Chip Mitchell
Criminal Justice Reporter | WBEZChip reports on criminal justice from WBEZ’s bureau on Chicago’s West Side. His investigative and narrative reporting has earned dozens of local and national awards. He is a three-time winner of the Chicago Headline Club’s annual award for “best reporter” in broadcast radio.
Before Chip joined WBEZ in 2006, his base for three years was Bogotá, Colombia. He reported from conflict zones around that war-torn country and from several other Latin American nations. The reporting reached U.S. audiences through NPR, the BBC and daily newspapers including the Dallas Morning News and the Christian Science Monitor.
From 1995 to 2003, Chip focused on immigration and Latin America as editor of Connection to the Americas, winner of the 2003 Utne Independent Press Award for “general excellence” among newsletters nationwide.
Chip was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and raised in nearby Falcon Heights. He earned a B.A. in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In Chicago, he lives with his partner and their daughter on the Northwest Side, where they founded the Humboldt Park Gators, an all-girls baseball team.
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Illinois became the first state in the country to abolish cash bail on Monday, but the courts remained slow in the Metro East. -
When Illinois becomes the first U.S. state to abolish cash bail, it could set off a surge in electronic monitoring to the fear of the law’s most fervent supporters.
