Police are trying to force Kim Foxx, Chicago's First Black Woman State's Attorney, to resign.
We can't let them win.
Sign the pledge :
We Stand with Kim Foxx
and Her Commitment to Decarceration.
05/04/2019
Dear friend,
Chicago police and their allies are trying to take down State's Attorney Kim Foxx's agenda to stop over-incarceration--and it has to stop. The North Suburban Association of Police Chiefs, representing 30 Cook County police departments, and the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) took to the stage yesterday to announce a vote of “no confidence” against Kim Foxx--continuing a tirade of attacks against her since she dropped charges against Black actor Jussie Smollett.1 The Chicago FOP, Rahm Emanuel, the National District Attorney’s Association, and the Illinois prosecutor’s bar have all come out making personal attacks against her--the Chicago Tribune even published an editorial saying she should lose her job.2
Let's be clear : the attacks against Kim Foxx are about upholding a racist criminal “justice” system that bends to the will of police and their unions and seeks to lock people in cages rather than transform harm in communities. In their press conference, the FOP president said this is about more than Jussie's case and listed off numerous other incidents where State’s Attorney Foxx did not over-prosecute and seek to throw people in jail, but sought to find other solutions to address harm that didn’t end in incarceration.3 The police even lamented that despite their over-policing of Black neighborhoods to rack up marijuana and suspended driving arrests, her office refuses to prosecute them--literally saying she makes it "impossible for us."4 Jussie Smollett’s case was not special, State's Attorney Foxx has been moving her office away from unnecessarily locking people up since she got into office.
In reality, it is Chicago police that have a track record of racist and brutal practices. And they're so bad that the Department of Justice had to investigate and intervene with an agreement that established federal monitoring of the department.5 The “law and order” faction of Chicago politics is deeply afraid of the power in Black communities electing their own prosecutors--and it's because we could dismantle the status quo. Our movement could result in the police actually being held accountable and Black people not being locked up for petty offenses. Our work could drastically change the unjust criminal legal system. The police and their unions feel their unchecked power slipping away, which is why they are attacking State’s Attorney Foxx and, by extension, our national movement to hold prosecutors accountable. We need to have her back to ensure no elected official could even try to remove her from office--this is about the future of our justice system.
Recently, Kim Foxx made the decision to not pursue charges against the actor Jussie Smollett who was caught up in controversy following his claims he was a victim of a hate crime in Chicago.6 While we don’t know the full details of the story, one thing we are sure about is that State’s Attorney Foxx’s decision on Smollett was not about special treatment--it was about changing the culture of prosecutors’ offices : from one focused on punitive convictions and locking people in cages, to one focused on ending mass incarceration. For decades, predominantly white and male prosecutors' have helped build a “criminal justice system” designed to keep Black people in cages.7This has led to the U.S imprisoning more people than any other country. There are nearly 2.3 million people behind bars and most of those people are Black.8 Thankfully, times are changing, but not without a fight.
