A man documented on video threatening CTA red line passengers with two hammers in March, who had been arrested forty-six times since 2015 and had eighty separate court cases filed under his name dating back to 1997, was finally ordered detained as a public safety risk this week after threatening to strike a Chicago police officer in the head and repeating the threat approximately nine times.
The sequence leading to that eventual detention tells a familiar story about the Cook County criminal justice system that Ted Dabrowski, Wirepoints president emeritus and former Republican gubernatorial candidate, discussed with Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer as another illustration of a system that appears constitutionally incapable of learning from its failures.
According to CWB Chicago, the man had just been released from Stateville Penitentiary when he appeared on the red line threatening passengers with hammers and making racial threats. About ten days after that video went viral, Chicago police arrested him after he threatened a fifty-five-year-old gas station employee with a hammer at a South Side service station, the second disturbance he had caused at that location that same day. Police cited him with a notice to appear in court and took him to St. Bernard Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. He did not appear for his court date, the victim also failed to appear, and the case was dropped. Three days later, Cook County Sheriff’s police found him sleeping across a row of seats on the red line with two hammers protruding from his backpack, recognized him from recent news coverage, and detained him when he became agitated, declared himself the king of the CTA, and threatened to strike an officer. Only at that point, after the fiftieth arrest, did a judge order him held as a public safety risk.
Dabrowski said the challenge of prosecuting these cases politically is one he has spent significant time thinking about since the election, because the facts seem so obviously on the side of those calling for accountability. The stories are extreme, they recur constantly, and the chain of decisions that allowed them to happen is traceable and documentable. Yet the political class responsible for those decisions largely ignores the pattern or constructs justifications for it, and the press corps that should be pressing Governor Pritzker and Mayor Johnson on these specific cases instead lets them pass without challenge. He said Pritzker would publicly claim he supports deporting violent criminals, but a Guatemalan national convicted of aggravated sexual abuse of a five-year-old child had his ICE detainer ignored by local authorities, forcing federal immigration officers to locate and arrest him themselves on the street. He said sexual assault of a five-year-old is unambiguously a violent crime, the detainer should have been honored, and the failure to honor it is the direct consequence of sanctuary city and sanctuary state policies that Pritzker actively supports while pretending otherwise.
Proft raised comments from Sixth Ward Alderman William Hall, who responded to the announced closure of a Walgreens in the Chatham neighborhood by calling for legislation making what he termed first-degree corporate abandonment a criminal offense, arguing that the store’s closure was as legally culpable as the theft that drove it away. Dabrowski said the logic is exactly backwards. Walgreens is closing because the combination of persistent theft, lack of law enforcement response to that theft, and the legal and financial exposure created by any attempt to physically prevent it has made the store unviable to operate. A Target in the same neighborhood recently closed for substantially the same reasons. When retail employees are trained not to intervene in theft because the liability and safety risks of intervention outweigh the cost of the stolen merchandise, and when the public policy environment fails to address the underlying lawlessness producing the theft, businesses have no rational alternative to closure. Threatening to criminalize the closure does nothing to address any of those underlying conditions and simply confirms to every business evaluating whether to open or remain in those neighborhoods that the political environment is hostile to their basic interests.
Proft closed by asking Dabrowski where things stand for him after his gubernatorial primary campaign, which he entered as a policy-focused reform candidate and which he said produced results that encouraged him despite the loss. He said winning Cook County and the collar counties by nine points demonstrated real resonance for a message centered on fiscal accountability and public safety, and that the primary difficulty was building name recognition in downstate markets that have no major media hubs and require substantial advertising spending he did not have. He said he finished the campaign more motivated than when he started, refuses to accept the decline of Illinois as inevitable, and is working on a new initiative he expects to announce soon. He said the question he has been thinking about is how far down Illinois has to go before the conditions are right for a genuine political reversal, and that his goal is to be ready with a credible vehicle when that moment arrives.