenders accountable through an increased police presence on the rail system, the launch of a new Public Transit Strategic Decision Support Center and strengthened, specialized transit crime investigations.”

It remains to be seen whether the updated plan will satisfy federal regulators, who said the CTA’s first plan failed to “significantly increase” law enforcement presence on the CTA, but did not provide a numeric target for law enforcement numbers it wanted the CTA to deliver. 

The FTA did not immediately comment on the CTA’s new plan Tuesday. 

In its Dec. 8 directive, the FTA cited what it described as high rates of worker and customer assaults on the CTA, as well as a particularly horrific November attack in which a 26-year-old woman was doused in gasoline and lit on fire.

When the FTA rejected the CTA’s first plan, it said the agency’s planned increase in law enforcement officers wasn’t enough. Additionally, the feds said, the CTA failed to target “significant reductions” in assaults against transit workers and passengers as regulators had requested. 

Overall, FBI-classified serious crimes on the CTA within city limits are slightly lower so far this year compared to the same timeframes in recent years, according to Chicago police data. But much of that drop comes from fewer thefts, while some violent crimes are up, including sexual assaults and aggravated batteries. Aggravated assaults and robberies, meanwhile, are down year over year. 

The CTA did not make public updated crime reduction targets, but described them as “aggressive” in its Tuesday news release. 

The agency cited data that it says shows progress made in reducing crime since upping security in December. Assaults against transit workers were down 25% in January and 29% in February when compared to the six-month average in the months leading up to December’s security surge, the agency said. 

The agency also claimed that crime was down 9% between Dec. 19, when the security surge began, through the end of February, when compared with the same time the previous year.

“The January and February results from CTA and CPD’s joint security surge have been promising, and we’ve built on that momentum by creating a sustainable security model that  puts people first,” acting CTA president Nora Leerhsen said Tuesday. 

The agency cited additional measures it has taken or plans to take to address safety on the system, including what the agency described as “increased transit crime prosecution” in collaboration with the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office. 

The agency also said it had partnered with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois “to address violent crime on transit.” 

Notably, the involvement of the Cook County sheriff’s office in the new safety plan comes as state lawmakers have called on the office to get involved in CTA crime. The mass transit funding bill approved by legislators last fall — which doesn’t go into effect for a few months — calls for the sheriff’s office to lead a law enforcement task force that will work to address crime on public transit throughout Chicagoland. 

“The CTA is one of the largest public transit systems in America and our office looks forward to working closely with them as they expand and invest in their security environment,” Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said in a statement. 

Meanwhile, the CTA is still trying to resolve another federal funding issue — the more than $2 billion in federal grant dollars slated for the agency’s Red Line extension and Red and Purple modernization projects that the Trump administration put on ice in October. In that case, the feds cited the agency’s diversity requirements for contractors, not safety.

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