The Chicago Cubs had their game on Wednesday night against the Baltimore Orioles postponed. That sends them into Thursday’s day off ahead of a weekend series with the New York Yankees. That is a matchup that you don’t see very often.

The Yankees play the Chicago White Sox every year but they very rarely ever see the National League Chicago squad. They last played during the 2017 season and only played three games at Wrigley Field. The Cubs lost all three games.

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This June, queer youth are challenging audiences on what it means to be active in environmental justice and to participate in mutual aid activism.

About Face Youth Theatre, founded in 1999, offers annual workshop sessions where LGBTQ+ youth and their allies ages 13 to 24 can participate in activist theater that supports learning in safe and nurturing environments.

Gayme Changers
Sat 6/18, 7:30 PM, Sun 6/19, 3 PM, Wed 6/22, 7:30 PM, and Fri 6/24, 7:30 PM; Den Theatre, 1331 N. Milwaukee, aboutfacetheatre.com, $5-$35.

This month, from June 18-24, AFYT will perform an ensemble-devised piece written by Kirsten Baity called Gayme Changers. Directed by Vic Wynter, the show’s premise is that it’s the final season of a hit reality television show where teams compete for a $4 million prize and the title of America’s next Social Justice Superstars. It’s an immersive comedy about climate change activism that functions as a call to action.

The inspiration came from discussions Baity had with another producer about what they thought was important to be talking about with the current cohort of youth, and what they wanted to leave the young artists with as they finish the program.

“As much as this program is about creating a show at the end, we also want to create good humans who are taking care of each other,” Baity says. “What we decided was not only something we wanted to teach people, but was also in our wheelhouses, which was discussing environmental justice as well as mutual aid.”

The path to the show started last fall when the ensemble created an audio drama of a turf war between Chicago rats, pigeons, and fairies. They wanted to keep that sort of magic and foolishness without having to come up with costumes that would look kitschy. 

“We needed the people to be people,” Baity says. “But we wanted to keep the drama.”

As an exercise to explore social justice, they had sessions where they played Monopoly, except the rules reflected the real world. Not everyone started with $200. Some started with $1,000 and some with $40. Some people were not allowed to buy certain properties as a re-creation of redlining. It began introducing ideas of capitalism and mutual aid.

Then they invited the youth to brainstorm.

“We talked about some things that we want to see in this play and they were like, ‘We want something that’s very queer—that’s a given,’” Baity said. “’We want something with a lot of fun, a lot of drama. We want to see friendships. We want to see different kinds of relationships.’”

The idea of a reality show encompassed all of the participants’ ideas.

They began to discuss the challenges nonprofits and activist organizations face and the hoops they have to jump through. They then set out to portray how foolish those things are through the game show/reality TV framework.

Two teams compete in the season finale of the reality show, Gayme Changers: Team H2Aid, an environmental justice organization, and 4 the Kidz, a mutual aid group. The mutual aid group centers getting trans-affirming clothing and other supplies to those who need it and helping people legally change their names. 

“The reason we created that team was because we wanted to talk about how it can be really easy to be defeatist and feel like there’s nothing we can do because we aren’t legislators, and phone banking and petitions only do so much,” Baity says. “But even when we can’t stop the Greg Abbotts of the world, we can definitely say, ‘You can have that haircut that you want, you can have your name legally changed, and you can get your gender marker changed. So even if the country is not with you, we are with you.’”

About Face Youth Theatre operates under a consent-based model where no one is touched without permission and the ensemble abides by community agreements they develop. The consent-based model extends to the audience, an important factor as immersive theater relies on audience participation. They will not, Baity says, be like the circus where someone comes up and starts touching you or messing with your hair.

Gayme Changers will have, Baity says, very specific containers of how they want the audience to participate. They will ask specific questions related to the theme of the show. The audience will be invited to brainstorm with those around them. 

They also want to make sure the audience knows they are in a space where consent matters.

“One thing that was a big deal was letting the audience know that there was going to be participation,” Baity notes. “So, if you’re like, ‘That’s going to give me way too much anxiety, I’m not going,’ or, ‘OK, I’m going to brace myself because the actors may ask me to do something’— keep in mind, they don’t have to. It’s not required. . . . At most, we’re asking people to talk. And we have community agreements that will be set up and will say, ‘This is a safe space to be wrong. This is a place where we center queer people and people of the global majority. So don’t come in here with your racist-ness or your transphobic whatevers—keep that to yourself.’”

They also note that audience participation includes just coming and watching. 

While the ensembles start with a baseline of community agreements, each one is customized to the group. Their very first workshop with each new ensemble is spent talking about what participants need to feel safe, to feel affirmed, and to be able to do their best work. 

For example, artists are told that their boundaries are perfect where they are and they don’t have to explain them. If they say, “Don’t touch my elbows,” they don’t have to give a reason why. They also teach that artists can say no—to anyone, regardless of whether they are a fellow cast member, a director, a group leader, or the artistic director. 

“Everybody is like, ‘We’re down for a no and for letting the no be as celebrated as the yes,’” Baity says. “It’s important to be like, ‘Thank you for telling me, thank you for setting that boundary.’”

They engage artists about their boundaries and whether they are comfortable with an alternative or whether they have an option within their boundaries that will help tell the story. 

Baity says About Face Youth Theatre works hard to get youth in the room and help them to launch careers in theater if that is what they want—to provide them with a place of support and the network of connections that they need. 

As for this production, they want the audience to know that it is very campy and designed to have a fun time without preaching.

“As much as we love the messiness of being human, of reality television, at the end of the day, we still care for each other,” Baity says. “Even when everything is a mess, we can still do something. We’re not pushing green capitalism; we’re not pushing this idea that you have to donate all your money to various organizations. We’re saying that even if all you’ve got is groceries for one person, that is doing the work.” 

Read More

This June, queer youth are challenging audiences on what it means to be active in environmental justice and to participate in mutual aid activism.

About Face Youth Theatre, founded in 1999, offers annual workshop sessions where LGBTQ+ youth and their allies ages 13 to 24 can participate in activist theater that supports learning in safe and nurturing environments.

Gayme Changers
Sat 6/18, 7:30 PM, Sun 6/19, 3 PM, Wed 6/22, 7:30 PM, and Fri 6/24, 7:30 PM; Den Theatre, 1331 N. Milwaukee, aboutfacetheatre.com, $5-$35.

This month, from June 18-24, AFYT will perform an ensemble-devised piece written by Kirsten Baity called Gayme Changers. Directed by Vic Wynter, the show’s premise is that it’s the final season of a hit reality television show where teams compete for a $4 million prize and the title of America’s next Social Justice Superstars. It’s an immersive comedy about climate change activism that functions as a call to action.

The inspiration came from discussions Baity had with another producer about what they thought was important to be talking about with the current cohort of youth, and what they wanted to leave the young artists with as they finish the program.

“As much as this program is about creating a show at the end, we also want to create good humans who are taking care of each other,” Baity says. “What we decided was not only something we wanted to teach people, but was also in our wheelhouses, which was discussing environmental justice as well as mutual aid.”

The path to the show started last fall when the ensemble created an audio drama of a turf war between Chicago rats, pigeons, and fairies. They wanted to keep that sort of magic and foolishness without having to come up with costumes that would look kitschy. 

“We needed the people to be people,” Baity says. “But we wanted to keep the drama.”

As an exercise to explore social justice, they had sessions where they played Monopoly, except the rules reflected the real world. Not everyone started with $200. Some started with $1,000 and some with $40. Some people were not allowed to buy certain properties as a re-creation of redlining. It began introducing ideas of capitalism and mutual aid.

Then they invited the youth to brainstorm.

“We talked about some things that we want to see in this play and they were like, ‘We want something that’s very queer—that’s a given,’” Baity said. “’We want something with a lot of fun, a lot of drama. We want to see friendships. We want to see different kinds of relationships.’”

The idea of a reality show encompassed all of the participants’ ideas.

They began to discuss the challenges nonprofits and activist organizations face and the hoops they have to jump through. They then set out to portray how foolish those things are through the game show/reality TV framework.

Two teams compete in the season finale of the reality show, Gayme Changers: Team H2Aid, an environmental justice organization, and 4 the Kidz, a mutual aid group. The mutual aid group centers getting trans-affirming clothing and other supplies to those who need it and helping people legally change their names. 

“The reason we created that team was because we wanted to talk about how it can be really easy to be defeatist and feel like there’s nothing we can do because we aren’t legislators, and phone banking and petitions only do so much,” Baity says. “But even when we can’t stop the Greg Abbotts of the world, we can definitely say, ‘You can have that haircut that you want, you can have your name legally changed, and you can get your gender marker changed. So even if the country is not with you, we are with you.’”

About Face Youth Theatre operates under a consent-based model where no one is touched without permission and the ensemble abides by community agreements they develop. The consent-based model extends to the audience, an important factor as immersive theater relies on audience participation. They will not, Baity says, be like the circus where someone comes up and starts touching you or messing with your hair.

Gayme Changers will have, Baity says, very specific containers of how they want the audience to participate. They will ask specific questions related to the theme of the show. The audience will be invited to brainstorm with those around them. 

