Chicago police are making thousands of arrests for illegal possession of a firearm, but as it turns out the strategy isn’t doing much at all to make the city a safer place; especially given that the vast majority of non-fatal shootings and over half of all homicides are going unsolved.

The Marshall Project has done an outstanding job of highlighting what’s actually happening in the Windy City when it comes to fighting “gun violence”; which all too often takes the form of arresting and charging individuals with felony offenses simply for possessing a gun without a valid Firearms Owner ID card or a concealed carry license. According to their report, felony arrests for gun possession have doubled over the past decade

Officials justify the focus on confiscating guns — even if they aren’t being fired at anybody — as a way of curtailing violence. Yet even as the number of possession arrests skyrocketed, the number of shootings increased, and the percentage of shootings involving victims in which someone was arrested declined.

For this article, The Marshall Project read nearly 300 arrest reports to understand the tactics police use to find guns and compiled decades of police data showing a history of discriminatory gun enforcement. We conducted more than 100 interviews with people navigating gun cases, researchers, attorneys and community residents. Here is what we found:

• From 2010 to 2022, the police made more than 38,000 arrests for illegal gun possession. The number of these arrests — almost always a felony in Illinois — doubled during this time.
• Illegal possession is the most serious offense in most of the cases analyzed, the charges often bearing names that imply violence, like “unlawful use of a weapon.”
• Research by Loyola University Chicago found that most people convicted in Illinois for these charges don’t go on to commit a violent crime and that people who already committed violent crimes are more likely to do so again.
• Although Black people comprise less than a third of the city’s population, they were more than 8 in 10 of those arrested for guns in the period reviewed. The majority were men in their 20s and 30s.
• Even if not sentenced to prison, those we interviewed faced criminal records, probation, job loss, legal fees and car impoundments.
• Weapons arrests, which include illegal gun possession, are at their highest since the mid-1990s.

“Guns are not assembly-line cases, and they shouldn’t be treated as such,” says Chris Hudspeth, 31, who has been incarcerated for illegal possession. “I’m scared for my life — and I gotta go to prison because I fear for my life, for my family’s safety? Because we’re not fortunate enough to live someplace else?”

Retired Chicago police detective Kevin Scott says solving violent crimes is harder than making weapons possession arrests because detectives have to compile several types of evidence to prove guilt.

“There’s so many other hoops you have to jump through to determine if someone even committed the crime of murder versus someone [who] had a gun on them,” Scott says. “You can arrest somebody with a gun all day long.”

… To see what this enforcement looks like, The Marshall Project focused on more than 225 gun arrests conducted over last year’s Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends — holidays that tend to have a heightened police presence — and found that the overwhelming majority of those arrested were Black men. Most people had no arrest warrants, nor were they on supervised release, probation or suspected of being in a gang. In most of the incidents analyzed, the police were not responding to 911 calls about a person with a gun.

In arrests where possession was the most severe charge — about 140 of the cases — more than 7 in 10 began with a traffic violation. After this initial stop, police often used some other justification for a search, like the smell of marijuana.

In one-third of the stops, the person arrested had a gun owner’s permit but not the license to allow carrying the loaded gun.

The arrest reports show that many people were cooperative with police when they asked about guns. In some cases, they told police they had the gun for safety.

“He has the firearm for protection due to him being shot and robbed in the past,” the police noted after one arrest. “Arrestee related that he was shot at two Mondays ago in an attempt[ed] carjacking where he was the victim,” another report reads.

Police make a large amount of stops but find a minuscule amount of weapons. For instance, officers stopped more than 6,500 people from the Friday evening before Memorial Day through the following Monday. They confiscated about 130 guns in possession arrests.

“We have an incredible problem when it comes to gun violence, but our strategy is failing, and it’s making it worse,” Cook County Public Defender Sharone Mitchell Jr. says. “Guilty or not, there’s a significant impact when it comes to really damaging, invasive police behavior.”