Foxx Hits Back At Mayor's Criticism, Points To Lack Of Arrests

CHICAGO — Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx responded to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot's criticism of her office's decision not to pursue charges in a deadly shootout that took place Friday in the Austin neighborhood.

Warning that a lack of accountability would send the city into chaos, Lightfoot and several aldermen representing wards on the city's West Side sent a letter to Foxx's office asking her to reconsider the decision by her felony review unit to decline to press charges of first-degree murder in connection with a shootout that took place around 10:30 a.m. on Friday in the 1200 block of North Mason Avenue.

Foxx said the mayor made factual misstatements about the evidence in the case, but she declined to specify them, citing the possibility that the case may lead to future criminal charges.

"This isn't a press conference that I intended to have," Foxx told reporters Tuesday. "But I was, quite honestly, mortified by what happened yesterday, particularly because the mayor — as a former prosecutor — knows that what she did yesterday was inappropriate."

Foxx acknowledged that the city is made more dangerous by the widespread belief among people committing gun crimes that they will not be caught. From the time she took office in December 2016 until July, Foxx said, only 18 percent of the city's 13,374 shootings have led to arrests by Chicago police.

"That's 11,000 shootings in which there's not been an arrest. This isn't me pointing fingers," Foxx said. "This isn't me playing defensive, this is us in the state's attorney's office wanting to work with our law enforcement partners. Because when we know we have that many unsolved shootings, there is a sense that people can get away with murder with impunity."

So far in 2021, the Cook County State's Attorney's Office has approved murder charges in 290 cases, Foxx said.

According to Chicago Police Department data, there have been 625 murders in the first three quarters of the year, up by 5 percent from last year and 58 percent from 2019.

The county's top prosecutor also told reporters Tuesday that her office has concerns about the integrity of investigations conducted by the Chicago Police Department's Area 5 detective unit on the Northwest Side and its repeated leaks to the media.

Last month, Foxx sent a letter to the City Council containing data about arrests and felony reviews during the prior month. She told alderpeople that felony arrests by police have declined by 30 percent since the start of the pandemic.

According to the data she provided, prosecutors turned down 32 percent of murder charges presented to them in August by police, approving 28 of the 41 cases reviewed.

The state's attorney was also critical of the mayor's proposal to seek to seize the assets of people affiliated with street gang activity. She said data shows such civil asset forfeiture programs are not effective against low-level offenders.

"These are not highfalutin' gangbangers," Foxx said. "These are people who are using their grandmother's cars, their mother's cars, who are posing on the internet with large swaths of bills but probably have $40 to their name."

Foxx said the issues that lead to Chicago's violence are not unique to the city, nor do they easily lend themselves to soundbites. She said they include trauma, housing, mental health, divestment and the coronavirus pandemic.

"If we're talking about violence, the roots of violence is not rooted in police or systems. There are people who are doing bad things — picking up guns, shooting at one another, stabbing one another, stealing from one another — that's not the police's fault," she said. "Where we are we have an unrelenting violence problem, but what I've seen is a need for a quick answer: 'Oh, it's the state's attorney's office,' 'Oh, it's the police,' and it's not."

Foxx said she was open to criticism, but it should be based on facts and data. Unlike, she said, the repeated unfounded claims by Police Superintendent David Brown about the effect of bail reform on crime.

"Look at my stuff. Question me. Interrogate me," Foxx said. "Sit me down for hours and show me where the state's attorney's office has made the community less safe."

Foxx's press conference comes during a week in which Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin said he witnessed brazen gunfire from a "joyrider" on Lake Shore Drive, former Barack Obama advisor David Axelrod called on Lightfoot to declare a "public safety emergency" and the state's richest man, Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, noted the difficulty of recruiting people to work in Chicago and warned he may relocate the global headquarters of his firm "if we don't change course."