The new wave of transformative Black women prosecutors is under attack and we MUST stand together with them. We have been working hard to shift the culture of DAs offices by pushing progressive prosecutors to apply a decarceral lens to their work, prioritize keeping our people home versus locking them up on petty offenses, end the money bail system, hold police accountable, and more. That's led to Black women like Kim Foxx, Aramis Ayala, Rachael Rollins, and Marilyn Mosby taking over county prosecutor roles. And when these powerful Black women do things to transform the legal system, they are attacked by racist watch dogs and the police. When Florida State's Attorney Aramis Ayala decided she'd no longer seek the death penalty, right-wing Governor Rick Scott moved to limit her power and galvanized conservative lawmakers to start pushing to remove her from office.9 When Marilyn Mosby chose to charge the officers who were responsible for Freddie Gray’s murder the Baltimore police department filed lawsuits against her.10 And most recently, when newly elected Boston DA Rachael Rollins announced she'd no longer prosecute petty crimes of poverty, a police association filed an ethics complaint against her with the state bar before she could even take office.11
Chicago has a long history of police violence, torture, mass criminalization and incarceration of Black folks. And the city's leaders are using Jussie Smollet’s case as a distraction to the daily terror they enact against Black communities. The same people attacking State's Attorney Foxx now, particularly the FOP and Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, are the same ones who did everything they could to cover up the killing of Laquan McDonald.12 They are the same ones who sat idly by while zero justice was brought to the family of 22-year-old Rekia Boyd, who was killed by the Chicago police in 2012.13 Jon Burge ran a torture ring as Police Commander of the Chicago Police Department for years--during which Burge and his “midnight crew’ of detectives brutalized Black people to coerce dozens of false confessions. Burge was fired from the department in 1993 but it wasn’t until 2010 when he was convicted of lying about the torture. It wasn't until 2015 that the Burge police torture survivors were granted reparations after more than two decades of fighting to be heard.14 But when Rahm Emanuel's and the Chicago FOP's pitchforks go up against a young queer Black man, all of a sudden justice isn’t moving fast enough ? Boy bye.
We need more transformative thinking in our justice system, not less. Since elected, State's Attorney Foxx has worked to bring transparency to the prosecutor's office, one that has historically been shrouded in secrecy.15 She’s also made progress in advancing bail reform and introduced guidelines to keep low-level nonviolent offenders out of jail and court.16 There's a lot further to go, but her will to stand up to injustice is what Black communities organized to change when they ousted former prosecutor Anita Alvarez. And if we don’t stand strong for what Black people took to the polls to fight for, we could see even worse attacks against our movement that result in us having even less leverage to change the status quo.
Imagine what our world would look like if the police couldn’t torture and kill our people without consequences ? Imagine what it would look like when the world views our people as people and not merely as “criminals” or “bad guys”. What would it be like if our people were free to be home with their families instead of locked up in cages ? Liberation for Black people is at odds with everything white supremacy upholds and police departments were built on. Police resistance to our work in building power is a sign that we are winning--so we can't let them stop us now.
Until justice is real,
Clarise, Rashad, Arisha, Scott, Erika, Kristen M., Marybeth, Marena, Leonard, Kristen P., Madison, and the rest of the Color Of Change team
References :
1. "Suburban police chiefs, Chicago cop union express 'no confidence' in Kim Foxx," Chicago Sun Times, 4 April 2019
2. "Kim Foxx will and should lose her job over Jussie Smollett case," Chicago Tribune, 28 March 2019
3. "Police chiefs join union in calls for resignation of state's attorney Kim Foxx," CNN, 4 April 2019
4. Ibid.
5. "Federal judge approves consent decree to reform Chicago Police Department," USA Today, 31 January 2019
6. "Charges Against Jussie Smollett Dropped, Record Expunged," The Root, 26 March 2019
7. "How Prosecutors Contribute to Mass Incarceration," Colorlines, 11 January 2019
8. "Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019," Prison Policy Initiative, 19 March 2019
9. "Gov. Rick Scott's Attack on Florida's First Black State's Attorney Is A Threat To Our Political Power," Essence, 25 May 2017
10. "Cops Win Another Round Pursuing Prosecutor Who Pursued Them," The Marshall Project, 20 March 2017
11. "Boston's first Black woman prosecutor has yet to take office, but she's already facing an ethics complaint," Washington Post, 28 December 2018
12. "How Chicago tried to cover up a police execution," Chicago Reporter, 24 November 2015
13. "Chicago police officer who killed Rekia Boyd quits before hearing," Guardian, 17 May 2016
14. "John Burge and Chicago's legacy of police torture," Chicago Tribune, 19 September 2018
15. "Kim Foxx just released 6 years of data--most prosecutor's offices remain blackboxes," The Appeal, 7 March 2018
16. "Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx Wants Justice for Chicago," The Marshall Project, 29 October 2018
Color Of Change is building a movement to elevate the voices of Black folks and our allies, and win real social and political change. Help keep our movement strong.
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