The Cook County state’s attorney’s office announced Friday that it is expanding a pilot program allowing Chicago police officers to bypass prosecutors and directly file charges in some low-level felony gun cases, a move the office says will ease backlogs and free up police officers and assistant state’s attorneys for higher-priority work.

The office launched the effort in January in the department’s Englewood District on the South Side, where police officers through Wednesday initiated charges in 43 gun possession cases. The program will now begin in the Far South Side’s Calumet District while the office reviews data with an eye on expanding the program, officials said.

The initiative will likely bring some relief to prosecutors in the office’s Felony Review Unit, which is staffed at all hours by assistant state’s attorneys who work with police to evaluate whether charges are appropriate.

The announcement was quickly criticized by the Cook County public defender’s office, which said the felony review process is an “essential check on police authority.”

“Felony review is built to ensure that a legal professional looks at charges to evaluate whether an arrest was appropriate,” Cook County Public Defender Sharone Mitchell Jr. told the Tribune. “We have concerns about moving away from that model.”

Charging decisions can at times cause conflict between police and prosecutors when prosecutors reject felony charges or ask for more evidence before filing. But for the gun possession charges subject to the bypass program, prosecutors were approving those in around 90% of cases and generally handling them by phone, said Yvette Loizon, chief of policy at the state’s attorney’s office. She added that prosecutors still review the cases at other points.

Now, police in the pilot districts can file the charges without waiting to connect with a prosecutor, Loizon said. So far, all cases filed through the pilot program that have reached the preliminary hearing stage or were presented before a grand jury have advanced, the office said.

In a statement, Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke said the program addresses a “longstanding bottleneck.”

“These are straightforward gun possession cases that nevertheless can take hours to get through felony review. Rather than take a police officer off the beat while awaiting a felony review callback, this program equips them with the tools and training to file appropriate charges directly and get back on the street,” Burke said in the statement. “It also allows felony review prosecutors to focus on the most serious crimes, which are labor intensive.”

Chicago police Superintendent Larry Snelling voiced support for the program in a statement that called it “a more efficient process that returns officers to the streets more quickly when processing offenders on simple firearm possession charges.”

A typical overnight shift in the Felony Review Unit can look like this: Prosecutors prioritize cases by seriousness and whether there is a live victim or witness who needs attention, Loizon said.

In those cases, they travel to the police districts to examine evidence and speak to victims and witnesses. Then at the end of their shift, they handle low-level felonies by speaking with officers on the phone, collecting information and entering it into the system.

Meanwhile, Loizon said, if a police officer catches a gun case early in their shift, the officer — instead of being out on the street — may end up waiting by the phone for hours for a prosecutor to call to approve the charges.

“It’s inefficient for us, it’s inefficient for the police, and I think it’s damaging to public safety,” Loizon said.

Cook County’s Felony Review Unit is nearly unique, with few other similar models nationwide, Loizon said.

The move to offload some low-level cases from the unit also is not unprecedented, she said, as most felony narcotics cases are directly filed by police.

Mitchell, though, said the stakes can be high for an individual if police get charges wrong, as people can be detained until the case goes before a judge.

“When you’re talking about the stigma of being in jail, losing your job, losing your ability to take care of family members . … Those harms happen very quickly within a day,” Mitchell said.

The state’s attorney’s office said it has trained police officers to evaluate the cases, and an on-duty watch lieutenant reviews charges before they are filed, officials said. Prosecutors also review cases before they go before a judge or grand jury.

“The notion that because we’re not doing a phone review of a case that comes in the door, we’re not doing any kind of prosecutorial review is completely wrong,” Loizon said.

Loizon also said police appear to be using the program judiciously. And there are protocols for when officers can bypass the felony review unit. For example, if an officer forgot to turn on a body camera, that case cannot be filed directly, she said.

“They’re not just throwing any case through bypass that they get their hands on,” she said. “If they were, we would probably have triple that amount.”

The office will likely next expand the program to the Illinois State Police and then review the findings from the expanded pilot before making additional expansion decisions. Loizon said suburban law enforcement agencies have expressed interest in felony review bypass for other low-level charges, such as retail theft.

The pilot program allows assistant state’s attorneys to focus more of their time on the most serious cases, Loizon said. One complaint the office has heard from law enforcement, she said, is that victims or witnesses who initially are willing to cooperate end up changing their mind during the wait for a prosecutor.

“We want to focus on the crimes that have the most devastating impact to the community,” she said.