They also want to make sure the audience knows they are in a space where consent matters.

“One thing that was a big deal was letting the audience know that there was going to be participation,” Baity notes. “So, if you’re like, ‘That’s going to give me way too much anxiety, I’m not going,’ or, ‘OK, I’m going to brace myself because the actors may ask me to do something’— keep in mind, they don’t have to. It’s not required. . . . At most, we’re asking people to talk. And we have community agreements that will be set up and will say, ‘This is a safe space to be wrong. This is a place where we center queer people and people of the global majority. So don’t come in here with your racist-ness or your transphobic whatevers—keep that to yourself.’”

They also note that audience participation includes just coming and watching. 

While the ensembles start with a baseline of community agreements, each one is customized to the group. Their very first workshop with each new ensemble is spent talking about what participants need to feel safe, to feel affirmed, and to be able to do their best work. 

For example, artists are told that their boundaries are perfect where they are and they don’t have to explain them. If they say, “Don’t touch my elbows,” they don’t have to give a reason why. They also teach that artists can say no—to anyone, regardless of whether they are a fellow cast member, a director, a group leader, or the artistic director. 

“Everybody is like, ‘We’re down for a no and for letting the no be as celebrated as the yes,’” Baity says. “It’s important to be like, ‘Thank you for telling me, thank you for setting that boundary.’”

They engage artists about their boundaries and whether they are comfortable with an alternative or whether they have an option within their boundaries that will help tell the story. 

Baity says About Face Youth Theatre works hard to get youth in the room and help them to launch careers in theater if that is what they want—to provide them with a place of support and the network of connections that they need. 

As for this production, they want the audience to know that it is very campy and designed to have a fun time without preaching.

“As much as we love the messiness of being human, of reality television, at the end of the day, we still care for each other,” Baity says. “Even when everything is a mess, we can still do something. We’re not pushing green capitalism; we’re not pushing this idea that you have to donate all your money to various organizations. We’re saying that even if all you’ve got is groceries for one person, that is doing the work.” 

Read More

Read More

The Chicago White Sox are off to a slow start but that does not mean manager Tony La Russa is getting his pink slip anytime soon.

The Philadelphia Phillies fired Joe Girardi after they got off to a disappointing start.

Read More

This story was produced as a collaboration between The TRiiBE and the Reader.

On February 20, 2020, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office (CCSO) shackled Shannon Ross’s leg with an electronic monitoring device that tethered him to the confines of his home. Although he lived in northern Indiana, Ross was forced to move to Chicago as one of the conditions of being on CCSO’s electronic monitoring (EM) program after he was arrested here in October 2019 on charges of theft of less than $500 and felony possession of a firearm. The move resulted in him losing his job as a forklift operator and losing his car after he was unable to make payments.

Ross, 32, said his electronic monitor sent false alarms daily, each one alleging that he’d left his home in the Chicago neighborhood of East Side without approval. Within the first week of being on EM, Ross said one of the CCSO officers who came to his house tried to pressure him into saying he left his home to take out the garbage—which would have been admitting to violating the terms of EM, since his garbage can is located outside. When he refused, a second CCSO officer advised Ross to record a video of himself in his room whenever he receives a false EM violation alarm.

During the year and a half that Ross was on house arrest, from February 2020 through September 2021, he says that CCSO officers showed up to his home more than 20 times. 

On one visit, Ross said officers nearly arrested him despite the fact that he told them he had video evidence that he hadn’t left his home. “They almost didn’t want to see my proof,” he said. “I told them, like, ‘I have proof.’ And they really wasn’t caring until my girl came out with the proof and [was] like, ‘Look, he’s not lying.’ Some officers are just like that—just don’t care.”

During several of the officers’ visits, Ross’s kids were home, and they saw him get handcuffed and questioned about his whereabouts. “They treat you like you’re a kid, like you’re a criminal,” he said. “Even when you ask for a supervisor or their name, they don’t give it to you–so if I wanted to file a dispute, I can’t. So I mean, they make it difficult.”

Ross had to get a judge’s approval for any movement outside his home because he was placed on EM before January 2021, when Governor J.B. Pritzker signed the Pretrial Fairness Act—which guaranteed movement for “essential functions” like getting groceries. Like many on EM, Ross was never granted movement outside his home even once, not even to buy food. His sister, a manager at Securitas, helped when she could, but work got in the way sometimes, he said.

“So some days I’ll go two days without eating,” Ross said. “Some days I go 24 hours with no food whatsoever.” 

After more than 18 months of being confined to his home with an ankle bracelet, he was found not guilty of the gun charge in September 2021. He was discharged from house arrest soon after. 

He says since getting off EM, life has been better: during those 18 months, he saved money to take a marketing course and now runs his own marketing agency. But the trauma of being on EM affects him even today.

“I feel guilty every time I go outside,” he said. “I feel like I’m not supposed to be there. So I be in the house a lot.”

Today, there are 3,000 people on electronic monitoring in Cook County. According to CCSO, the program is a “community-based alternative incarceration concept” that allows those in pretrial detention to remain in at home rather than in jail. 

The program has grown significantly since 2020 because courts were backlogged by the COVID-19 pandemic, preventing judges from hearing cases or approving pretrial movement for people on EM, and due to growing concerns over the spread of COVID-19 in jails. 

According to a September 2021 report by Chicago Appleseed, the number of people on EM in Cook County declined in August of that year, but was still 31 percent higher than it was in March 2020. Seventy-eight percent of people in the program had been detained for at least three consecutive months.

Consequently, hundreds of people still remain in ankle monitors today who still haven’t been convicted of any crime. Individuals on EM could also face penalties in the future completely unrelated to their original charges. In January, Illinois state representative Martin J. Moylan, whose district includes suburban Elk Grove Village and Des Plaines, introduced a bill that would make unknowingly tampering with, removing, or damaging electronic monitoring devices a Class 4 felony. In April, the bill was sent to the General Assembly’s rules committee.

When a person’s EM device sends an alert, employees at an out-of-state call center review the alert to determine if it’s genuine. Transparency Chicago, a nonprofit whose research includes CCSO’s EM program, shared slides they obtained through FOIA that were presented to Cook County by University of Chicago’s research lab, Radical Innovation for Social Change (RISC), which provides software and analysis to CCSO about the EM program. 

According to the slides, more than 80 percent of the alerts sent by CCSO’s EM vendor, Track Group, to CCSO and its call center are “false positive” alerts, each requiring manual review. RISC’s slides state that these false positives threaten to distract CCSO and call center staff from more serious alerts.

According to CCSO’s contractor, information on how often the ankle monitors trigger an alert that results in a phone call or blaring siren cannot be collected. A spokesperson for Protocol, the third-party contractor that handles call center operations, said the company is unable to distinguish calls made to an EM device used by CCSO from calls made to people on house arrest outside of Cook County. In practice, that means nobody, anywhere, has an accurate picture of how often people on EM are called about alerts, false or otherwise.

To understand how EM is impacting people placed in the program, we collected the experiences of those who were personally plagued with problems from CCSO’s EM program and attorneys who shared their clients’ experiences. Their experiences give insight into where the program’s faults are, raising questions of why these life-destroying problems persist for so long and why it takes so long for officials to notice.

The CCSO’s call center is responsible for reviewing the many thousands of daily automated alerts that get triggered when their systems believe that a person violated the EM conditions—for example, leaving their home. The call center has steps and procedures they follow, which range from noting the violation or calling the person on EM, to blaring a loud siren on their EM device or dispatching sheriffs to their home. 

Documents obtained by The TRiiBE from CCSO via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request indicate that when the siren on a person’s EM device goes off, the contractor’s call center must check if the person on EM is in a courthouse. According to the Public Defender’s office, there have been at least three instances of a person’s monitor sounding an alarm while they’re standing in front of a judge in the courthouse, one of which reportedly happened in front of a jury. A spokesperson for CCSO said they notified the EM contractor about these incidents, and said the contractor “implemented a programming that it believes will reduce or eliminate these events.”

When a person on EM is found to have significant signal issues within their home, one option CCSO provides in rare cases is what’s commonly referred to as a “beacon.” Because environmental issues such as building material can cause signal loss with GPS, the beacons are designed to mitigate signal loss entirely by being inside the person’s home and only alerting if they move away from the beacon. 

About 13 percent of the 178 people who have had their monitor supplemented with a beacon have more than one beacon. According to emails between CCSO and the company that provides them, obtained by The TRiiBE through a FOIA request, a person on EM can have up to ten beacons.

Jeremey “Mohawk” Johnson, 27, has been on EM since August 2020. He is charged with hitting a helmeted police officer with a skateboard during a protest after police charged into a crowd of nonviolent demonstrators. Johnson has posted more than 150 videos on YouTube documenting the false EM alarms and violations he’s received. On March 24, 2021, he received his first EM beacon, and a second one on April 15, 2021, after he moved to the south side. 

Yet Johnson’s double beacons, one of which he said was installed incorrectly by CCSO, have caused a plethora of signal issues and a slew of accusations from call center employees and the sheriff. 

