Source: chicagoreader.com 12/28/25
Terrance has followed the same routine for years. Once a week, he gets in his car around 7 AM and drives to the Second District police station, a rectangular, two-story building of beige bricks at 51st and Wentworth in Chicago’s Fuller Park neighborhood. Inside, he joins a handful of other people sitting on worn wooden benches in the dimly lit waiting area. After a time, he steps up to meet a detective behind the front desk and hands over a white sheet of paper on which he’s written the address of every place he stayed the previous week.
Terrance, who asked to use only his first name for his safety, is homeless—but not because he doesn’t have a place to stay. He could be living at home with his wife of two years, but the state’s amalgamation of housing banishment laws has made vast swaths of Chicago illegal for him and hundreds of others similarly situated. A sex offense conviction from more than 20 years ago means he’s barred from living within five hundred feet of a school, playground, or day care.
The mere fact that Terrance is unhoused means he’s bound by even more restrictions. Unlike people on the registry with a legal place to live (who are required to report in person to their local police station once a year), people without a “fixed residence” must report every week and provide cops with a detailed log of their whereabouts.
Terrance is meticulous; anything less could spell disaster. If he misses a single week or transcribes even one address incorrectly, he could be hauled off to jail on the spot and charged with a new felony. “It’s a life-and-death situation,” he says. By law, he can’t stay at the same address more than twice in one year, otherwise he’d have to register it as a “temporary residence.” This means he has to find 183 different places to stay annually.
Yet, beginning January 1, he and the rest of the city’s weekly registrants will have even fewer options for shelter as Chicago plunges into the depths of winter. The Chicago Police Department (CPD) is planning to enforce a policy that bars people with sex offense convictions from riding public transit for more than two hours at a time, say multiple registrants and advocates in interviews with the Reader. The change, the latest in a constantly shifting landscape of rules governing nearly every aspect of the lives of people with sex offense convictions, coincides with a sizable investment in policing on…
Unfortunately, this article accurately reports what CPD is now spending time and money on (with the exception of the article listing the wrong CPD location for registration – I don’t know what that’s all about). But the people in the story are real and CPD is now planning to enforce this transit loitering policy. Of course for anyone not on the registry, CPD would rarely be able to enforce transit loitering, but for homeless on the registry, PFRs must report weekly every place they spent the night the past 7 days. So now if they say they were riding the rails, they will be busted. Fish in a barrel, LE doesn’t even have to leave their desks.
This scheme guarantees homeless registrants will be arrested at some point. It’s impossible not to fail this weekly reporting mandate listing addresses that are not within 500 feet of this or that. It enrages me, but they are enforcing the insane law.
The cold air over the Great Lakes must of frozen Chicago Land’s lawmakers brains and critical thinking. Oh wait, they never thought critically just a bunch of cronies in the land of Lincoln near the Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan borders.