As last week ended, two events in Chicago underscored the deep challenges still facing this city when it comes to the most basic of human needs — our safety and security.
Crosetti Brand on Thursday was found guilty by a jury (after just 90 minutes of deliberation) of stabbing 11-year-old Jayden Perkins to death as the boy tried to protect his mother from ex-boyfriend Brand, who was knifing her as well. Just hours later, Chicago police Officer Krystal Rivera, 36, was shot dead as she and other officers investigated a person believed to have a gun in Chatham on the city’s South Side.
The trauma and tragedy inherent in both stories was on our minds as we recalled our meeting earlier in the week with Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke. O’Neill Burke discussed her first six months on the job. She has wasted no time beginning to whip the nation’s third-largest district attorney’s office into shape after years of diminishment. Recruiting of new prosecutors has gone so well that the office has surpassed its salary allocation, she told us.
But she told us something else during our conversation that was bracing indeed. As she was running for the office last year, O’Neill Burke said, “I thought guns were the biggest problem. But it turns out domestic violence is.”
In Cook County, 23 women have died allegedly at the hands of abusers just since O’Neill Burke took office in December.
Twenty-three. