Chicago police are teaming up with federal and state officials to fight gun violence. On Friday, officials will announce a new task force featuring about 20 ATF agents, Illinois state troopers and state and federal prosecutors. Chief Anthony Riccio, who runs CPD’s Bureau of Organized Crime, sits down to talk more about the initiative.
President Donald Trump announced Friday that he is "sending in Federal help" to Chicago, saying the city's crime and shootings have reached "epidemic proportions."
"Crime and killings in Chicago have reached such epidemic proportions that I am sending in Federal help," the president tweeted. "1714 shootings in Chicago this year!"
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The move follows an earlier promise Trump made in January, when he tweeted that he would “send in the Feds!” to help curb the rising number of shootings in Chicago. It also comes just before the long Fourth of July weekend, which has previously been among the most violent in the city. Last year, 62 people were shot over the holiday weekend, including three children.
In the last week, 98 people have been shot in the city, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, and 1,727 have been shot this year.
On Thursday, authorities confirmed that roughly 20 agents with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are being sent to Chicago as part of a new initiative to combat gun violence in the city.
State police, intelligence analysts and state and federal prosecutors will target illegal guns and repeat gun offenders, Chicago police said. Superintendent Eddie Johnson said in a statement Thursday night that "we are foundationally changing the way we fight crime in Chicago."
"We always welcome any assistance we can get," Anthony Riccio, head of the Chicago Police Department’s organized crime unit, told NBC 5.
Riccio added that the number of shootings so far this year is actually 14 percent less than last year.
"We are making progress," he said. "Nobody is celebrating certainly when you have that many people shot."
Police and federal officials note, however, that efforts to curb gun violence in Chicago have been cooperative — and are ongoing. Under the new effort, the federal prosecutors and prosecutors from Cook County will work on new strategies to prosecute gun crimes and offenders.
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The area that would likely impact the most people directly is education. K-12 schools have been receiving some form of state funding up to this point because they were fully funded over the last two years, through the stopgap budget passed in 2016, as well as individual appropriations the year before. While most school districts around the state are behind on receiving state aid to some degree, there are appropriations in place for them to eventually get paid – though the comptroller is behind on making those legally-obligated payments. If Illinois enters its third fiscal year without a budget – that’s no longer the case. Because the entire budget compromise from House Democrats appears to be contained in one bill (versus piecemeal appropriations as in years prior), it’s essentially, as it stands Wednesday, an all-or-nothing deal. If the compromise isn’t passed, then nothing is funded, meaning K-12 schools would have no state funding, period. If they can open in the fall at all, many schools likely wouldn’t be able to stay open very long – though each district’s financial situation varies.
When it comes to Illinois’ largest school district, Chicago Public Schools officials say the state owes them about $467 million. CPS plans to use that funding to repay $387 million in loans from JPMorgan Chase that the district took out to continue operating through June, as well as make its required contribution to the Chicago Teachers' Pension Fund at the end of the month. CPS faces a deadline of Dec. 28 to repay or refinance the loans, according to the Chicago Tribune, which calculated that the deals will cost the district roughly $70,000 per day in interest alone. "School districts throughout Illinois have suffered under the Rauner Administration's failure to provide education funding in a timely manner, and the agreement CPS was forced to reach today is a direct result of this failure,” CPS’ Vice President of Finance Ron DeNard said in a statement when the first agreement was finalized on June 19.
The state’s problems with education funding continue at the college level as well. Illinois’ public universities have been among those hardest hit by the stalemate, with several schools like Chicago State, Governor’s State and Northeastern Illinois forced to make cuts and layoffs, implement furlough days and reckon with drastic drops in enrollment – all major issues that will continue should the standoff extend past Friday. What’s more, the Higher Learning Commission – the regional agency responsible for granting Illinois schools accreditation – warned legislators last week that there could be “consequences” for institutions’ standings if the impasse continues. Accreditation essentially serves as official recognition that a school is meeting certain standards to provide a quality education for its students. But it extends beyond that, as the federal government will not administer financial aid to students attending institutions that are not accredited.
