People with sex and gun convictions are required to register with police, but Chicago Police Department can’t keep up

Outside a red brick building in Chicago’s Burnside neighborhood, Odell Whitehorn Jr. recently stood in a line with over a dozen men on a bitterly cold morning.

Whitehorn is on the Illinois murder and violence against youth registry, for a crime he committed when he was 18, in 2000. Once a year, Whitehorn is required to register with the Chicago police. This was the fifth time he said he’d attempted to register in the previous couple of weeks.

On the other occasions, Whitehorn said police turned him away because it was too crowded and they didn’t have enough capacity to register everyone. Other men in line complained they’ve faced the same problem.

Whitehorn nervously shifted his weight from one foot to the other as he considered his impossible situation. If he gives up and doesn’t register, he could end up in prison. But he can’t skip work and risk losing his job to keep coming back.

Thousands of people in Chicago are on a criminal conviction registry, including registries for gun crimes, sex offenses and murder and violence against youth. People on the registry have to show up yearly, quarterly or weekly, or risk getting locked up.

But WBEZ has found men are repeatedly being turned away because of staffing shortages in the Chicago Police Department’s registry office. Data from public records show CPD routinely registered more than 1,000 people per month in 2018. By the end of 2022, that number had been cut nearly in half.

The team that registers people is “a unit that for some reason the Chicago Police Department, especially the bureau detectives, who oversee this unit, do not care if it succeeds. And right now it is failing,” said Patty Casey, a former Chicago police commander who oversaw the registries until she retired in June 2021.

Casey called the situation inhumane and said people who are trying to comply with the law should be able to do that.

Provided

On Thursday, after WBEZ first reported on the issue, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said she had been unaware of the problem and would be taking it up with Police Supt. David Brown to ensure “we’re doing what we need to do to make sure that they have the ability to register accordingly.”

After declining to comment initially, the police department said late Friday it was “in the process of increasing efficiencies at the Criminal Registration Unit as we work to strengthen the criminal registration process. CPD is committed to ensuring that those who need to register are able to comply with the law.”

The stakes are high. People on the registry risk arrest and incarceration, causing destabilized families and communities. And Chicago is wrestling with big concerns over public safety and how to use its limited resources to fight violence.

Chicago 400 Alliance, an organization led by unhoused people on the registry, said the problems exacerbate an already racist system. They estimate that 1 in every 147 men in Illinois is on a registry. For Black men it’s much higher: 1 in 42.

“People have gotten jobs, they’re taking care of their families, they’re doing their best, and they’re constantly having to come back to the police station to be treated like they’re in custody,” said Laurie Jo Reynolds, an associate professor at the University of Illinois Chicago and the coordinator of the Chicago 400 Alliance. “So they’re really tied down in the weight of this impossible system.”

Victims and their families also say poorly functioning registries are not in their interests.

Jennifer Bishop-Jenkins, a victim advocate and director of Marsy’s Law for Illinois, said victims can be retraumatized if the system fails to work as promised.

“This is a matter of public safety and law. And it is not something that should be a, ‘Oh, only if we feel like it today,’ ” said Bishop Jenkins.

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times

Barriers to registering

Outside the office, Dale Miller was bundled up, waiting in line to register, which he is required to do every 90 days. He said he lives across town and it had taken him two hours and three buses to get there. He left his house at 4:30 a.m. because he wanted to be near the front of the line since four other attempts to register failed when police told him they were at capacity.

But when Miller finally reached the front of the line, he said he had to pay a $100 registration fee and didn’t have the cash. Miller said he’d have to wait until his Social Security check came later in the month, and he would have to make the long trek yet again.

In the past, people could register at police headquarters, located at a relatively central location at 35th Street and Michigan Avenue. But the location recently changed, and now anyone who registers yearly or quarterly must go to an office on 91st Street on the South Side in Chicago’s Burnside neighborhood. Weekly registrants are assigned to other locations throughout the city.

Chicago police did not answer questions about why the registry office was moved.

Another man in the line, Leo Charles, said the process is even more difficult for people who are unhoused. The law requires those without an address to register every week. Charles has housing now but previously was unhoused. He said his entire week centered on showing up to register and scrounging together money for transportation. It added an extra barrier to the already arduous task of finding a job and housing.

“You’ve already been convicted, you already served time, you already did what you’re supposed to do. And now, you know, gotta sit out here in the public’s eye just lined up a block long — rain, sleet, snow,” Charles said.

Some men in the line said waiting outside also placed them at risk of violence.

“We already registered as gun offenders, so we don’t have nothing out here to protect ourselves. So anybody who rides past and sees us, that don’t like us, they can harm us right here and get away with it,” one man in line said.

Casey, the former police commander, said the line outdoors makes the situation much more dangerous — especially since people often have to cross gang lines to register.

“It’s a drive-by waiting to happen, which is a danger to the registrants and also to the police officers,” Casey said.

Chicago police did not answer questions about the potential dangers of waiting outside.

Shannon Heffernan/WBEZ

Increasing resources or decreasing registries

Casey said she believes registries are a useful tool for police, but right now the units are being starved without enough staffing.

Public records show the number of people working on registries has been significantly cut, from 18 in 2021 to 10 in 2022.

But some victim advocates argue that increasing the number of police working on registries is a distraction from more important work.

Madeleine Behr, the policy manager at the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, which provides free legal services for victims of sexualized violence, said clients sometimes call detectives assigned to their cases and detectives tell them they can’t meet because they are busy doing compliance checks.

She said those detectives are busy rearresting people for technical violations, such as failing to update an address, instead of interviewing victims who need immediate help.

Reynolds said the Chicago 400 Alliance is working with state legislators to propose a bill that would shrink registries and ease the backlog by cutting the amount of time people spend on the murder and violence against youth registry and eliminating a requirement that unhoused people register weekly.

“If we think that the police have an important role to play, it should be investigating crime or responding to 911 calls or helping people in need,” Reynolds said.

Several men in the line complained that if filling out those forms were really in the public’s interest, the city would make it easier for them to actually complete the task. And if safety were the goal — they wouldn’t have them standing outside, exposed.

A car drove by with its window down and one man, worried about a drive-by shooting, pointed at it.

“This could get really critical,” he said.

Still, he knew he had to stay in line and register. He said it was his third attempt; other times, the door was locked or the offices were over capacity. He said police had already issued a warrant for him.