Notes related to Jeremy Johnson’s ankle-monitor false alerts, which were obtained from the Cook County Sheriff via a FOIA request.

In a video Johnson posted May 3, two CCSO officers criticized fellow officers for improper installation and spoke freely with Mohawk about the beacon’s shortcomings. 

“When you hit a dead spot with your cell phone, it’s still shitty at the end of the day. So that’s the same thing with this thing [the beacon],” one officer said on the video. “It sucks,” shrugged the other officer as he uncuffed Johnson.

In February 2021, Johnson received a call from the electronic monitoring agency almost nightly between 12 AM and 5 AM, accusing him of being outside of his apartment when he was in bed. Most of the late-night calls Johnson receives from call center employees end in them chalking the false alarms up to an automatic message or system glitch. 

“If it doesn’t work,” Johnson asked, “why are you still putting it on people?” 

Read more about Jeremey “Mohawk” Johnson’s experience here.

Another man we interviewed, Charles Bobock, shared his experiences with constant false EM violations and sheriff visitations. Most of these visitations begin with him being immediately handcuffed. Bobock says that during his time on EM, starting in July 2021, he was visited in his home by CCSO officers five or six times a month with accusations of leaving his home. Bobock says it wasn’t until early 2022 that he began getting cuffed without explanation as soon as the front door was opened. 

One week in April 2022, he was visited and cuffed four times. On April 11, he tweeted, “LOL. Cuffed up behind my back again by CCSO. This time they had me walk down the street with everyone watching, so they could ‘get a better signal’ on my ankle monitor. That’s twice in four days.” 

In May, Bobock endured a tumultuous period in which he was cuffed five times in eight days.

“Every time they turn up, I panic, because as soon as those cuffs go on, I think these cuffs might not come off this time,” Bobock said. “I’m useless for the rest of the day, because I’m shaking after they leave. It’s a real PTSD moment every time they put the cuffs on. I really don’t know whether I’m leaving with them or not. It gets to be really, really traumatic every time this happens.”

We reached out to CCSO to ask why people on EM are handcuffed prior to questioning. In an emailed response, a spokesperson said it is to ensure the safety of investigators and others, and noted that CCSO policy states individuals should be restrained “only for as long as reasonably necessary” to ensure officer safety.

According to Bobock, he has never been offered a beacon to help alleviate these false EM violations. 

Bobock said that on May 24, sheriff’s officers came to his home to arrest him, claiming that his home was unfit for the EM program. He added that his neighbor, who witnessed and intervened in CCSO’s attempted arrest, invited Bobock to live in his home rather than be taken back to jail. After a discussion between the arriving officers and Bobock’s neighbor, CCSO approved his move.

After the attempted arrest, Bobock said he asked the officers why he was never given a beacon in spite of the constant visits for false alarms, and the officers responded that he hadn’t hit the threshold needed to get one. When asked, a CCSO spokesperson did not clarify what that threshold might be.

In an email to The TRiiBE, the spokesperson said “environmental interference” at Bobock’s home “made it extremely difficult to comply with the court order and monitor his compliance with program rules,” and that the “nature of the site” prevented installation of a beacon. Bobock said that the only thing he was told was that a garage is an unsuitable place to live. 

Regardless of whether Bobock’s previous home was suitable or not for the EM program, with or without a beacon, one thing is clear—before Bobock was able to move into his home, the CCSO officers who dropped him were required to run an “Initial Residence Verification” process, which should include livability checks and confirmation that the EM device was “activated” with the EM vendor. 

After living in his new home for over a week, Bobock says that things have been quiet, with the exception of one signal strength text, which was followed by a visit and handcuffing by the officers, stating, “just checking up on you.” In spite of everything, Bobock says that he’s able to move around his neighborhood with no complaints from CCSO.

“I’ve been wandering around the block picking up trash, taking the dog to the dog park across the street each day, taking the garbage to the dumpster” Bobock said. “All things that would have got me into trouble before.”

In another case, a company changing its name led to one of its employees, who was on EM, being reincarcerated. Richard Bullock, a 40-year-old man facing first-degree murder charges, was sent back to jail after a CCSO investigator concluded that Bullock had forged pay stubs and proof of employment. The investigator apparently came to that conclusion while looking into Bullock’s scheduled work movement, and found via the Illinois Secretary of State’s website that the company he worked for, Upskel Housing INC, had dissolved in 2019. The investigator seems to have failed to notice that the company had simply reincorporated under a new name, Upskel LLC, which was also listed on the website. According to Bullock’s lawyer, the forgery allegations are unresolved, and the murder case is still pending.

Another man, who shared his experience with us on the condition of anonymity due to fear of impact to his ongoing criminal case, wound up wearing two ankle monitors at once. The sheriff’s office still hadn’t removed his ankle device and continued to visit him at his home despite a court order that had discharged him from the sheriff’s EM program a week earlier so that he could move to the more-lenient EM program managed by the chief judge. At the courthouse, a second EM device, meant to work with the chief judge’s EM systems, was attached to his other leg, and he would have to be scheduled for the removal of CCSO’s. 

The night of his court appearance for his EM discharge, he received a 2 AM visit from the sheriff alleging that he violated EM after leaving the courthouse. The officers who went to his home were not aware that the discharge was filed. When we spoke with him, he’d been wearing two devices for a week and was afraid to leave his home, from worries of another late-night visit or potential reincarceration. 

Tracey Harkins, an attorney whose clients include many on EM, shared her experiences with prosecutors whom she characterized as aggressive and judges who she says have impossible standards and deep misunderstandings of GPS accuracy.

“It was common practice for judges to scoff at any attorney suggesting that technology failure could be at issue for resolution,” Harkins said. In a case where CCSO admitted technology failure, she said the presiding judge responded in earnest, “GPS is the most reliable thing in the world.”

The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office (CCSAO) relies on progress reports that show when a person on EM allegedly leaves their home to determine whether to increase their bond or re-incarcerate those on EM. Harkins said that in her experience, a vast majority of judges read the reports at face value with no verification, testimony, or additional information. She said that attorneys who requested hearings to challenge progress reports “were frequently scoffed at, or held to an impossible standard” where judges agree to a hearing on the spot and without any preparation. 

“Being held to a hearing immediately was grossly unfair,” she said. 

Harkins said that since last October, she has seen 30-40 people ordered back into custody based on these progress reports. When asked what can be done to improve CCSO’s EM program, Harkins said that the sheriff’s office needs to “properly and fully” investigate alleged violations before writing reports or taking actions. 

“This requires that appropriate training be implemented—something that is currently lacking,” she said.

After WTTW published an article in March detailing the false alarms and prosecutorial action taken by CCSAO against Michael Matthews, one of Harkins’s clients, the state’s attorney’s office withdrew their petition against Matthews, saying that they did so in good faith after seeing video that proved he was home when they claimed he hadn’t been. 

But Harkins said that CCSAO had already had that video in December. 

“One of two things is true,” she said. ”Either they are utterly incompetent and didn’t connect the dots for three months, or they knew that there was a problem and ignored it and prosecuted Michael [Matthews] in bad faith—either option is unacceptable.”

Since the Pretrial Fairness Act went into effect, Sheriff Tom Dart has claimed that the law has resulted in dozens of people on EM who have been accused of violent offenses being automatically given time to move about freely and unmonitored—an assertion the Public Defender’s office disputed at the time. 

“They rarely give the underlying data for those assertions, and so there’s no way to check their work—which is concerning, given that those numbers have been found to be suspect,” said Sarah Staudt, a senior policy analyst and staff attorney at the Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice. “If Sheriff Dart is going to make proclamations about people on EM, he needs to give the underlying numbers out too, so folks can decide for themselves whether they agree with his assertions.” 

Cook County public defender Sharone Mitchell, who took office in April 2021, said he believes that Dart and Mayor Lori Lightfoot are intentionally misunderstanding the program to stoke fear and shift blame for violence in the city. 

“We know that we’ve seen alerts when people are actually sitting at their home, abiding by the condition of their release,” Mitchell said. “We know that in some instances people are being thrown back into jail without a hearing; it’s just the notification of a violation that causes a person to be detained.”

Mitchell emphasized that those on EM have only been accused of a crime, and could have their case dismissed or be found not guilty at trial. “There are real consequences to both pretrial incarceration through jail, and pretrial incarceration through electronic monitoring,” he said. “And we know that both of those outcomes disrupt people’s jobs, their education, and their family obligations.”

Mitchell added that the impacts on individuals ripple out into communities when EM is concentrated in certain neighborhoods—as is the case in Chicago.

“So when you are talking about a large amount of people who live in the same neighborhoods, and you have that impact over and over and over again, now we’re really talking about the destruction of communities,” Mitchell said. “Now we’re talking about that cycle of incarceration and violence.”

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Jeremey “Mohawk” Johnson has been on electronic monitoring since August 2020, after he was arrested for allegedly hitting a cop with a skateboard at an anti-ICE and defund CPD rally in the Loop. More than a year after the Reader profiled him in March 2021, his case remains in pretrial limbo. Johnson has worn an electronic-­monitor (EM) ankle bracelet and been mostly confined to his home during that time. 

