The number of arrests at this year’s Lollapalooza music festival dropped to the lowest in five years, city emergency officials said Monday.
The Grant Park Festival, which included Sunday with a punk- and alt-heavy lineup, was sold out to its 115,000 capacity all four days, event organizers said.
Between Thursday and Sunday, police made nine arrests and issued seven summonses or tickets, according to information from the Office of Emergency Management and Communications. There were 63 ambulance transports during the event, officials said.
Six arrests were reported Saturday, the highest one-day total, while nearly a third of the ambulance transports occurred Sunday, officials said.
The number of arrests at Lollapalooza has decreased every year since 2019, officials said. Citations and tickets have fluctuated more from year to year, but the total for 2024 was half of 2023, according to the city.
Ald. Brian Hopkins, 2nd, chairman of the City Council’s Public Safety Committee, said Monday that most of the illegal activity at Lollapalooza tends to be fence-jumping and theft.
He said police and festival security have improved in terms of “identifying groups of people who look like they’re about to try to jump the fence, so when they see that they can flood the area.”
Hopkins said he would suggest Lollapalooza 2025 include an opportunity for festival-goers who are victims of theft to fill out police reports while on site. He said that as it stands now, people whose phones or other items are stolen must leave the lot to file a police report.
With high humidity and temperatures mostly in the 80s, Hopkins praised the effort to hand out free water and said it may have contributed to the second-lowest number of ambulance transports since 2019.
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