In Chicago, slim odds of an arrest when someone is shot and wounded, Sun-Times finds

Tom Wagner was working as a rideshare driver when he got shot during a carjacking on the West Side in 2021.

The shooting left a jagged scar across his abdomen where bullets pierced his gallbladder, colon and liver. 

After three years of calling detectives for updates — including 10 months during which he says he got no response at all — Wagner says he found out last month that the police have formally dropped the investigation of his shooting without an arrest. 

“I get that they’re understaffed,” Wagner says. “But, at the same time, where’s my justice?”

Wagner is among more than 19,000 people wounded in shootings in Chicago since 2018. The Chicago Police Department has made arrests in 1,200 of those cases.

Last year alone, there were 2,300 nonfatal shootings in Chicago. The police made arrests in just 141 of them — a “clearance” rate of about 6%, a Chicago Sun-Times investigation has found.

Mayor Brandon Johnson pledged during his campaign to hire 200 more detectives. But records show the number of detectives assigned to at least one shooting actually has fallen by nearly 20%, with 40 fewer investigators in 2024 than the police department had the year before.

Experts say the chronic lack of arrests is a big part of the reason there are as many shootings as there are in many Chicago neighborhoods plagued by gunfire.

Those who did the shootings remain on the street, free to hurt more people. Seeing no arrest, victims’ friends in some cases try to take justice into their own hands and retaliate. Witnesses who already might be in fear but also don’t think arrests are likely might be less willing to cooperate with detectives — part of a widespread “no-snitch code” — making it harder to make arrests.

Some of the city's most violent neighborhoods have some of the highest rates of shooting cases that end up being "closed" without anyone being arrested, the Sun-Times found.

In Pullman, there's been just one arrest in dozens of nonfatal shootings in that South Side neighborhood in the past six years.

This year, the Chicago Police Department began a pilot program that dedicates detectives to investigating nonfatal shootings. It includes about 60 detectives across the city’s 22 police districts.

“We’re trying to make incremental progress here,” says Antoinette Ursitti, the department's chief of detectives.

More cases, fewer resources

The police department assigns 8.4% of its officers to detective work. That's well below the percentage in New York (11.4%) and Los Angeles (15.4%), though similar to Philadelphia (8.7%).

New York and Los Angeles regularly solve more than 70% of homicides. Philadelphia’s clearance rate for murders is only slightly higher than Chicago’s, which hovers around 25%.

For every person shot to death in Chicago, four people are shot but survive.

The volume of shootings assigned to a relatively small number of investigators in Chicago means officers have little time to devote to any one case.

One-quarter of the detectives working shooting investigations in Chicago in 2024 were assigned more than 10 cases over the course of the year. And 10% of them had more than 20 cases — on top of the cases they had from past years and general assignments.

“In some districts, in the summer, you might be getting five or seven shooting cases a week,” one retired detective says. “And most districts, that’s not the only kind of case you’re going to be working.

“Even if you wanted to run down every case like [it was] a murder, there’s just no time to do it,” he says. “And you’re not going to get approved for any overtime unless it’s a case that’s been in the news.”

Department records show that 80% or more of nonfatal shooting investigations are “suspended” each year, meaning officers assigned to those cases no longer are actively investigating them. Slightly fewer than half of all cases are suspended within 30 days, according to police department figures.

Distrust runs deep

Some shooting victims interviewed by the Sun-Times speak of having deep distrust of the police. The small percentage of arrests only makes that worse.

“They are going to ask you to corroborate, ask you about this and that,” says one man who was wounded twice in 15 years and says he refused to cooperate with the police both times. “Once you’re in there, and you get into it, you don’t know what they’re going to ask you about.”

The department’s surveys of public sentiment show the Chicago police have a low level of trust among the public, particularly in communities where most shootings happen.

The three detective "areas" with the most shootings had the lowest trust scores in the department’s community sentiment survey. And Black Chicagoans’ trust in the police is 10 points lower than that of white Chicagoans, according to the survey.

The investigations of about 1,500 nonfatal shootings since 2018 were dropped because the victims of those shootings didn't want to help with the investigation, according to department records.

“You put more energy into the cases you have more cooperation and a better chance to solve,” says John Garrido, a former Chicago police detective and supervisor who retired in 2022. “If a victim is not going to sign a complaint, the state’s attorney is probably not going to charge it” unless investigators are able to locate other witnesses or video evidence.