He has documented his struggles with near-incessant false EM alerts—which sometimes bring Cook County Sheriff’s Office (CCSO) investigators to his door—via his YouTube page, Monitored by Cook. The page includes dozens of videos documenting his problems with EM dating as far back as December 18, 2021.

The Reader interviewed Johnson on Thursday, May 5; his ankle bracelet had sent four false alerts the previous day. He has encountered more difficulty with the electronic monitoring system after moving on April 13. “There’s been major inconsistencies and communication issues with [the CCSO]—specifically about my beacons and my address change,” he says. 

What follows are Johnson’s words, which have been edited and condensed for clarity.

The move

They gave me a new leg monitor in March. I asked the person at the desk who was doing our forms what relocation would be like. That person just said, “When you get the lease, just send that to us in advance, that way we have the documentation. You should be good.”

I asked for relocation on March 21. We signed the lease online. I told County [CCSO], “I could send you the lease.” I sent it in March 21 at 11:39 AM. They gave me a confirmation email at 11:39; I got it 30 seconds later.

I called them [a week later] and they said, “You still have to process the request.” They called me, like, “We need your landlord’s information.” This happened March 28. I re-sent them the email with my landlord’s information at 8:51 AM. I got the confirmation at 8:52 AM. 

They called me April 4 and said that they never got any of my relocation stuff, and that it was never sent in. I told the woman on the phone, “I did send it.”

She’s like, “OK, you’re saying you have the confirmation emails. You’re giving me dates and times. There’s only a few of us working—can you resend it?” So I sent screenshots of my lease, screenshots of the signature, and the PDF with the entire lease. I sent that April 4 at 2:24 PM, maybe ten minutes after I’d gotten off that call. I got the confirmation email at 2:25.

They said that they approved the movement, and that it was put on my schedule. 

[One evening in April], two officers came to my house, and they had me sign a bunch of paperwork for the address that I was moving from. [One officer] said, “I don’t know what happened, ’cause I know you signed it, ’cause I was here when you relocated the last time.” This is the guy that dropped me off when I first got arrested and got put on house arrest. This is the officer that came and installed my first beacon. I know this guy. Never remember his name, but he’s always pretty pleasant. 

He comes over and he’s like, “When you move next week, and you take your beacons with you, make sure you call them, and somebody should come and set the beacons up immediately.” He said that to me on camera. 

I signed out on April 13, in the morning, to move all of my stuff. Put it all in the moving truck that my mom and my stepdad got to help me move. The sheriff’s officer told me that I have to move my beacons to my new place. They’re not coming to help me move, so nobody else can move them to the new place but me. And I was told by the Sheriff’s Department not to leave them.

I take the beacons with me. The beacons are like, “You’re tampering with the beacon, you’re moving outside of your zone.” And then they start calling my leg monitor, calling my phone—like, “Why are you moving the beacon? Why are you not where you’re supposed to be?” 

I’m like, “Y’all, I’m relocating—look at the movement schedule.” They’re like, “Oh, yeah, you are relocating, you have movement till five.” And I’m like, “Check your own email before you bother me.”

The extension

I asked for a movement extension, ’cause I moved to the other side of the city. It was taking a long time for me to get to work—the Green Line’s messed up. There are massive delays on all the trains, the trains just aren’t running like they used to.

They don’t grant it for weeks. I already have the work movement approved, I’m just asking for more time. I call someone on the phone—he says, “Hey, it does make sense that you need a movement extension—the train’s bad, so you asking for more time to get to work should not be a problem. I need you to resubmit the schedule with whatever current pay stub you have and the new times you need.” 

I did that, and I got a reply from the sheriff saying, “We already granted this movement, just ask for an extension.” And I’m like, “No, you don’t understand, that’s what I’m doing. [My contact] said the system won’t let him add an extension without new paperwork or a new schedule.” Cook County was like, “We approved this already—just ask for an extension.” I’m like, “That’s what I’m doing.” 

They approved my movement, and gave me my movement extension—they said, “If you leave at 11, you’ll get there by 12,” and I’m like, “Not from where I live. I need to leave at 10:30.” They send me my movement request the morning of—giving me permission to leave at 10:30—at 10:44 AM. They didn’t send it to me until I called them four times that morning. 

Because of how the automated system works, if you leave your house late, they assume something happened and you’re not leaving at all; so if you do leave, they call. The system will automatically hit you with an alert if you leave 15 minutes after your leaving time. It’s supposed to be a 15-minute grace period, that’s what I was told by Investigator Collins, because I’ve had multiple phone conversations with Investigator Collins, and that’s how she said it works. I could not leave until 15 minutes late, because I did not get the movement approved until 15 minutes late. 

They called me on my leg monitor in my Lyft, and asked me why I was outside. They called me for leaving late, after they approved my movement late.

The officers

On April 20—after getting beacon violation, after beacon violation, after beacon violation—at about 6:42 PM, officers come and start grilling me. They’re like, “So this is your new spot? Where’s the consent form?” I’m like, “I don’t have a consent form . . . nobody from the Sheriff’s Department came to install my beacon or give me a new consent form.” A resident consent form is the form you fill out that allows you to live where you live. 

My name is on the lease, and the landlord knows I’m on house arrest. I’m allowed to live here, and by the letter of the law this is my place. I was told initially—by the person who said that they never got my paperwork—that because my name is on the lease I’m good. These officers were not notified of that, they were not notified of anything. 

They started asking me about my beacons. They’re like, “Why do you have two beacons?” I’m like, “Because County gave me two beacons.” They’re like, “OK, you’ve moved, why do you still have two beacons?” And I’m like, “Because y’all never came to get them—if you never came to get them, and they gave me two, what was I supposed to do with the other one? Eat it?” 

They’re like, “Oh, your beacon is not registered to your new house.” And I’m like, “I put in this movement request last month. Y’all had from March 21 to April 4, and you got all that paperwork sent in—you got all this time to log the beacons at the new address the day that I moved.” No one did it, no officers came to install them—because they’re supposed to be stuck on the wall. One of them’s just sitting in my windowsill, where it can be reached and tampered with.

There’s a cat here; cats touch anything they can when they can. At that point, the cat’s jumping on the beacon and knocking it down, jumping in the other window where the other one is, knocking it down. I’m getting these tampering violations—sometimes while I’m at work, since the cat’s playing with them. 

Then [Investigator Reimer] asks me, “You’re not putting it in your pocket and then leaving the house with it, are you?” 

That’s multiple charges: that’s tampering with a beacon, that’s unauthorized leave, that’s felony escape. That’s three different things, if I put it in my pocket and try to leave. That is the goofiest thing I can do, because not only is that more charges, but it’s, quite frankly, antithetical to getting away with anything. If I wanna sneak out, I’m not gonna take something that makes my signal stronger. Why would anybody do that? 

He asked me that, and then he told me—after investigating and calling—like, “The language that the call center was using was confusing. It said you were leaving and that you were taking it out on the street, and then it was popping back in the system two minutes later and you were going all over with it. It’s sitting in your window, we see that now, the beacons are probably bouncing off of each other, and messing up the signal, and then because of where your bedroom is, you’re losing it.” 

The beacons

Reimer and I were talking about it, and I asked him, “What do I do with the beacon?” They were like, “Do you want to tape it up now?” We can’t find the tape. [Reimer] tells me, when I can, get some Command Strips, call the call center, tell them that I was told by the Sheriff’s Department to tape the beacon up in the windowsill myself, and then have them track the signal to make sure it works. He said this to me, right? He didn’t tell the call center that he told me to do that—or maybe he did tell them, and they lost it. 

Again, nobody from County came to bring me my paperwork or to install my beacon. It took them seven days to get out to me, after I called them every day for a week saying, “Hey, my beacons aren’t on the wall. I keep getting zone violations, and whenever I call y’all, y’all bring up my old address. You should know that I don’t live there anymore.” 

I keep getting, “The beacon is not registered to your current apartment. You’re getting beacon violations because your room might be too far away from the beacon. Something’s going on with your bedroom.” Stuff like that. 

I ordered some Command Strips. I call the call center: “I’m calling to put my beacon up, because I was told by the sheriff to put my beacon up.” 

The person at the call center tells me, “You’re not allowed to touch that.” I’m like, “I understand that—I was told to call you to let you know that I’m putting the beacon up on the windowsill, and that you should check the signal to make sure that it’s working properly.”

The call center tells me, “It’s up to your discretion because you said that the officer told you to and that you got that on video. Our hands are tied—I just know, legally, you’re not supposed to do that. I’m gonna go ahead and put that in the data record.” 

I’m like, “Well, I’m telling you that I’m not gonna do it, so there is nothing going on. Imma just leave that shit where it is.” 

Homie records it anyway. I keep getting zone violations while I’m in my bedroom ’cause my beacon’s in the living room in the front of the house, and my bedroom is towards the back of the apartment. The range is not big enough, so it keeps losing me. Even in my own bedroom, it keeps losing me. 

The system

This is what happens when you have an institution of people who outsource all of their work to different departments, and then don’t talk to each other. The call center is communicating with the sheriff through, like, notes. The sheriff is calling protocol; protocol may have different standards than what every sheriff has. 

