CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) - The Cook County Sheriff's Office plans to stop accepting new placements to its electronic monitoring program on April 1st, saying it can no longer run the program in a safe and responsible manner due to changes made during the Pretrial Fairness Act.
Anthony McGee is vice president of Teamsters Local 700 which represents sheriff's deputies who work in the electronic monitoring program. He said Sheriff Tom Dart is making a mistake.
“This was simply the sheriff’s office sticking its finger in the eyes of Cook County by saying they no longer want to do it. No one was contemplating this until the sheriff brought it up,” McGee said.
A sheriff's office's statement to WBBM said all electronic monitoring should be consolidated under the chief judge's office in Cook County.
About 1,500 pretrial defendants are being monitored under the Sheriff's Office program.
Here is the Cook County Sheriff’s Office full response to Chief Judge Timothy Evans comments made to the Chicago Sun-Times.
“The Chief Judge’s statement that this decision was made lightly or overnight is just not true and is a lie. He conveniently forgot to mention the years of discussion among all criminal justice stakeholders including the Cook County Board of Commissioners who hired an outside firm to study the Cook County EM programs and ultimately recommended there be one consolidated program. He also failed to mention that he had no problem putting violent offenders, that I now cannot hold accountable, on my program. My office is the only Sheriff’s office in the nation to operate an electronic monitoring program, while every other program is operated by the judiciary. As I have said previously, I can no longer run this program in a safe and responsible manner due to the free movement and other changes made during the pretrial fairness act. The time has come to consolidate all electronic monitoring under the Office of the Chief Judge as is the case in every jurisdiction in the United States. If Chief Judge Timothy Evans is not capable of running that type of program, he should seek input from any of the Judicial Circuits that run successful programs or continue his conversations with the Administrative Office of Illinois Courts.”
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