US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois Andrew Bros announced the results of Operation New Dawn last week, a multi-agency federal law enforcement operation that began quietly around May 1st and produced approximately two hundred people charged, three hundred fugitives arrested, and twenty-four missing children recovered across eleven coordinating federal agencies. At the press conference, Bros made pointed public comments about the Cook County judicial system, saying there is a problem with Cook County judges and that more of the press needs to start reporting on it because repeat violent offenders are being released on pretrial conditions that put the public at risk.
Mark Glennon, founder of Wirepoints, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to discuss what those comments mean in practice and the accelerating demographic decline that is compounding every other problem the state faces.
Proft opened with a specific illustration of what Bros is talking about. A juvenile who pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in the killing of Octavia Redmond, a forty-eight-year-old postal worker and three-year veteran of the United States Postal Service, was sentenced last week to five years in juvenile detention. The circumstances of the crime were not ambiguous. The fifteen-year-old dressed in all black, tracked Redmond’s mail delivery route, exited a stolen white Dodge Durango, and shot her multiple times at close range in an execution-style killing in the West Pullman neighborhood. Surveillance video captured the shooting. The firearm was linked to a separate battery case. He pleaded guilty to first-degree premeditated murder and received five years. Illinois law allows juveniles to be charged as adults in cases like this, which would have exposed the defendant to a sentence of up to forty years. That option was not pursued.
Glennon said five years for a planned and deliberate murder like that is indefensible, and agreed with Proft’s assessment that regardless of clinical terminology, the behavioral profile of someone who tracks and executes a stranger at fifteen years old is that of a sociopath who should not be returning to civil society in five years. He said the Operation New Dawn numbers are encouraging, particularly the three hundred fugitives arrested and twenty-four missing children recovered, and represent the kind of federal intervention that the public wants and that the local system has failed to provide.
Proft cited a series of cases from CWB Chicago illustrating the daily pattern Bros was describing: a man who predicted he would get right back out after attempting to rob a CTA passenger while wearing an ankle monitor, a man who received one year for a bus hijacking and then three years for mugging a Red Line passenger while already on pretrial release, and a parolee who burglarized two northwest side homes while wearing an Illinois Department of Corrections ankle monitor. He said these are not isolated anecdotes but a daily accumulation of preventable crimes committed by a small cadre of repeat offenders who remain in circulation because of judicial decisions that prioritize leniency over public safety.
On the demographic crisis, Glennon said new data showing Illinois’s under-twenty population declining by nearly seven percent between 2020 and 2025, a rate three times faster than the national average decline of two percent, represents poison for the state’s future. The growth gap extends across every young professional demographic: the national population of people in their twenties grew 4.3 percent while Illinois grew only one percent, and the national population of people in their thirties grew 4.7 percent while Illinois grew barely half a percent. He said Chicago’s historic status as the number one destination city for Big Ten graduates is slipping away as more Midwestern young people bypass Big Ten schools entirely for SEC and ACC institutions and never return to the region. He said young, smart people are the key to a city’s future, and their departure is the most consequential long-term indicator of decline, far more significant than any individual business relocation.
Glennon characterized the overall trajectory as managed decline being passed off as progress, with Pritzker regularly claiming improvements while every aggregate metric moves in the wrong direction. He said in Chicago specifically the decline is actually unmanaged, with the political class making active decisions that accelerate the deterioration rather than merely failing to reverse it.
On Congresswoman Delia Ramirez using the eve of America’s 250th anniversary to honor the Chicago Young Lords, a street gang turned Puerto Rican nationalist organization, Glennon said Ramirez and the growing DSA faction within the Democratic Party are straightforward America-hating individuals who do not hide their orientation and whose growing influence within the party is the political story to watch. He noted that Pritzker recently appeared on CNN welcoming DSA-aligned members into the Democratic coalition, describing them as part of the formula for winning elections, which Glennon said is impossible to reconcile with Pritzker’s occasional self-characterization as a capitalist.
He made a specific appeal to the Hispanic community in Chicago, noting that national polling consistently shows Hispanics as one of the demographics least supportive of the DSA’s direction, and expressed frustration that candidates like Ramirez are winning elections within Hispanic districts without serious challenge from within those communities. He said many Hispanic Americans came to the United States specifically to escape the kind of political movements that Ramirez and the DSA represent, and that someone needs to stand up and communicate that message clearly in Chicago.
Proft drew a historical parallel to Louis Philippe II, the Duke of Orléans, who financed the French Revolution only to end up on the wrong side of the guillotine, suggesting that Pritzker’s accommodation of the DSA to serve his presidential ambitions will ultimately be repaid with the same gratitude revolutionary movements have historically shown to their wealthy enablers.