And then every sheriff operates differently. They have a general understanding of what the rules are, but I get different things from different sheriffs depending on who comes to work that day. There’s zero consistency—and negative two communication—amongst branches and between officers. On top of the fact that the technology isn’t working particularly well, it creates a mess. 

None of what they were supposed to do on their end happened. I can’t control if they give me consent forms or not; they’re supposed to bring those to my house. I can’t control if they install the beacon or not; they’re supposed to come and install it. That did not happen when I moved, so my hands were tied. The only thing I could do was sit in my house, go to work when I was allowed to, and hope to God that they show up and do what they said they were going to so that I don’t get in more trouble. But that did not happen.

I can’t even get a straight answer on whether or not I’m allowed to answer the door. ’Cause one person, I’ve called him, he’s like, “If you don’t step outside, you can go to your door and [get] deliveries—you can open your door and grab your pizza, you can’t go outside. If you’re not on your porch or outside of your building, it’s fine. Use your own discretion.” Completely different person said, “I don’t know about that. I wouldn’t even chance it.” It really depends on who I talk to that day. So I just do nothing, I just have my roommates do everything for me, because it’s safer that way. 

So the way the system works is, false accusation happens. False accusation gets put on file. Then they fix it. It is accusation, potential punishment, then they fix it.

Even though the system clears them, prosecutors can look at the record, bring up how many alerts you have—not violations, just alerts. Violations are not alerts. All I am getting is alerts saying, “We think you’re outside, we think you’re here, why did you leave late.” 

Prosecutors can look at alerts and say, “He’s sneaking out.” Even if the system clears them—even if the sheriff comes to your house, says, “OK, we see video evidence you didn’t leave at this time”—which I have done before. 

So even though you can have all of this evidence, a prosecutor can still bring this up in court—you can have your bond revoked and be put back in jail, over these alerts, even when they’re not violations. 

I started putting the cameras up and posting the videos. I’m like, “You not finna lie on me in court and get me locked up when I ain’t do nothing. Imma give you hard video, you not gonna play me.”

I have alerts. And oftentimes the alerts clear themselves before they call you. Sometimes they’ll call you and then an alert got cleared ten minutes ago, but whoever called didn’t see that the alert got cleared. So they can call you and bother you about something. It’s a mess over there. And that mess gets people convicted.

These alerts are still admissible in court. And that’s what bothers me. Not just for my situation. Regardless of what you feel about somebody’s relationship with the law, you should not be locking people up over faulty technology, especially when you know it’s faulty. 

Especially with that new law they’re trying to pass that creates severe punishment for multiple violations, because the same County that is saying, “We know the monitors don’t work well, we know the GPS technology is faulty,” is also actively trying to implicate and punish people in legislature for these same signal failures. That just ain’t right.

The impact

I’d go to work; I catch two, three, four violations just trying to commute, and more violations means more chances for a prosecutor to lie on me in court. It’s safer for me to not work. It’s safer for me to be broke, it’s safer for me to ask my parents for money, than it is to risk catching a charge for trying to be productive.

I worked at Warby Parker. I can’t pick up a shift to make more money to pay rent without permission from County. If somebody’s like, “Hey, can you work this location today?” I can’t do it. I can’t trade shifts with coworkers. There’s a whole two-thirds of my job that I can’t participate in that could potentially humanize people—or show people that I’m not a fucking animal—that I just can’t do. 

I’m not trying to go back to jail ’cause the train got delayed. I’m not trying to get locked up ’cause I missed the bus and I didn’t have $30, $40 for an Uber because it’s surging ’cause the weather’s bad. It is safer to not have a job. It is safer to call my parents and borrow money every month. Or to get on Twitter and Instagram and be like, “Hey, y’all, I’m struggling right now, I need help.” ’Cause I do need the help, ’cause I can’t work. Half the time I was working I had to leave early ’cause I’d get called while I’m at work. Or I get called three times before I go to work—I get called at two in the morning, get called at six in the morning, so my sleep’s interrupted. 

My hairline is going, my beard is turning gray. I’m not even 28 yet, and I’m already looking like how my dad might have when he was in his 40s. I’m stressed, I have flashbacks about jail all the time. My leg monitor constantly triggers my fight or flight; my therapist was telling me that just being on this thing for as long as I have—and then having it go off all the time, and interrupting my REM cycle—is triggering my fight-or-flight. If a scale is “one, completely relaxed,” and “ten, thinking you’re about to die,” I wake up most days at a six to seven. Stuff keeps happening with the leg monitor that brings me up to a ten. So it’s been deeply, emotionally taxing. 

I just don’t understand why they want to do this for this long. It’s so disproportionate. I allegedly got into it with an officer, right? I got beat up, I got knocked to the ground—stomped on and hit with sticks by multiple officers, a medic had to pick me up and drag me away. I got pepper-sprayed point-blank in the face multiple times. I got choked. After I got out of jail, I had a bad limp for two weeks ’cause of how bad I got beat up. 

Now, like, two years later they’re still trying to figure out if they’re gonna put me in prison. How much they want to do to a person over an alleged incident? If I ain’t did it, all of this is for nothing. And if you think I did do it, you done got your licks back before I got arrested, so you ain’t tired yet? You gonna take it this far, after you done already beat my ass? No matter how you cut it, this has been taken way too fuckin’ far. 

It’s making me think it was never about justice or public safety. No city that sends police officers to beat up and kettle people in public has any moral authority to put people on house arrest for public safety, in my opinion, ’cause they put the public in danger. ’Cause they were dangerous to me, ’cause they were dangerous to those protestors.

This article was co-published with The TRiiBE, a digital media platform that is reshaping the narrative of Black Chicago and giving ownership back to the people. 

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This story was produced as a collaboration between The TRiiBE and the Reader.

On February 20, 2020, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office (CCSO) shackled Shannon Ross’s leg with an electronic monitoring device that tethered him to the confines of his home. Although he lived in northern Indiana, Ross was forced to move to Chicago as one of the conditions of being on CCSO’s electronic monitoring (EM) program after he was arrested here in October 2019 on charges of theft of less than $500 and felony possession of a firearm. The move resulted in him losing his job as a forklift operator and losing his car after he was unable to make payments.

Ross, 32, said his electronic monitor sent false alarms daily, each one alleging that he’d left his home in the Chicago neighborhood of East Side without approval. Within the first week of being on EM, Ross said one of the CCSO officers who came to his house tried to pressure him into saying he left his home to take out the garbage—which would have been admitting to violating the terms of EM, since his garbage can is located outside. When he refused, a second CCSO officer advised Ross to record a video of himself in his room whenever he receives a false EM violation alarm.

During the year and a half that Ross was on house arrest, from February 2020 through September 2021, he says that CCSO officers showed up to his home more than 20 times. 

On one visit, Ross said officers nearly arrested him despite the fact that he told them he had video evidence that he hadn’t left his home. “They almost didn’t want to see my proof,” he said. “I told them, like, ‘I have proof.’ And they really wasn’t caring until my girl came out with the proof and [was] like, ‘Look, he’s not lying.’ Some officers are just like that—just don’t care.”

During several of the officers’ visits, Ross’s kids were home, and they saw him get handcuffed and questioned about his whereabouts. “They treat you like you’re a kid, like you’re a criminal,” he said. “Even when you ask for a supervisor or their name, they don’t give it to you–so if I wanted to file a dispute, I can’t. So I mean, they make it difficult.”

Ross had to get a judge’s approval for any movement outside his home because he was placed on EM before January 2021, when Governor J.B. Pritzker signed the Pretrial Fairness Act—which guaranteed movement for “essential functions” like getting groceries. Like many on EM, Ross was never granted movement outside his home even once, not even to buy food. His sister, a manager at Securitas, helped when she could, but work got in the way sometimes, he said.

“So some days I’ll go two days without eating,” Ross said. “Some days I go 24 hours with no food whatsoever.” 

After more than 18 months of being confined to his home with an ankle bracelet, he was found not guilty of the gun charge in September 2021. He was discharged from house arrest soon after. 

He says since getting off EM, life has been better: during those 18 months, he saved money to take a marketing course and now runs his own marketing agency. But the trauma of being on EM affects him even today.

“I feel guilty every time I go outside,” he said. “I feel like I’m not supposed to be there. So I be in the house a lot.”

Today, there are 3,000 people on electronic monitoring in Cook County. According to CCSO, the program is a “community-based alternative incarceration concept” that allows those in pretrial detention to remain in at home rather than in jail. 

The program has grown significantly since 2020 because courts were backlogged by the COVID-19 pandemic, preventing judges from hearing cases or approving pretrial movement for people on EM, and due to growing concerns over the spread of COVID-19 in jails. 

According to a September 2021 report by Chicago Appleseed, the number of people on EM in Cook County declined in August of that year, but was still 31 percent higher than it was in March 2020. Seventy-eight percent of people in the program had been detained for at least three consecutive months.

