The Cook County state’s attorney’s office Monday announced a new task force made up of local and federal law enforcement agencies that it says will strengthen efforts to prosecute crime on public transit.
The task force will include a plethora of law enforcement agencies — including the Cook County sheriff’s office, the Chicago Police Department, the U.S. attorney’s office and the FBI — as well as the Chicago Transit Authority, Metra and Pace.
At monthly meetings to begin next week, task force members will “review processes that will assist in effective and efficient charging and prosecution of transit crime,” according to guidelines released by the state’s attorney’s office.
“When we get all oars in the same water rowing in the same direction, we can make significant progress,” Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke said at a news conference at the Roosevelt Red Line Station Monday. Acting CTA President Nora Leerhsen pledged the mass transit agency was “fully committed to ensuring open communication and the seamless exchange of any data needed to advance the task force mission.”
The task force comes on the heels of an internal task force launched by the state’s attorney’s office earlier this year. And it’s separate from another law enforcement task force mandated by the state’s landmark transit funding and reform legislation, which takes effect in just two weeks.
The transit legislation mandates a regional law enforcement task force to be led by the Cook County sheriff’s office in conjunction with local law enforcement agencies, such as the Illinois State Police and municipal police departments, with the goal of reducing violent crime on public transit. By December, that task force is required by law to create a report of recommendations for fighting crime on public transit.
Asked about how the work of the new task force would differ from the work of the statutorily required task force, O’Neill Burke said, “That task force is not formulated as of yet.”
“We decided that there was a great and urgent need to get ahead of this right now,” she said.
Asked by a reporter what issues in inter-agency communication might have spurred the creation of the task force, O’Neill Burke referenced the work of the office’s internal task force.
“We started working with CTA and CPD, saying: OK, there’s a lot of technology here. We have to make sure, one, that we have an open avenue to get that technology, and two, that we know exactly how to present that in court,” she said. “That was so successful that we said we need to expand this to the entire region.”
Although the state’s attorney’s office listed 10 agencies that will take part in its new task force, including the CTA, Metra and Pace, it did not list the Northern Illinois Transit Authority, which as of June 1 will become the governing body for the three sister transit agencies.
NITA will replace the Chicago area’s existing transit governing body, the Regional Transportation Authority, and is intended to be a more empowered agency that will engender better coordination between the region’s three major transit agencies. A significant portion of new funding expected to be raised under the NITA law this year is slated to go toward law enforcement staffing and other public safety priorities.
The CTA has been under heightened pressure to reduce crime on public transit since a particularly horrific November attack in which a 26-year-old woman was doused with gasoline and lit on fire while riding the Blue Line downtown.
President Donald Trump’s administration seized on that attack in threats to withhold millions in federal funding unless the CTA addressed crime to its satisfaction.
Chicago police data shows that serious crime on the portion of the CTA within city limits is down 24% so far this year compared with 2025. Still, certain violent crimes — namely aggravated batteries and sexual assaults — are up year-over-year. Aggravated batteries on CTA property, for instance, are up 8.5% over the year.
Following the Trump administration’s funding threats, the CTA boosted law enforcement staffing hours by 75% and brought in members of the Cook County sheriff’s police to patrol the city’s rail system. The Trump administration has since backed off threats to withhold funding from the transit agency, at least for the time being.
The CTA has argued that its law enforcement staffing surge is working. At the agency’s monthly board meeting last week, Leerhsen cited recent improvements in crime numbers. Violent crime on the CTA was down 33% in April when compared with the same month last year, she said.
