Forming a “21st Century posse” to hunt down wanted criminals, the Chicago Police Department has detailed all of its fugitive hunters to a U.S. Marshals Service task force that has broad authority to conduct manhunts all over the country and abroad, officials announced Wednesday.
The marshals are “the best ones at finding people who have fled,” said Police Supt. Philip Cline.
One police fugitive team was already working with the Marshals Service’s Great Lakes Regional Task Force. Based on its success, Cline said, he decided to send the remaining two teams to work in the agency’s new headquarters in a sprawling Humboldt Park loft.
That brings the number of Chicago police officers on the fugitive task force to 40, and the total number of officers in the task force to 147.
The task force’s commander, Chief Inspector Geoff Shank, said the Chicago team already in place had a 66 percent increase in arrests since joining the task force.
The move is the first time a police department has had its entire fugitive team attached to a Marshals Service task force, said Kim Widup, the U.S. marshal for the Northern District of Illinois.
Chicago police will still pay the officers’ salaries, Cline said, but overtime, travel, office expenses and other costs will be paid for with federal money.
The fugitive task force has been involved in several recent high-profile searches, including the arrest in September of Shawn Thigpen, who was charged with sexually assaulting boys he met in chat rooms after one boy was slain and his body was left in Lincoln Park.
The Great Lakes task force is not the largest in the Marshals Service, Widup said, but it has been the most productive.
Since it was created less than two years ago, the task force has made more than 8,500 arrests, including more than 190 arrests for murder; more than 500 for violent sexual offenses; and more than 600 for robbery, burglary or carjackings, officials said.
The task force is based in Chicago but has satellite offices in DuPage County, Springfield, Indianapolis, Hammond and Milwaukee.
Widup credits the high number of arrests to cooperation among the Marshals Service and a number of state and local police agencies that help.
Cline noted that the Marshals Service’s national jurisdiction made deputizing all of his investigators very attractive.
“We have a longer reach and more authority to go after criminals hiding out in other jurisdictions,” Cline said.
“This will be successful, particularly, because the U.S. marshals are very good at what they do–because they have a single focus–they go after fugitives and bring them to justice.”
Chicago gang members involved in violence often flee to other Midwest cities, or to the South, or to Mexico when they know they are wanted by police.
Deputizing police officers as marshals gives them broader authority to track the fugitives down. .
“We’ll go across country, or across borders to arrest people who have harmed the Chicago community,” Shank said.
In addition to Chicago police officers, the task force has eight Cook County sheriff’s deputies and investigators from the Illinois State Police, the DuPage County sheriff, Illinois Department of Corrections, Illinois attorney general’s office, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and several other agencies.
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dheinzmann@tribune.com