Consequently, hundreds of people still remain in ankle monitors today who still haven’t been convicted of any crime. Individuals on EM could also face penalties in the future completely unrelated to their original charges. In January, Illinois state representative Martin J. Moylan, whose district includes suburban Elk Grove Village and Des Plaines, introduced a bill that would make unknowingly tampering with, removing, or damaging electronic monitoring devices a Class 4 felony. In April, the bill was sent to the General Assembly’s rules committee.

When a person’s EM device sends an alert, employees at an out-of-state call center review the alert to determine if it’s genuine. Transparency Chicago, a nonprofit whose research includes CCSO’s EM program, shared slides they obtained through FOIA that were presented to Cook County by University of Chicago’s research lab, Radical Innovation for Social Change (RISC), which provides software and analysis to CCSO about the EM program. 

According to the slides, more than 80 percent of the alerts sent by CCSO’s EM vendor, Track Group, to CCSO and its call center are “false positive” alerts, each requiring manual review. RISC’s slides state that these false positives threaten to distract CCSO and call center staff from more serious alerts.

According to CCSO’s contractor, information on how often the ankle monitors trigger an alert that results in a phone call or blaring siren cannot be collected. A spokesperson for Protocol, the third-party contractor that handles call center operations, said the company is unable to distinguish calls made to an EM device used by CCSO from calls made to people on house arrest outside of Cook County. In practice, that means nobody, anywhere, has an accurate picture of how often people on EM are called about alerts, false or otherwise.

To understand how EM is impacting people placed in the program, we collected the experiences of those who were personally plagued with problems from CCSO’s EM program and attorneys who shared their clients’ experiences. Their experiences give insight into where the program’s faults are, raising questions of why these life-destroying problems persist for so long and why it takes so long for officials to notice.

The CCSO’s call center is responsible for reviewing the many thousands of daily automated alerts that get triggered when their systems believe that a person violated the EM conditions—for example, leaving their home. The call center has steps and procedures they follow, which range from noting the violation or calling the person on EM, to blaring a loud siren on their EM device or dispatching sheriffs to their home. 

Documents obtained by The TRiiBE from CCSO via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request indicate that when the siren on a person’s EM device goes off, the contractor’s call center must check if the person on EM is in a courthouse. According to the Public Defender’s office, there have been at least three instances of a person’s monitor sounding an alarm while they’re standing in front of a judge in the courthouse, one of which reportedly happened in front of a jury. A spokesperson for CCSO said they notified the EM contractor about these incidents, and said the contractor “implemented a programming that it believes will reduce or eliminate these events.”

When a person on EM is found to have significant signal issues within their home, one option CCSO provides in rare cases is what’s commonly referred to as a “beacon.” Because environmental issues such as building material can cause signal loss with GPS, the beacons are designed to mitigate signal loss entirely by being inside the person’s home and only alerting if they move away from the beacon. 

About 13 percent of the 178 people who have had their monitor supplemented with a beacon have more than one beacon. According to emails between CCSO and the company that provides them, obtained by The TRiiBE through a FOIA request, a person on EM can have up to ten beacons.

Jeremey “Mohawk” Johnson, 27, has been on EM since August 2020. He is charged with hitting a helmeted police officer with a skateboard during a protest after police charged into a crowd of nonviolent demonstrators. Johnson has posted more than 150 videos on YouTube documenting the false EM alarms and violations he’s received. On March 24, 2021, he received his first EM beacon, and a second one on April 15, 2021, after he moved to the south side. 

Yet Johnson’s double beacons, one of which he said was installed incorrectly by CCSO, have caused a plethora of signal issues and a slew of accusations from call center employees and the sheriff. 

Notes related to Jeremy Johnson’s ankle-monitor false alerts, which were obtained from the Cook County Sheriff via a FOIA request.

In a video Johnson posted May 3, two CCSO officers criticized fellow officers for improper installation and spoke freely with Mohawk about the beacon’s shortcomings. 

“When you hit a dead spot with your cell phone, it’s still shitty at the end of the day. So that’s the same thing with this thing [the beacon],” one officer said on the video. “It sucks,” shrugged the other officer as he uncuffed Johnson.

In February 2021, Johnson received a call from the electronic monitoring agency almost nightly between 12 AM and 5 AM, accusing him of being outside of his apartment when he was in bed. Most of the late-night calls Johnson receives from call center employees end in them chalking the false alarms up to an automatic message or system glitch. 

“If it doesn’t work,” Johnson asked, “why are you still putting it on people?” 

Read more about Jeremey “Mohawk” Johnson’s experience here.

Another man we interviewed, Charles Bobock, shared his experiences with constant false EM violations and sheriff visitations. Most of these visitations begin with him being immediately handcuffed. Bobock says that during his time on EM, starting in July 2021, he was visited in his home by CCSO officers five or six times a month with accusations of leaving his home. Bobock says it wasn’t until early 2022 that he began getting cuffed without explanation as soon as the front door was opened. 

One week in April 2022, he was visited and cuffed four times. On April 11, he tweeted, “LOL. Cuffed up behind my back again by CCSO. This time they had me walk down the street with everyone watching, so they could ‘get a better signal’ on my ankle monitor. That’s twice in four days.” 

In May, Bobock endured a tumultuous period in which he was cuffed five times in eight days.

“Every time they turn up, I panic, because as soon as those cuffs go on, I think these cuffs might not come off this time,” Bobock said. “I’m useless for the rest of the day, because I’m shaking after they leave. It’s a real PTSD moment every time they put the cuffs on. I really don’t know whether I’m leaving with them or not. It gets to be really, really traumatic every time this happens.”

We reached out to CCSO to ask why people on EM are handcuffed prior to questioning. In an emailed response, a spokesperson said it is to ensure the safety of investigators and others, and noted that CCSO policy states individuals should be restrained “only for as long as reasonably necessary” to ensure officer safety.

According to Bobock, he has never been offered a beacon to help alleviate these false EM violations. 

Bobock said that on May 24, sheriff’s officers came to his home to arrest him, claiming that his home was unfit for the EM program. He added that his neighbor, who witnessed and intervened in CCSO’s attempted arrest, invited Bobock to live in his home rather than be taken back to jail. After a discussion between the arriving officers and Bobock’s neighbor, CCSO approved his move.

After the attempted arrest, Bobock said he asked the officers why he was never given a beacon in spite of the constant visits for false alarms, and the officers responded that he hadn’t hit the threshold needed to get one. When asked, a CCSO spokesperson did not clarify what that threshold might be.

In an email to The TRiiBE, the spokesperson said “environmental interference” at Bobock’s home “made it extremely difficult to comply with the court order and monitor his compliance with program rules,” and that the “nature of the site” prevented installation of a beacon. Bobock said that the only thing he was told was that a garage is an unsuitable place to live. 

Regardless of whether Bobock’s previous home was suitable or not for the EM program, with or without a beacon, one thing is clear—before Bobock was able to move into his home, the CCSO officers who dropped him were required to run an “Initial Residence Verification” process, which should include livability checks and confirmation that the EM device was “activated” with the EM vendor. 

After living in his new home for over a week, Bobock says that things have been quiet, with the exception of one signal strength text, which was followed by a visit and handcuffing by the officers, stating, “just checking up on you.” In spite of everything, Bobock says that he’s able to move around his neighborhood with no complaints from CCSO.

“I’ve been wandering around the block picking up trash, taking the dog to the dog park across the street each day, taking the garbage to the dumpster” Bobock said. “All things that would have got me into trouble before.”

In another case, a company changing its name led to one of its employees, who was on EM, being reincarcerated. Richard Bullock, a 40-year-old man facing first-degree murder charges, was sent back to jail after a CCSO investigator concluded that Bullock had forged pay stubs and proof of employment. The investigator apparently came to that conclusion while looking into Bullock’s scheduled work movement, and found via the Illinois Secretary of State’s website that the company he worked for, Upskel Housing INC, had dissolved in 2019. The investigator seems to have failed to notice that the company had simply reincorporated under a new name, Upskel LLC, which was also listed on the website. According to Bullock’s lawyer, the forgery allegations are unresolved, and the murder case is still pending.

Another man, who shared his experience with us on the condition of anonymity due to fear of impact to his ongoing criminal case, wound up wearing two ankle monitors at once. The sheriff’s office still hadn’t removed his ankle device and continued to visit him at his home despite a court order that had discharged him from the sheriff’s EM program a week earlier so that he could move to the more-lenient EM program managed by the chief judge. At the courthouse, a second EM device, meant to work with the chief judge’s EM systems, was attached to his other leg, and he would have to be scheduled for the removal of CCSO’s. 

The night of his court appearance for his EM discharge, he received a 2 AM visit from the sheriff alleging that he violated EM after leaving the courthouse. The officers who went to his home were not aware that the discharge was filed. When we spoke with him, he’d been wearing two devices for a week and was afraid to leave his home, from worries of another late-night visit or potential reincarceration. 

Tracey Harkins, an attorney whose clients include many on EM, shared her experiences with prosecutors whom she characterized as aggressive and judges who she says have impossible standards and deep misunderstandings of GPS accuracy.

“It was common practice for judges to scoff at any attorney suggesting that technology failure could be at issue for resolution,” Harkins said. In a case where CCSO admitted technology failure, she said the presiding judge responded in earnest, “GPS is the most reliable thing in the world.”

