Five years after Illinois passed one of the nation’s most sweeping police reform laws, key provisions remain incompletely implemented across the state’s more than 800 law enforcement agencies, according to a report released this month.
Between one-third and half of police departments surveyed said their use-of-force policies are missing at least one requirement under the Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today (SAFE-T) Act, the report found. In a separate review of 10 agencies, only one had fully incorporated the law’s standards.
The findings come from the “Workgroup to Implement the SAFE-T Act Policing Provisions,” which was convened to assess how well the 2021 law has been carried out across Illinois. The group outlined dozens of recommendations to push the law closer to full implementation across five areas, including use-of-force standards, officer decertification, body-worn cameras, training practices and data reporting requirements.
Passed in the wake of nationwide protests following the 2020 police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and years of scrutiny over policing practices in Illinois, the SAFE-T Act overhauled multiple areas of the criminal legal system, including the controversial elimination of cash bail, which took effect in 2023 after a court challenge.
Its policing provisions mandated body-worn cameras for all Illinois law enforcement officers, banned chokeholds and other restraints, required officers to intervene when colleagues use excessive force, expanded training requirements, toughened the process for decertifying officers who commit serious misconduct, and created new reporting requirements for use-of-force incidents, mental health dispatches and deaths in custody.
“The strength of the SAFE-T Act will only be realized when interactions between police and community involve less force and tension and more equity and partnership to build safe communities together,” said Ahmadou Dramé, director of the Illinois Justice Project, which organized the workgroup and is part of the Chicago Community Trust. “Unfortunately, many provisions have yet to be fully completed five years later.”
The workgroup, co-chaired by state Sens. Robert Peters (D-13th) and Elgie R. Sims Jr. (D-17th) and state Rep. Justin Slaughter (D-27th), brought together law enforcement leaders, state officials, advocates and researchers to identify where implementation has stalled and how to address it.
It spent months studying gaps identified in a preliminary report released in April 2025, which found no area of the law had reached 100% compliance. This second report, released in April 2026, offers recommendations for addressing those gaps and establishes an oversight mechanism under the governor’s office to monitor their implementation.
Dramé told the Herald in an interview that the Illinois Justice Project’s role was to serve as the administrative backbone of the effort, including fundraising to support the workgroup.
“When you bring everybody to the table together at the state level, local level, across principals, whether it’s the Attorney General’s Office, governor’s office, legislators, and you create an environment where it is safe to say or ask, ‘How should I be handling this?’” Dramé said. “One of the things that we were able to do was to surface those areas where things might be stuck.”
He described the workgroup’s atmosphere as largely cooperative, despite including progressive reformers as well as law enforcement personnel who were critical of some of the law’s provisions, saying the group focused on how to best implement the existing law rather than relitigating its merits.
“The overwhelming majority of people are working together in good faith to implement the law,” he said.
But the group found significant gaps in implementation, including departments whose policies omit key use-of-force provisions.
To resolve that issue, the new report recommended the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board (ILETSB), which is the statewide agency tasked with overseeing law enforcement certification, to develop a model use-of-force policy to reduce inconsistencies across jurisdictions.
Dramé said the model policy would be a tool for smaller departments that lack the resources to develop their own SAFE-T Act-compliant policies and for agencies that rely on subscription-
based template services, such as Lexipol, that have not always kept pace with Illinois-specific requirements.
“The model policy really just serves as an opportunity to make sure that we’re doing that as best we can,” he said, adding that the law would serve as the baseline for what any model policy could include. “I don’t think that the stakeholders who are involved in this can leave with a product that contradicts what the law states.”
On data reporting, the workgroup found that some agencies still have never submitted required monthly reports on use-of-force incidents, mental health dispatches and deaths in custody. Part of the problem, Dramé said, was not bad faith but confusion about who was responsible for ensuring compliance and how to submit data correctly, including whether agencies with no incidents in a given month were required to file a “zero report,” essentially reporting no incidents.
“I didn’t experience anyone in the workgroup or elsewhere who led a local policing agency anywhere in the state and didn’t want to report on that,” he said.
The new report recommends that state agencies publicly identify non-reporting departments on the Illinois State Police website to create accountability.
The new report also noted some progress, including that ILETSB has put in place the infrastructure for discretionary officer decertification hearings to begin by launching a portal for filing misconduct cases, adopting administrative rules that govern those hearings, hiring six administrative law judges and setting up a space for hearings, with some cases scheduled.
On body-worn cameras, the report found a nearly 100-fold increase in the amount of camera grant funding requested by agencies compared to 2025, but also found that many law enforcement agencies were struggling to comply with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) rules around video footage, which departments said require double the amount of time of each recording to properly redact for public release. A bill that would amend the FOIA statute by providing agencies more time to respond to requests for video recordings was introduced in late March and is currently under consideration in the Illinois House.
Going forward, Bria Scudder, the deputy governor for public safety, infrastructure, environment and energy, will lead a new monitoring body that is set to convene twice annually to assess implementation progress by law enforcement agencies across the state.
Peters, one of the law’s original sponsors, pointed to broader public safety trends as evidence the reforms are working despite the gaps in implementation.
“Since the SAFE-T Act was signed into law, crime in Illinois has seen a historic, multi-year drop, bringing us to levels not seen since the 1960s, especially violent crime and especially in Chicago,” Peters said. “I’m committed to continuing my advocacy of this reform to ensure lawmakers and law enforcement are focused on facts, fairness and building safer communities for all.”
Dramé said that the law’s full promise remained unrealized but was within reach.
“We have made significant progress, and I think that we should be proud of that progress,” he said. “But we just shouldn’t be satisfied because we’ve got more work to do.”
Max Blaisdell is a staff writer at Hyde Park Herald.