“We don’t have unlimited resources,” Garrido says. “It’s triage.”

Another veteran detective, who retired in 2024, says extra attention and effort can pay off if a detective can devote the time.

“That first time you talk to [the victim or a witness] at the scene, the shooter might be right there," the detective says. "The [victim] might just be mad or scared.

“They don’t expect us to do anything," he says. "They don’t think we care. And the way to show that you care is to go back and ask them again.

“And maybe they really can’t help you with that case. But they might know something about another case. And, if they know you are the kind of detective that cares and keeps working, they might help you out on that one.”

Chicago police brass have seen results when more resources are dedicated to specific types of crimes. For instance, when the number of carjackings soared during the COVID-19 pandemic, the police department created a vehicular hijacking team. The number of arrests made went up, and the number of carjackings dropped, says Kevin Bruno, deputy chief of the detective bureau.

Philip Cook, a Duke University researcher who has studied crime in Chicago, says police departments understandably put the most time and energy into solving murders because of the gravity of those crimes and also because, individually and collectively, those shootings get the most news coverage and draw the public’s attention the most.

But solving nonfatal shootings can have the same positive effects as closing murder cases, he says, and police departments that have put more resources into solving these shootings have seen dramatic results.

“It’s not as if there is one group of shooters out there who kill people and another group who go out there just to wound people,” Cook says. “It’s the same mix of folks doing the shooting.”

Taking lessons from Denver

In Denver, Paul Pazen took over as police chief in 2018. His department was solving about 17% of shooting crimes then, while 75% or more of homicides were being solved.

In 2020, Pazen established a “Firearm Assault Shoot Team,” known as the FAST unit, and beefed up shooting investigations with detectives who were trained in investigative techniques used by homicide detectives.

“In the first year, we went from 17% to 64% clearance rate,” says Pazen, who retired in 2022 amid controversy over his department’s handling of rising crime during the pandemic and the George Floyd protests.

While Denver’s murder rate remained elevated during the pandemic years, Pazen points out that the number of shootings in his last year as chief was lower than in 2020.

“I know they are down in staffing in Chicago, and they have a lot more shootings than in Denver," he says. "But I would think you could scale up what we did.”

This year, using Denver as a model, the Chicago Police Department has assigned 58 detectives citywide to exclusively handle shooting investigations.

“Looking at the last two years, on average, there are 1,855 nonfatal shootings citywide,” says Ursitti, the chief of detectives. “If you take that with 58 detectives, that’s 32 cases per detective.”

Ursitti says she hopes to bring that ratio down to 20 cases per detective in the near future.

‘Why even bother?’

None of this is likely to find the culprit who shot and wounded Tom Wagner when he was carjacked in West Garfield Park in March 2021.

The gunman got off six shots.

Wagner was able to drive off before collapsing as he tried to crawl from the car. He spent four weeks in intensive care and has had multiple surgeries.

Soon after the shooting, Wagner says a detective told him a suspect had been arrested in another gun-related case and that the suspect’s cellphone data was being cracked by the FBI.

In June 2022, Wagner says the detective told him he was taking the case to prosecutors.

But that, he says, was the last update he heard until the following March.

After months of calling the number for the detective, Wagner says he finally contacted a supervisor: “A sergeant told me, ‘I’ve been here a year, and I haven’t seen him.' "

Wagner says he found out that the detective had been out for months with a knee injury and that the investigation into his shooting hadn’t been reassigned.

But Wagner says he kept calling for updates, continuing even after moving to Syracuse, N.Y. In December, he says, he set up a meeting with another detective and drove 10 hours to the Harrison District police station on the West Side.

The news wasn't worth the trip. The suspect no longer was in custody after serving about a year in the other gun case, a supervisor told him. And there would be no further investigation because the only charges that had been likely in his case had a three-year statute of limitations, which had expired in March 2024.

The case had been formally closed in November, according to police records — a month before Wagner’s trip to the police station.

“Why even bother to have me come in?” Wagner says. “It feels like a slap in the face.”

Told about Wagner’s case, Ursitti says the department has put new protocols in place to make sure cases like Wagner’s don’t fall through the cracks.

“This is a new regime,” she says.