The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office (CCSAO) relies on progress reports that show when a person on EM allegedly leaves their home to determine whether to increase their bond or re-incarcerate those on EM. Harkins said that in her experience, a vast majority of judges read the reports at face value with no verification, testimony, or additional information. She said that attorneys who requested hearings to challenge progress reports “were frequently scoffed at, or held to an impossible standard” where judges agree to a hearing on the spot and without any preparation. 

“Being held to a hearing immediately was grossly unfair,” she said. 

Harkins said that since last October, she has seen 30-40 people ordered back into custody based on these progress reports. When asked what can be done to improve CCSO’s EM program, Harkins said that the sheriff’s office needs to “properly and fully” investigate alleged violations before writing reports or taking actions. 

“This requires that appropriate training be implemented—something that is currently lacking,” she said.

After WTTW published an article in March detailing the false alarms and prosecutorial action taken by CCSAO against Michael Matthews, one of Harkins’s clients, the state’s attorney’s office withdrew their petition against Matthews, saying that they did so in good faith after seeing video that proved he was home when they claimed he hadn’t been. 

But Harkins said that CCSAO had already had that video in December. 

“One of two things is true,” she said. ”Either they are utterly incompetent and didn’t connect the dots for three months, or they knew that there was a problem and ignored it and prosecuted Michael [Matthews] in bad faith—either option is unacceptable.”

Since the Pretrial Fairness Act went into effect, Sheriff Tom Dart has claimed that the law has resulted in dozens of people on EM who have been accused of violent offenses being automatically given time to move about freely and unmonitored—an assertion the Public Defender’s office disputed at the time. 

“They rarely give the underlying data for those assertions, and so there’s no way to check their work—which is concerning, given that those numbers have been found to be suspect,” said Sarah Staudt, a senior policy analyst and staff attorney at the Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice. “If Sheriff Dart is going to make proclamations about people on EM, he needs to give the underlying numbers out too, so folks can decide for themselves whether they agree with his assertions.” 

Cook County public defender Sharone Mitchell, who took office in April 2021, said he believes that Dart and Mayor Lori Lightfoot are intentionally misunderstanding the program to stoke fear and shift blame for violence in the city. 

“We know that we’ve seen alerts when people are actually sitting at their home, abiding by the condition of their release,” Mitchell said. “We know that in some instances people are being thrown back into jail without a hearing; it’s just the notification of a violation that causes a person to be detained.”

Mitchell emphasized that those on EM have only been accused of a crime, and could have their case dismissed or be found not guilty at trial. “There are real consequences to both pretrial incarceration through jail, and pretrial incarceration through electronic monitoring,” he said. “And we know that both of those outcomes disrupt people’s jobs, their education, and their family obligations.”

Mitchell added that the impacts on individuals ripple out into communities when EM is concentrated in certain neighborhoods—as is the case in Chicago.

“So when you are talking about a large amount of people who live in the same neighborhoods, and you have that impact over and over and over again, now we’re really talking about the destruction of communities,” Mitchell said. “Now we’re talking about that cycle of incarceration and violence.”

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Jeremey “Mohawk” Johnson has been on electronic monitoring since August 2020, after he was arrested for allegedly hitting a cop with a skateboard at an anti-ICE and defund CPD rally in the Loop. More than a year after the Reader profiled him in March 2021, his case remains in pretrial limbo. Johnson has worn an electronic-­monitor (EM) ankle bracelet and been mostly confined to his home during that time. 

He has documented his struggles with near-incessant false EM alerts—which sometimes bring Cook County Sheriff’s Office (CCSO) investigators to his door—via his YouTube page, Monitored by Cook. The page includes dozens of videos documenting his problems with EM dating as far back as December 18, 2021.

The Reader interviewed Johnson on Thursday, May 5; his ankle bracelet had sent four false alerts the previous day. He has encountered more difficulty with the electronic monitoring system after moving on April 13. “There’s been major inconsistencies and communication issues with [the CCSO]—specifically about my beacons and my address change,” he says. 

What follows are Johnson’s words, which have been edited and condensed for clarity.

The move

They gave me a new leg monitor in March. I asked the person at the desk who was doing our forms what relocation would be like. That person just said, “When you get the lease, just send that to us in advance, that way we have the documentation. You should be good.”

I asked for relocation on March 21. We signed the lease online. I told County [CCSO], “I could send you the lease.” I sent it in March 21 at 11:39 AM. They gave me a confirmation email at 11:39; I got it 30 seconds later.

I called them [a week later] and they said, “You still have to process the request.” They called me, like, “We need your landlord’s information.” This happened March 28. I re-sent them the email with my landlord’s information at 8:51 AM. I got the confirmation at 8:52 AM. 

They called me April 4 and said that they never got any of my relocation stuff, and that it was never sent in. I told the woman on the phone, “I did send it.”

She’s like, “OK, you’re saying you have the confirmation emails. You’re giving me dates and times. There’s only a few of us working—can you resend it?” So I sent screenshots of my lease, screenshots of the signature, and the PDF with the entire lease. I sent that April 4 at 2:24 PM, maybe ten minutes after I’d gotten off that call. I got the confirmation email at 2:25.

They said that they approved the movement, and that it was put on my schedule. 

[One evening in April], two officers came to my house, and they had me sign a bunch of paperwork for the address that I was moving from. [One officer] said, “I don’t know what happened, ’cause I know you signed it, ’cause I was here when you relocated the last time.” This is the guy that dropped me off when I first got arrested and got put on house arrest. This is the officer that came and installed my first beacon. I know this guy. Never remember his name, but he’s always pretty pleasant. 

He comes over and he’s like, “When you move next week, and you take your beacons with you, make sure you call them, and somebody should come and set the beacons up immediately.” He said that to me on camera. 

I signed out on April 13, in the morning, to move all of my stuff. Put it all in the moving truck that my mom and my stepdad got to help me move. The sheriff’s officer told me that I have to move my beacons to my new place. They’re not coming to help me move, so nobody else can move them to the new place but me. And I was told by the Sheriff’s Department not to leave them.

I take the beacons with me. The beacons are like, “You’re tampering with the beacon, you’re moving outside of your zone.” And then they start calling my leg monitor, calling my phone—like, “Why are you moving the beacon? Why are you not where you’re supposed to be?” 

I’m like, “Y’all, I’m relocating—look at the movement schedule.” They’re like, “Oh, yeah, you are relocating, you have movement till five.” And I’m like, “Check your own email before you bother me.”

The extension

I asked for a movement extension, ’cause I moved to the other side of the city. It was taking a long time for me to get to work—the Green Line’s messed up. There are massive delays on all the trains, the trains just aren’t running like they used to.

They don’t grant it for weeks. I already have the work movement approved, I’m just asking for more time. I call someone on the phone—he says, “Hey, it does make sense that you need a movement extension—the train’s bad, so you asking for more time to get to work should not be a problem. I need you to resubmit the schedule with whatever current pay stub you have and the new times you need.” 

I did that, and I got a reply from the sheriff saying, “We already granted this movement, just ask for an extension.” And I’m like, “No, you don’t understand, that’s what I’m doing. [My contact] said the system won’t let him add an extension without new paperwork or a new schedule.” Cook County was like, “We approved this already—just ask for an extension.” I’m like, “That’s what I’m doing.” 

They approved my movement, and gave me my movement extension—they said, “If you leave at 11, you’ll get there by 12,” and I’m like, “Not from where I live. I need to leave at 10:30.” They send me my movement request the morning of—giving me permission to leave at 10:30—at 10:44 AM. They didn’t send it to me until I called them four times that morning. 

Because of how the automated system works, if you leave your house late, they assume something happened and you’re not leaving at all; so if you do leave, they call. The system will automatically hit you with an alert if you leave 15 minutes after your leaving time. It’s supposed to be a 15-minute grace period, that’s what I was told by Investigator Collins, because I’ve had multiple phone conversations with Investigator Collins, and that’s how she said it works. I could not leave until 15 minutes late, because I did not get the movement approved until 15 minutes late. 

They called me on my leg monitor in my Lyft, and asked me why I was outside. They called me for leaving late, after they approved my movement late.

The officers

On April 20—after getting beacon violation, after beacon violation, after beacon violation—at about 6:42 PM, officers come and start grilling me. They’re like, “So this is your new spot? Where’s the consent form?” I’m like, “I don’t have a consent form . . . nobody from the Sheriff’s Department came to install my beacon or give me a new consent form.” A resident consent form is the form you fill out that allows you to live where you live. 

My name is on the lease, and the landlord knows I’m on house arrest. I’m allowed to live here, and by the letter of the law this is my place. I was told initially—by the person who said that they never got my paperwork—that because my name is on the lease I’m good. These officers were not notified of that, they were not notified of anything. 

They started asking me about my beacons. They’re like, “Why do you have two beacons?” I’m like, “Because County gave me two beacons.” They’re like, “OK, you’ve moved, why do you still have two beacons?” And I’m like, “Because y’all never came to get them—if you never came to get them, and they gave me two, what was I supposed to do with the other one? Eat it?” 

