https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/02/kim-foxx-states-attorney-chicago-criminal-justice-attacks
Kim Foxx Is Under Attack Because She’s Trying to Transform Chicago’s Criminal Justice System
BY
KENZO SHIBATA
Chicago’s criminal justice system has long been brutal and racist. State’s Attorney Kim Foxx has tried to change that in the last four years — which is precisely why she’s under attack right now.
teach in Chicago Public Schools and see the impacts of over-policing in the city every day. Students are regularly stopped by police for the high crime of hanging out in public. I’ve heard countless stories of verbal and physical altercations with police officers from my students. This traumatizes young people, and they carry that trauma into our classrooms. The police and criminal justice system cause problems that teachers must try to fix, and in Chicago, that means doing more with less as our mayor prioritizes expanding budgets for police over schools.
I was never one to support candidates for prosecutor. Central to my vision for a better world is reducing and eventually eliminating the positions and institutions of prosecutors, police, and prisons that have gained so much power and ruined so many lives in our society. I didn’t see much potential in running “progressive” prosecutors, which seemed like a contradiction in terms.
This changed when I learned of Kim Foxx’s campaign for Cook County state’s attorney against incumbent Anita Alvarez in Chicago in 2016. Alvarez helped then-mayor Rahm Emanuel hide the police dashcam footage of seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald being murdered by officer Jason Van Dyke in a hail of sixteen bullets in 2014. When that footage was finally released in 2016, a coalition of community organizers, many who do not normally involve themselves in electoral politics, organized the #ByeAnita campaign in 2016, working parallel to the official campaign for Kim Foxx…