After the brutal attempted murder of 28-year-old Bethany McGee on the Blue Line—burned alive by a repeat violent offender who should never have been free—many Chicagoans expected Governor JB Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson to finally acknowledge the cost of Illinois’ criminal-justice experiments. Instead, the state’s political leadership offered only minor rhetorical shifts, paired with a familiar reluctance to confront the policies at the heart of the crisis.
On Chicago’s Morning Answer, host Dan Proft walked listeners through a week of violent incidents on the CTA—including a Thanksgiving Day stabbing on the Red Line—and the growing sense that criminals now operate with brazen confidence. Proft argued that both the SAFE-T Act’s elimination of cash bail and Cook County’s electronic monitoring failures have created an environment where known dangerous offenders cycle back onto the streets with ease.
Joining the program to unpack the deeper structural issues was Rafael Mangual, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of Criminal Injustice: What the Push for Mass Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts Most. Mangual said the outcomes we’re seeing are not just predictable—they were predicted.
“It’s almost as if someone could have foreseen this going south,” Mangual said. The research, he noted, has long shown that crime is overwhelmingly driven by a very small group of highly active offenders. In New York, for example, just 357 individuals amassed over 6,000 arrests for retail theft—an enormous share of the city’s total.
“This is true in every American city,” he said. “Crime is a broad social problem, but it is driven by a relative handful of people.”
That means you don’t need “mass incarceration” to meaningfully reduce violence. You simply need the political will to detain and incapacitate the repeat offenders who are already revealing themselves through their conduct. In both Chicago and New York, research shows that less than 0.2% of the population is responsible for the majority of gun violence.
Yet Illinois’ current system—strengthened by the SAFE-T Act—does the opposite. It releases repeat violent offenders pre-trial, often under electronic monitoring that has proven ineffective at best and reckless at worst. The horrific Blue Line attack, Proft noted, was preventable. So are most of the daily violent crimes reported across Chicago.
Mangual said the problem goes beyond pretrial policy. Cities like Chicago reflexively avoid acknowledging the cultural realities driving youth “takeovers” and mob violence. During the chaotic teen gathering near the tree-lighting ceremony—where multiple people were shot—local progressive leaders argued that the solution was more youth “safe spaces” and social-program funding.
Mangual called that framing an evasion.
“That’s essentially admitting downtown Chicago is unsafe,” he said. “The environment didn’t cause that violence. The people who brought violence with them did.”
Most teens at the tree-lighting event didn’t suddenly erupt into fights or fire guns. The violence came from “a discrete cultural problem with a discrete subset of the population”—young people immersed in peer cultures that treat violence as a means of conflict resolution and social status.
No number of parks, basketball leagues, or warmed-over social-program ideas will change that, Mangual argued, until city leaders confront the small group driving the chaos.
Proft highlighted new research showing that violent crime would drop dramatically—up to 80%—if offenders were prevented from reoffending after their first conviction. Even incapacitating offenders after their third conviction would reduce violent crime by half. In fact, making a tenth violent conviction punishable by life without parole could reduce violent crime by 20%.
Mangual said these numbers make intuitive sense: the average person entering prison has 10–12 prior arrests and 5–6 prior convictions. More than 95% of incarcerated people are eventually released, and more than 80% reoffend within a decade.
“That is a self-inflicted wound,” he said. “The people we need to take off the street are telling us who they are.”
Chicago’s failure to act, he argued, harms vulnerable communities most. While the chaos downtown is jarring, neighborhoods like Englewood, Austin, and West Garfield Park endure this violence daily. The refusal to remove predators from the streets robs these residents of the stability necessary for economic mobility, safe childhoods, and basic neighborhood life.
“If leaders truly cared about disadvantaged neighborhoods,” Mangual said, “they would protect them from the people driving the violence.”
Instead, Illinois’ political establishment continues to treat violent offenders as victims of circumstance, while victims like Bethany McGee—and the thousands living in Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods—bear the cost.
Until that changes, Mangual warned, the cycle of preventable tragedies will continue.