They’re like, “Oh, your beacon is not registered to your new house.” And I’m like, “I put in this movement request last month. Y’all had from March 21 to April 4, and you got all that paperwork sent in—you got all this time to log the beacons at the new address the day that I moved.” No one did it, no officers came to install them—because they’re supposed to be stuck on the wall. One of them’s just sitting in my windowsill, where it can be reached and tampered with.

There’s a cat here; cats touch anything they can when they can. At that point, the cat’s jumping on the beacon and knocking it down, jumping in the other window where the other one is, knocking it down. I’m getting these tampering violations—sometimes while I’m at work, since the cat’s playing with them. 

Then [Investigator Reimer] asks me, “You’re not putting it in your pocket and then leaving the house with it, are you?” 

That’s multiple charges: that’s tampering with a beacon, that’s unauthorized leave, that’s felony escape. That’s three different things, if I put it in my pocket and try to leave. That is the goofiest thing I can do, because not only is that more charges, but it’s, quite frankly, antithetical to getting away with anything. If I wanna sneak out, I’m not gonna take something that makes my signal stronger. Why would anybody do that? 

He asked me that, and then he told me—after investigating and calling—like, “The language that the call center was using was confusing. It said you were leaving and that you were taking it out on the street, and then it was popping back in the system two minutes later and you were going all over with it. It’s sitting in your window, we see that now, the beacons are probably bouncing off of each other, and messing up the signal, and then because of where your bedroom is, you’re losing it.” 

The beacons

Reimer and I were talking about it, and I asked him, “What do I do with the beacon?” They were like, “Do you want to tape it up now?” We can’t find the tape. [Reimer] tells me, when I can, get some Command Strips, call the call center, tell them that I was told by the Sheriff’s Department to tape the beacon up in the windowsill myself, and then have them track the signal to make sure it works. He said this to me, right? He didn’t tell the call center that he told me to do that—or maybe he did tell them, and they lost it. 

Again, nobody from County came to bring me my paperwork or to install my beacon. It took them seven days to get out to me, after I called them every day for a week saying, “Hey, my beacons aren’t on the wall. I keep getting zone violations, and whenever I call y’all, y’all bring up my old address. You should know that I don’t live there anymore.” 

I keep getting, “The beacon is not registered to your current apartment. You’re getting beacon violations because your room might be too far away from the beacon. Something’s going on with your bedroom.” Stuff like that. 

I ordered some Command Strips. I call the call center: “I’m calling to put my beacon up, because I was told by the sheriff to put my beacon up.” 

The person at the call center tells me, “You’re not allowed to touch that.” I’m like, “I understand that—I was told to call you to let you know that I’m putting the beacon up on the windowsill, and that you should check the signal to make sure that it’s working properly.”

The call center tells me, “It’s up to your discretion because you said that the officer told you to and that you got that on video. Our hands are tied—I just know, legally, you’re not supposed to do that. I’m gonna go ahead and put that in the data record.” 

I’m like, “Well, I’m telling you that I’m not gonna do it, so there is nothing going on. Imma just leave that shit where it is.” 

Homie records it anyway. I keep getting zone violations while I’m in my bedroom ’cause my beacon’s in the living room in the front of the house, and my bedroom is towards the back of the apartment. The range is not big enough, so it keeps losing me. Even in my own bedroom, it keeps losing me. 

The system

This is what happens when you have an institution of people who outsource all of their work to different departments, and then don’t talk to each other. The call center is communicating with the sheriff through, like, notes. The sheriff is calling protocol; protocol may have different standards than what every sheriff has. 

And then every sheriff operates differently. They have a general understanding of what the rules are, but I get different things from different sheriffs depending on who comes to work that day. There’s zero consistency—and negative two communication—amongst branches and between officers. On top of the fact that the technology isn’t working particularly well, it creates a mess. 

None of what they were supposed to do on their end happened. I can’t control if they give me consent forms or not; they’re supposed to bring those to my house. I can’t control if they install the beacon or not; they’re supposed to come and install it. That did not happen when I moved, so my hands were tied. The only thing I could do was sit in my house, go to work when I was allowed to, and hope to God that they show up and do what they said they were going to so that I don’t get in more trouble. But that did not happen.

I can’t even get a straight answer on whether or not I’m allowed to answer the door. ’Cause one person, I’ve called him, he’s like, “If you don’t step outside, you can go to your door and [get] deliveries—you can open your door and grab your pizza, you can’t go outside. If you’re not on your porch or outside of your building, it’s fine. Use your own discretion.” Completely different person said, “I don’t know about that. I wouldn’t even chance it.” It really depends on who I talk to that day. So I just do nothing, I just have my roommates do everything for me, because it’s safer that way. 

So the way the system works is, false accusation happens. False accusation gets put on file. Then they fix it. It is accusation, potential punishment, then they fix it.

Even though the system clears them, prosecutors can look at the record, bring up how many alerts you have—not violations, just alerts. Violations are not alerts. All I am getting is alerts saying, “We think you’re outside, we think you’re here, why did you leave late.” 

Prosecutors can look at alerts and say, “He’s sneaking out.” Even if the system clears them—even if the sheriff comes to your house, says, “OK, we see video evidence you didn’t leave at this time”—which I have done before. 

So even though you can have all of this evidence, a prosecutor can still bring this up in court—you can have your bond revoked and be put back in jail, over these alerts, even when they’re not violations. 

I started putting the cameras up and posting the videos. I’m like, “You not finna lie on me in court and get me locked up when I ain’t do nothing. Imma give you hard video, you not gonna play me.”

I have alerts. And oftentimes the alerts clear themselves before they call you. Sometimes they’ll call you and then an alert got cleared ten minutes ago, but whoever called didn’t see that the alert got cleared. So they can call you and bother you about something. It’s a mess over there. And that mess gets people convicted.

These alerts are still admissible in court. And that’s what bothers me. Not just for my situation. Regardless of what you feel about somebody’s relationship with the law, you should not be locking people up over faulty technology, especially when you know it’s faulty. 

Especially with that new law they’re trying to pass that creates severe punishment for multiple violations, because the same County that is saying, “We know the monitors don’t work well, we know the GPS technology is faulty,” is also actively trying to implicate and punish people in legislature for these same signal failures. That just ain’t right.

The impact

I’d go to work; I catch two, three, four violations just trying to commute, and more violations means more chances for a prosecutor to lie on me in court. It’s safer for me to not work. It’s safer for me to be broke, it’s safer for me to ask my parents for money, than it is to risk catching a charge for trying to be productive.

I worked at Warby Parker. I can’t pick up a shift to make more money to pay rent without permission from County. If somebody’s like, “Hey, can you work this location today?” I can’t do it. I can’t trade shifts with coworkers. There’s a whole two-thirds of my job that I can’t participate in that could potentially humanize people—or show people that I’m not a fucking animal—that I just can’t do. 

I’m not trying to go back to jail ’cause the train got delayed. I’m not trying to get locked up ’cause I missed the bus and I didn’t have $30, $40 for an Uber because it’s surging ’cause the weather’s bad. It is safer to not have a job. It is safer to call my parents and borrow money every month. Or to get on Twitter and Instagram and be like, “Hey, y’all, I’m struggling right now, I need help.” ’Cause I do need the help, ’cause I can’t work. Half the time I was working I had to leave early ’cause I’d get called while I’m at work. Or I get called three times before I go to work—I get called at two in the morning, get called at six in the morning, so my sleep’s interrupted. 

My hairline is going, my beard is turning gray. I’m not even 28 yet, and I’m already looking like how my dad might have when he was in his 40s. I’m stressed, I have flashbacks about jail all the time. My leg monitor constantly triggers my fight or flight; my therapist was telling me that just being on this thing for as long as I have—and then having it go off all the time, and interrupting my REM cycle—is triggering my fight-or-flight. If a scale is “one, completely relaxed,” and “ten, thinking you’re about to die,” I wake up most days at a six to seven. Stuff keeps happening with the leg monitor that brings me up to a ten. So it’s been deeply, emotionally taxing. 

I just don’t understand why they want to do this for this long. It’s so disproportionate. I allegedly got into it with an officer, right? I got beat up, I got knocked to the ground—stomped on and hit with sticks by multiple officers, a medic had to pick me up and drag me away. I got pepper-sprayed point-blank in the face multiple times. I got choked. After I got out of jail, I had a bad limp for two weeks ’cause of how bad I got beat up. 

Now, like, two years later they’re still trying to figure out if they’re gonna put me in prison. How much they want to do to a person over an alleged incident? If I ain’t did it, all of this is for nothing. And if you think I did do it, you done got your licks back before I got arrested, so you ain’t tired yet? You gonna take it this far, after you done already beat my ass? No matter how you cut it, this has been taken way too fuckin’ far. 

It’s making me think it was never about justice or public safety. No city that sends police officers to beat up and kettle people in public has any moral authority to put people on house arrest for public safety, in my opinion, ’cause they put the public in danger. ’Cause they were dangerous to me, ’cause they were dangerous to those protestors.

This article was co-published with The TRiiBE, a digital media platform that is reshaping the narrative of Black Chicago and giving ownership back to the people. 

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