In the wake of two brazen acts of violence on the CTA, police and transit officers met Friday to debate methods to tamp down prison exercise on Chicago’s trains and buses.
The assembly, in keeping with a Chicago Police Department spokesman, was “to discuss options for enhanced strategies to deter and combat crimes, including making any adjustments to Transit deployments where necessary.”
The concentrate on CTA security intensified earlier this week after a musician was stabbed on the busy Jackson Red Line platform. The subsequent day, a person was shot whereas exiting a Blue Line prepare on the UIC-Halsted station. Suspects have been taken into custody in each incidents.
While these two incidents obtained substantial media consideration largely due to when and the place they occurred — each in or close to downtown, and in broad daylight — prison exercise on the CTA is on the rise throughout the town.
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas in 2019, CTA buses and trains have been the scene of 458 prison incidents, in keeping with the CPD. That’s a 24 % enhance from the identical interval in 2017.
Police data present prior to now 10 years there have been practically 6,200 robberies and tried robberies on CTA property. Of these, 835 have led to arrests.
Shootings on trains, nevertheless, are considerably much less frequent. CPD data present since January 2010 there have been 5 nonfatal shootings on CTA trains. In that very same time interval, there have been eight murders on CTA trains and station platforms.
The most up-to-date deadly capturing on CTA property occurred in December when a 20-year-old man was shot and killed on the Howard station in Rogers Park.
As a part of the organizational shuffle introduced final month by interim CPD Supt. Charlie Beck, duty over the CTA and all of mass transit in Chicago could be positioned below the management of the CPD’s new counter-terrorism unit.
“What we want to do is put more of a presence not only on the platforms but riding the trains themselves,” Beck advised ABC7 on Friday.