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Posted: Saturday, 04 July 2009 9:49AM
"Crook County' milestone. 2,000,000 crooks
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Crook tally in Cook County hits 2 million
Jul 4, 2009
In Cook County -- sometimes known as "Crook County'' -- we've just hit a dubious milestone.
Police recently issued "IR" No. 2 million to a 38-year-old Indiana man arrested in the south suburbs on charges of possession of $10 worth of marijuana and a minor traffic violation.
IR numbers -- the "IR" stands for "individual record" -- are like Social Security numbers for criminals. They are assigned to criminal suspects the first time they are arrested in Cook County. The same number sticks with a person for every subsequent arrest in Cook County.
At the current pace, with police issuing about 5,000 new IR numbers a month, Cook County would reach IR No. 3 million in about 16 years.
That's a far faster pace than it took to get to 2 million, even considering that the system of tracking has changed over the years. At one point, the Chicago Police Department assigned a new identification number for every arrest. But in 1962, department officials decided that a single number should track a person's entire criminal history.
That year, James E. Lenon was given IR No. 1. Nearly a half century later, just what he was arrested for then isn't clear from existing records, though court records show Lenon was paroled in 1970 on an auto-theft conviction.
In 1971, according to newspaper accounts, he and two accomplices died in a police shootout after they robbed Al's Tavern at 1645 W. Cortland.
"Their bodies had been riddled with bullets,'' the Chicago Daily News reported.
The trio were identified as the culprits in at least 30 tavern holdups. They wore yellow hard hats and posed as construction workers, police said.
In 2000, police agencies throughout Cook County were connected to the same booking system as Chicago and began issuing IR numbers, too.
In 2004, juveniles were given IR numbers for the first time. In the past, juveniles -- who account for 27 percent of those arrested for the first time in Cook County -- were tracked separately.
It's tough to escape your IR number because your fingerprints are kept on file with it.
"People often lie and don't tell us who they really are,'' said Joe Perfetti, director of records for the Chicago Police Department. "We can positively identify someone within minutes.''
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