Overview
- Chief Judge Charles S. Beach II convened a multi-agency committee to examine how electronic monitoring violations are communicated, evaluated, and acted upon, with public recommendations expected by late January.
- Sheriff Tom Dart said he warned for years about program weaknesses and cited the SAFE-T Act’s requirement that people on monitors are not actively observed two days each week, adding that he stands ready to assist the review.
- Federal prosecutors say Lawrence Reed was on pretrial monitoring when he allegedly set a woman on fire on a Blue Line train, and reporting shows multiple alerts in the days and even hours beforehand did not lead to his apprehension.
- After the program shifted from the sheriff to the courts in April, operations moved from a law-enforcement home-detention model to a compliance-based approach without an apprehension arm, with officials reporting roughly 8,500 alerts weekly and a temporary pause on escalations to prosecutors.
- A lawsuit over the 2024 killing of Lacramioara Beldie alleges repeated violation alerts were ignored and that the vendor failed to issue an alert the night she was killed, intensifying scrutiny of monitoring practices.