At the center of State’s Attorney’s Kim Foxx’s vision for a revitalized State’s Attorney’s Office is a core belief that the job of the Office of the Cook County State’s Attorney is to promote public safety, and that public safety is best achieved by an Office that operates not with a “win at all costs” mentality, but rather with integrity, discretion, accountability, collaboration, and fairness.
This platform of reform focuses on several key issues that have particular significance for criminal prosecution. As such, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office top priorities are:
Accountability & Integrity
Rebuilding trust and legitimacy of the office is essential to effective prosecution of crimes. To achieve this, the Office will:
- Articulate a mission and vision for the Office that places the focus on justice, rather than winning cases, and align the work of the Office—including internal and external communications, training, policies, and hiring and promotion practices—to reflect that mission and vision.
- Acknowledge the existence of racial inequalities in the justice system, and the disproportionate impact that certain criminal justice policies have had on communities of color; and commit to understanding, evaluating, and transparently reporting on those impacts, and on the Office’s efforts to address them.
- Evaluate and modify as needed the system for investigation and prosecution of police misconduct, including the creation of protocols governing the investigation of officer-involved shootings and the potential use of special prosecutors for police misconduct investigations to avoid concerns about conflict of interest and promote the appearance of propriety.
- Review the conviction integrity functions within the Office, and make necessary adjustments to ensure that the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office operates a state-of the-art, highly-trained and externally-reviewed conviction integrity process.
- Develop intentional policies designed to increase the diversity of the Office, with a particular focus on building a pipeline for diverse supervisors, bureau chiefs, and executive staff.
Balanced & Restorative Justice (BARJ)
Balanced and restorative justice (BARJ) is a philosophy based on a set of principles that guide prosecutors as we try to balance the needs of the victim and the community with the needs of juvenile offenders. Restorative justice principles can guide responses to conflicts in many settings, not just those caused by a violation of law.
The BARJ model was a concept developed in part by the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, in order to make the philosophy of restorative justice applicable to the modern U.S. justice system. BARJ uses restorative justice principles to balance the needs of three parties: offenders, victims, and the community.
The Juvenile Justice Bureau has embraced the principles of BARJ. Learn more here.
Criminal Case Management & Operations
The Bureau will also hire, train, and develop top-quality attorneys; and drastically reduce case backlogs to save taxpayers money and protect the rights of the accused as well as victims. In order to achieve this, the Office will:
- Provide comprehensive and consistent training necessary to restore discretion to prosecutors at key decision points, including plea bargaining and bond decisions, and ensure that training addresses risk screening, available diversion and alternative court resources, and any potential collateral consequences of various options particularly regarding immigration status.
- Develop an improved case management and reporting system to assist prosecutors, reduce duplicative paperwork, and address case backlogs.
- Evaluate the felony review process with the goals of ensuring that the process is fairly and equitably administered, and ensuring that attorneys on the felony review unit receive adequate training and are supported by experienced attorneys.
Engagement & Transparency
To serve the interests of justice and promote public safety, the State’s Attorney will work to improve transparency; and establish a culture of trust and communication between residents and the Office that will reduce crime and increase clearance rates. To achieve this, the Office will:
- Understand and acknowledge the importance of connection to community and respectful relationships with all the various stakeholders in the justice system— including victims, witnesses, family members, and those accused of crimes—and adopt practices that specifically prioritize and cultivate that respect.
- Develop and implement strategies for the office to regularly engage and communicate with communities around the County, including through community forums, annual reports, and partnerships with other criminal justice stakeholders.
- Lead collaborative, system-wide efforts with other justice system partners to address challenges in the justice system and develop thoughtful, evidence-informed mechanisms for addressing those challenges.
- Design ways for various stakeholders to communicate with the Office, to ensure that communication between the office and communities is a two-way street.
- Improve data collection and transparency in the Office, to provide employees, parties, academic institutions, the media, and Cook County residents with access to information on key issues related to prosecution, diversion, racial and gender impacts of enforcement efforts, and other critical issues.
Juvenile & Emerging Adults
The Juvenile Bureau must strive to assess and address juvenile delinquency cases in a manner that considers adolescent brain development, coordinates with other systems including the child welfare system, and pursues justice through developmentally-appropriate programs that aim to rehabilitate youth. In order to achieve this, the Office will:
- Articulate and disseminate a vision for the Juvenile Bureau that educates and holds attorneys accountable to a system that seeks to address delinquency in ways that are fair, just, and truly aimed at rehabilitating young people.
- Build an expansive and effective diversion system for juveniles and emerging adults to expand the use of intensive interventions and services that are significantly more effective at addressing delinquency and preventing recidivism than detention.
- Improve internal and inter-agency communication and collaboration in order to support “dually-involved youth”—those who have contact with both the delinquency and child protection systems.
- Use the tools of the Office to address the school to prison pipeline. The Office can serve a key role in supporting school districts and education officials in efforts to reform school discipline policies and practices to promote the use of restorative justice and diversion for school-based incidents. The County-wide reach of the Office should be used to help improve information gathering and sharing about the scope of the school-to prison pipeline challenges currently facing the County, and can serve as a gatekeeper, developing tools to filter cases so that only those who need justice system intervention are elevated from the school level.
Protecting County Interests
In addition to criminal prosecutions and related programs that promote public safety, the Office of the Cook County State’s Attorney must thoughtfully and proactively work through its Civil Division to protect the interests of the County, in civil matters, and to advocate for County residents through proactive civil litigation. In order to achieve this, the office will:
- Empower and encourage Bureau attorneys to proactively develop and pursue civil cases that advocate for the interests of County residents and potentially raise revenue for the County, including on topics such as wage theft and consumer fraud.
- Cultivate collaboration between the Office and its client, Cook County, to develop protocols and practices to assess risk, evaluate potential conflicts, and reduce exposure when the County is sued.
Smart Technology
The State’s Attorney’s Office must be the fair and unbiased arbiter of justice, focusing its most intensive resources on aggressively pursuing prosecution of violent crime, and diverting non-violent offenders with mental illness, drug addiction, or other needs to the appropriate treatments that will further promote public safety by addressing the underlying causes of their misconduct. In order to achieve this, the Office will:
- Cultivate partnerships between the State’s Attorney’s Office and other key justice system stakeholders to develop prosecution and prevention strategies, including identification and prosecution of high risk and violent individuals, and to coordinate alternative efforts like diversion and deferred prosecution programs for lower risk offenders and those who need treatment.
- Develop and disseminate a strategic plan to address gun violence and gun offenders, including support for violence prevention strategies, enforcement efforts to address supply-side gun market issues, and developing intensive evidence- and data-informed prosecution of gun cases.
- Evaluate and expand successful alternatives to traditional prosecution, including community courts, specialty courts, and diversion programs, and track effects of those efforts on recidivism and on jail and prison populations.
- Align internal operations and employee performance metrics to reflect priorities beyond conviction rates, including diversion and alternative prosecutions, and reward and promote employees who use risk screening tools and exercise sound judgment and discretion in pursuing alternatives to traditional prosecution for appropriate candidates.
Through all of these priorities, the common thread is a commitment to addressing our most urgent challenge: promoting public safety. It is only by restoring trust in the office, reducing recidivism, supporting rehabilitation, improving cooperation, and increasing efficiency that the Office will be able to truly achieve the public safety gains that the people of Cook County demand and deserve. Click here to download the Transition Report (PDF).