Illinois police are preparing new ways to better serve and protect law-abiding citizens as the state’s new criminal justice reform bill goes into effect Sunday, a local sheriff said.
“We’ve spent a lot of time trying to prepare for what’s coming,” Franklin County Sheriff Kevin Bacon told Fox News. “Trying to sift through a thousand pages to figure out what our role is and what’s going to change and how we can better serve the citizens we protect has been first and foremost for us.”
The Illinois Safety, Accountability, Justice and Fairness-Today (SAFE-T) Act, which went into effect January 1, overhauled the Illinois justice system with provisions such as limiting when defendants can be considered risks of jailbreak and allow defendants under electronic monitoring to leave. home for 48 hours before they can be charged with absconding. It was also supposed to eliminate the cash bail, but the state Supreme Court suspended that portion hours before the law took effect.
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In an earlier interview, Orland Park Mayor Keith Pekau told Fox News: “When I said this is the most dangerous law I’ve ever seen, I believe that.”
Bacon, who was elected sheriff in November, said he has attended “what feels like hundreds of hours of training and discussion” on the new reforms. “And there are so many questions that still exist.”
“My focus has been to make sure that people who commit certain crimes can stay in jail,” he told Fox News. “We work very hard to provide the best services that we can and sometimes we feel like we are paddling against the current.”
Concerned Illinoisans like Bacon scored a victory Thursday when Circuit Judge Thomas Cunnington ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit brought by various prosecutors and sheriffs from across the state. The class action lawsuit, signed by dozens of counties across the state, argued that the pretrial release and bail reforms in the SAFE-T Act are unconstitutional.
ILLINOIS SHERIFF REACTS TO THE SAFE-T ACT: LOOK HERE
JUDGE RULES ILLINOIS LAW ELIMINATING CASH BAIL UNCONSTITUTIONAL
“Today’s ruling affirms that we remain a government of the people, and that the constitutional protections afforded to the citizens of Illinois, most importantly, the right to exercise our voice by voting, are inalienable,” the state attorney said. of Kankakee County, Jim Rowe, one of the lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said in a statement.
The Illinois superior court, as a result, blocked the removal of the cash bail as the state’s appeal decision, though the rest of the bill remains in effect.
The SAFE-T Act also removed trespassing from a Class A misdemeanor to a Class B. As a result, police will not be able to arrest non-violent trespassers and instead can only issue them with a citation.
“If someone is trespassing on your property, we’ll get them off your property,” Bacon said. “We may not be able to arrest them, we may not be able to put them in county jail, but we’re not going to leave them there.”
SAFE-T ACT: ILLINOIS SHERIFF WARNS PROSECUTORS NOT TO BE ‘OVERLY JEALOUS’ IN DIRECTING VICTIMS TO ARREST CRIMINALS
The sheriff said while officers will continue to work within the requirements of the law, “there’s also common sense and discretion, and we’re going to use that.”
“Law enforcement officers: your loyalty remains to the victims of crime,” he added.
Sheriff Kevin Bacon said law enforcement’s loyalty remains with crime victims as the SAFT-T law will increase the number of criminals released onto the streets.
(AP Newsroom)
Franklin County, located in southern Illinois with a population of about 37,000, experiences a high number of drug-related robberies, the sheriff said.
“It’s ongoing,” Bacon told Fox News. “Every day.”
The sheriff said from what he can tell of the SAFE-T act, “there is no drug offense other than a firearm or high level drug offense that is arrestable.”
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As a result, he fears that not only will the high volume of these crimes continue, but low-level drug-abusing offenders will also not be given opportunities to clean themselves up if they are released immediately after arrest.
“It’s a snowball effect if the drug issue leads to these deaths and robberies that we experience,” Bacon said. “They are a fight for rural departments to keep up.”
“Just to hire somebody and send them out before they’re sober, I don’t see a huge benefit,” he told Fox News. “I hope I’m wrong, but it’s worrisome.”
