The Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice sends our sincere condolences to the family and friends of Chicago Police Officer John Bartholomew. We continue to keep the injured police officer in our thoughts and hope for his recovery. No family should experience the pain caused by these senseless acts of violence, and our hearts go out to everyone impacted here.

Unfortunately, as we have seen time and time again since the passage of the Pretrial Fairness Act, cynical individuals are once again attempting to turn the pain of others into their own political gain. What is clear from publicly-available information is that there was absolutely nothing in the law that prohibited the detention of Alphanso Talley while he was awaiting trial. Any statement to the contrary is manifestly false.

No pretrial system can prevent every single tragedy, but it’s clear that Illinois has the tools in place to respond to concerns about public safety. The reality is that the new system—which gives judges more time and information to make release and detention decisions—is far better than the one that allowed the size of someone’s bank account to be the primary factor deciding who was released and who was jailed while awaiting trial.

While no public official’s decisions are above scrutiny, we urge everyone speaking about public safety issues to use care in how they characterize decisions by judges in individual cases. At this time, none of us have access to all the information that was taken into consideration in Mr. Talley’s case. Even under the best of circumstances, judges can not prevent every possible tragedy.

The insistence by some to blame every act of violence on the Pretrial Fairness Act is not only a callous capitalization on someone else’s suffering, it is also a distraction from honest efforts to improve community safety. Decades of research documented the injustice of the money bond system and the ways in which it failed to keep our communities safe and increased the likelihood that people would be arrested again in the future. 

Since the Pretrial Fairness Act took effect, fewer people are being incarcerated awaiting trial, and communities across our state have seen significant decreases in both violent and property crime. The people benefitting from the law are also proving that the system is working. In Cook County, our state’s largest court system, the vast majority of people on pretrial release are succeeding: 94% of the more than 150,000 people released pretrial have not been charged with new offenses against a person. While tens of thousands of people succeeding on pretrial release does not make for a compelling news story, it does demonstrate that we can build safer and stronger communities without widespread pretrial detention.

Working collaboratively to improve our public safety systems is good policymaking. Attempts to mislead the public or draw conclusions using misinformation only undermine these efforts. The Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice will continue to work in good faith to share accurate information about pretrial laws in Illinois, and we will not let this tragedy be manipulated to return us to a system of wealth-based incarceration.