Jan. 27--The CTA released figures Wednesday indicating crime dropped on its bus and train lines by 25 percent last year, but officials did not include detailed breakdowns and would not say whether sexual assaults were part of the decline.
The agency also did not provide numbers for each line, or say whether any increases were recorded in specific crimes on its system from 2014 to 2015.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel appeared with CTA president Dorval R. Carter Jr. to tout the numbers early Wednesday morning but declined to answer questions afterwards. They noted that the "total number of crimes" on the CTA fell by 25 percent in 2015, with robberies and theft showing the biggest decreases.
Serious crimes, including murder, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated battery and aggravated assault, declined 12 percent, from 412 incidents in 2014 to 364 in 2015, said Jeff Tolman, a CTA spokesman. There were no homicides on CTA property either year, Tolman said. CTA officials did not immediately have a breakdown on how many of what types of crime were represented in that total number, but said that those numbers represent "seven incidents for every 10 million rides in 2015."
In 2014, there were 4,691 crimes reported on CTA property compared to 3,512 in 2015, according to the statistics released by the agency. On the rail system, "total crime" fell 32 percent last year on trains, platforms and tracks, the CTA said. On buses, overall crime dropped 32 percent.
Thefts decreased by 19 percent and robberies by 22 percent across the transit system, according to the agency.
The agency did not say whether the number of sexual assaults increased last year on bus or rail lines. It said there were eight sexual assaults reported across the system in 2015 but did not give the numbers for 2014. Steele said he did not know of any crimes that showed a significant increase.
At their news conference, Emanuel and Carter credited the installation of security cameras on buses, trains and platforms, noting that 256 people were arrested for crimes on CTA property after their "images were caught on CTA cameras," an 8 percent increase from the year before.
They did not say what those people were arrested for, or whether they were convicted.
The CTA announcement Wednesday comes during a spike in shootings across Chicago. More people were shot in the city during the first three weeks of this year than during the same period in each of the past four years, according to data compiled by the Chicago Tribune.
The city has also come under fire for how it keeps crime statistics.
An audit in early April by the city inspector general's office found that the department underreported aggravated batteries and assaults by about one-fourth in 2012 by failing to follow state guidelines. The department should have counted each victim as a separate incident, but instead counted each shooting as one, regardless of how many victims there were.
Tribune reporters Rosemary Regina Sobol and Liam Ford contributed.
