A CTA union president demanded Wednesday that the transit agency bring back conductors and re-establish its own police unit to stop a surge in violent crime and unruly behavior that’s depressing ridership and putting CTA employees at risk.
Eric Dixon is president of the Amalgamated Transit Workers Union Local 308, which represents rapid transit workers. He said yet another “smoke and mirrors” response from Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown and CTA President Dorval Carter Jr. won’t cut it.
Hours before Lightfoot, Brown and Carter announced their latest in a series of crackdowns on CTA crime, Dixon said he would “take what he could get,” including more officers and unarmed security guards.
In a news conference at the Chicago/State Red Line stop, the trio announced several measures, including “strategically adjusting resources from within the Bureau of Counterterrorism to better address shifts in crime patterns” on public transit, according to a news release.
Those officers will be divided into teams that will “focus on gang and narcotics crimes on the transit system, as well as patrolling the busy rail lines.”
“Violence on our transit system must end, as people shouldn’t have to fear for their lives when they’re commuting around our city,” the mayor was quoted as saying in the release.
“This partnership between CTA and CPD will help to protect them and contribute greatly to our citywide mission to create a safer Chicago.”
The CTA also is expanding its used of unarmed security guards.
“Having a visible presence of guards is an important deterrent to misbehavior and also helps demonstrate our commitment to addressing our riders’ concerns,” Carter was quoted as saying in the release, which explained the security guards now will be used every day, instead of five days a week, and will help enforce CTA prohibitions on smoking, loud music, harassment or bullying.
But Dixon argued, CTA crime would remain “out of control” until conductors return to be the “eyes and ears,” at least on subway trains, and the CTA re-establishes the in-house police unit disbanded more than 40 years ago.
Only the CTA’s Red and Blue lines have subway components. They also are the two lines that operate 24 hours a day.
“It makes no sense to me. Boston, New York, D.C., Atlanta, Toronto — all these cities have their own transit policing and we can’t have ours back here. When Mayor [Jane] Byrne dissolved that program, crime wasn’t as bad then as it is now,” Dixon said.
“I’ve been around for 35 years. You had guys undercover in the subways. As a conductor, I would see them get on the trains. If something happened, I’d say, ‘In the fourth car, we’ve got a situation.’ They would go to that car. They’d stop things from happening.”
Dixon dismissed the CTA’s decision to add more unarmed security guards, calling it window dressing.
“A lot of these are young kids walking around with backpacks on. They’re on their cell phones. They’re not there deterring any crime from happening. You need somebody with authority, so that when somebody sees them, they’re gonna stop doing what they’re gonna do. Right now, these kids walk right past them and do whatever they’re gonna do. That does nothing but put a Band-Aid on it,” Dixon said.
Dixon made a similar argument about the CPD’s Mass Transit Unit which, he claims, is short of manpower and dominated by moonlighting officers “working on their days off.”
“It was like 100 officers. We’ve got three shifts: a.m., p.m. and midnights. That’s 33 officers-per-shift for bus and rail? That’s not enough. It’s a joke,” Dixon said.
Hours after yet another CTA shooting — this one on the Red Line at 63rd Street and the Dan Ryan — Dixon said: “Who wants to get on a train or bus these days if they don’t know if they’re gonna be safe or not?”
In a text message to the Sun-Times, Keith Hill, president of the Amalgamated Transit Workers Union Local 241, which represents bus drivers, agreed with Dixon that the answer to the CTA crime surge is “the mass transit police I’ve been pushing for about four years now.”
It’s not the first time Lightfoot has vowed to rein in a CTA crime wave that discouraged people from using mass transit.
In January 2020, two months before the stay-at-home shutdown triggered by the coronavirus pandemic sent ridership into a tailspin, the mayor called a three-year surge in CTA crime “totally, fundamentally unacceptable” and vowed to get a handle on it with increased patrols and even more surveillance cameras.
At the time, the CTA was struggling to control a 24% spike in crime that triggered 458 criminal incidents on its buses and trains during the one-month period between Thanksgiving and Christmas 2019.
Interim Chicago Police Supt. Charlie Beck first asked SWAT team officers he called the “best and the brightest” at CPD to start riding CTA trains. Then, he launched a more extensive crackdown on mass transit violence.
His broader plan bolstered CPD’s Mass Transit Unit by 50 officers, assigned four detectives exclusively to solving CTA crimes and built a strategic deployment center specifically for mass transit.
The 200-officer Mass Transit Unit grew to 250, freeing SWAT officers to return to their normal duties. They were bolstered by 50 moonlighting officers bankrolled by the CTA.
Beck also asked each of the city’s 22 police districts to do “platform security missions” several times per shift at CTA stations in those districts.
That freed officers assigned to the Mass Transit Unit to ride the trains, dramatically increasing both the perception and reality of safety for CTA riders.
“We’re gonna hold the districts — the normal geographic commands — primarily responsible for that platform presence because I want as many of the 250 cops that will be assigned to CTA to be riding the trains as possible,” Beck said then.
The technology extended to the officers themselves, who were asked to start wearing tracking devices.
“Deep into CTA, oftentimes, their [police radios] don’t work. We want to make sure we know where they are so we can keep them safe,” Beck said then.
“It’s not only how many you have. It’s how you use them. And we want to make sure we’re using them effectively in the right places at the right times.”
The new Strategic Decision Support Center for mass transit opened in the Central Police District. It was bankrolled by a donation from billionaire Ken Griffin, Illinois’ richest man. The center has access to more than 32,000 surveillance cameras on CTA buses, trains and platforms.
“Having a crime analyst there will allow us to not only respond to crime, but make sure that we can put people where we think crime is gonna occur,” Beck said then.
