Kirk Dillard Pushes for More Police on Chicago CTA

Kirk Dillard isn’t waiting around. The chairman of the Regional Transportation Authority went public this week with a direct call to Chicago officials: don’t let transit safety get buried in the city’s broader police staffing debate.

Dillard’s push comes as Superintendent Larry Snelling’s department-wide study circulates through city hall, a report calling for hundreds of new officers spread across Chicago’s precincts. Dillard’s argument is that transit riders can’t be an afterthought in that conversation. Not commuters on the Red Line. Not people waiting at open-air stops in Englewood and Rogers Park at seven in the morning.

“Not good enough,” Dillard said of where staffing currently stands.

He’s been pointing to New York City as the benchmark. The MTA deploys significantly more sworn officers per rider than the CTA does, and Dillard thinks that gap is worth taking seriously. Chicago’s system logs roughly 1.5 million rides on a typical weekday. The complaints from those riders about safety aren’t new. Alderpersons have raised them. Advocacy groups have raised them. The riders themselves have said it in every survey and public comment session the RTA has run.

What’s changed is the legal framework under them. The newly passed Northern Illinois Transit Authority Act gives Dillard something real to work with. The law calls explicitly for regional coordination on law enforcement, which is a different approach than what Chicago’s been doing. Consider the scope of what’s actually operating here: the CTA runs into nearly 40 suburbs, Metra maintains its own police force, and Pace Suburban Bus depends on local municipal departments wherever it operates. That’s not a coherent security structure. It’s a workaround that’s been patched together for decades.

Under the new act, the Cook County sheriff and Illinois State Police take on expanded, direct responsibility for transit security across the region. That’s a structural change. It’s not about adding one more beat cop to one more station. It’s about pulling enforcement authority outside the boundaries of the city limits argument that’s dominated this issue for years.

The CTA hasn’t been standing still, to be fair. The agency boosted police hours, brought in more sheriff’s deputies, tightened fare-card enforcement, and put high-barrier gates into select stations. Dillard acknowledged that Federal pressure was part of what drove those moves. Whether those changes hold at their current level and get built upon is the real question in front of transit leadership right now.

Still, Dillard’s framing here is careful. He’s not treating this as a straight policing problem. That’s the right read. Transit safety runs from the moment a rider walks through a turnstile to the moment they step off a platform at their stop. Social services matter in that picture. Outreach to people experiencing homelessness matters. So does basic cleanliness. So does ADA accessibility, and anyone who’s tried to wheel someone onto a CTA bus with a broken ramp doesn’t need that point spelled out for them.

The Northern Illinois Transit Authority Act includes a transit ambassador program set to launch this summer at CTA and Metra stations, modeled on approaches that other American cities have tried. Ambassadors aren’t police officers. They’re trained to de-escalate, to connect people with services, and to provide the kind of consistent human presence that makes a platform feel less like a place where bad things happen. San Francisco and Denver have run versions of this.

Whether the ambassador program lands the way advocates hope is still an open question. The Chicago Sun-Times has published reader letters in April 2026 pressing elected officials on CTA safety from multiple angles, and the volume of that response suggests the issue isn’t fading from public attention anytime soon.

Dillard’s done here what an RTA chairman can do: frame the problem regionally, point to a legal structure that now supports action, and keep the pressure on. The harder work falls to the city, the county, and the state agencies that now share responsibility under the Northern Illinois Transit Authority Act. The riders on the Red Line at 11 p.m. are watching to see what happens next.