The number of arrests at this year’s Lollapalooza music festival dropped to the lowest in the last five years, city emergency officials said Monday.
The Grant Park festival, which wrapped Sunday with a punk and alt-heavy lineup, was sold out for its 115,000-person capacity all four days, event organizers said.
Between Thursday and Sunday, police made nine arrests and issued seven citations 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 single-day total, while almost a third of the ambulance transports occurred Sunday, officials said.
The number of arrests at Lollapalooza has decreased each year since 2019, officials said. Citations and tickets have fluctuated more year to year, but the 2024 total was half of 2023’s, according to the city.
Ald. Brian Hopkins, 2nd, chair 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 at “identifying groups of people who look like they’re about to attempt a fence-jumping, so when they see that, they can flood the zone.”
Hopkins said he would suggest that Lollapalooza 2025 include an opportunity for festivalgoers who are victims of theft to fill out police reports while on-site. He said as it stands now, people whose phones or other items are stolen need to leave the grounds to make a police report.
With high humidity and temperatures mostly in the high 80s, Hopkins praised the move to hand out free water and said that may have contributed to the second-lowest number of ambulance transports since 2019.