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That’s not the only impact the standoff has on financial aid for students. Budgetary woes have hit Illinois hard when it comes to Monetary Award Program grants. MAP grants are a form of financial aid that go toward tuition for roughly 130,000 Illinois students who demonstrate need based on their FAFSA application. Last year, the state suspended MAP grants for the 2017 to 2018 academic year. Some schools continued to award around 124,000 students funding in lieu of the MAP grants they would have received in hopes of reimbursement, while others have depleted their own savings in an effort to continue their education. Roughly 1,000 people were unable to return to college as a direct result of losing their MAP grant funding.
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Students and residents turning to luck to help boost their funds will be sorely disappointed, as the Illinois Lottery suspended sales of Powerball tickets effective Wednesday night, with plans to shutter Mega Millions sales Friday night. Players who win more than $25,000 will also have their payments delayed due to the impasse, the Lottery said.
And while summer is typically the season of road construction, projects across Illinois will come to a halt without a budget, putting roughly 30,000 people out of work. While reports surfaced that discussions are underway to keep some of those projects going, the governor’s office refuted that claim Tuesday, as countless social service agencies across the state have already been waiting for more than two years to be paid.
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Those social service agencies will continue to wait if the stalemate continues. A patchwork of court orders and consent decrees dictates that the state pay certain suppliers, though Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza has warned that her office is required to pay out more than it receives in revenue each month. Mendoza’s office will be forced to continue to make those payments (though many of them are late and not in full), meaning the bill backlog that already sits around $15 billion would continue to pile up. By August, Mendoza has said the state will likely not have enough money to cover even those payments it is legally required to make, forcing a tough choice that could see state employee paychecks halted, or a missed pension payment.
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All these factors are part of what’s led credit ratings agencies to warn that they will downgrade Illinois’ rating to junk status without a budget deal by Friday. Illinois has the distinction of being the only state to ever go two years without passing a budget, according to the National Conference of State Legislators, and if its creditworthiness drops below investment grade, the Land of Lincoln will again be in a league of its own, as no other state has ever earned a junk rating before. A downgrade would also make it more difficult for the state to issue bonds – making it more expensive to borrow money at higher interest rates, ultimately deepening the deficit and potentially costing taxpayers millions of dollars for years to come.
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As if that weren’t enough, while the clock ticks closer to the end of the fiscal year, the special session costs taxpayers $40,000 a day – with no end in sight, as Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner vowed Wednesday to keep the Democratic-controlled legislature in Springfield past the June 30 deadline until a deal is done.
Sessions last week pledged federal assistance to 12 cities to help them develop individualized, long-term strategies to fight violence. But Chicago was not among them.
The Justice Department said that's because Chicago was already part of a similar Justice Department program called the Violence Reduction Network, which began in 2014. Under that initiative, federal agents teamed up with their local counterparts to share resources and intelligence.
The Justice Department spokesman said the department will keep working with cities including Chicago under the new crime-fighting program, called the Public Safety Partnership. And he noted that dozens of additional ATF agents had "surged" into Chicago so far this year.
The van is a state-of-the-art mobile forensic lab that’s designed to assist law enforcement in analyzing bullet casings and other ballistic evidence instantly.
Officers can drive the van directly to crime scenes and analyze shell casings and weapons on the spot, getting immediate results linked to the ATF’s National Integration Ballistic Information Network.
The NIBIN is an interstate database that will allow authorities to gather information on suspects and develop leads within hours instead of days – helping them to ultimately track down and arrest gun offenders more quickly in the early, critical stages of an investigation.
“That shell casing is then entered into this national information network that ATF maintains and compared against like images to see if there’s a connection with other crimes,” ATF spokesman David Coulson said. “It’s kind of connecting the dots and it provides, hopefully what the goal is, actionable intelligence to investigators.”
The NIBIN van arrived in Chicago from Baltimore on June 1 and will stay in the city through the end of July as the ATF runs its pilot program. There is a possibility that it could stay longer in Chicago depending on the success of the program.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, speaking Friday on the Fox News Channel's morning show, "Fox & Friends," said the Justice Department is "sending in additional gun investigators" to Chicago and that he has urged the U.S. attorney's office to prosecute gun cases aggressively.
"The police have been demoralized in many ways," he said. "In many ways, the policies in Chicago have not been working. Murders are way, way too high. It is critical for the people of Chicago's public safety that we begin to work together here and deport violent criminals that have been convicted. They need to not be a sanctuary city, they need to be protecting the people of Chicago from violent criminals."
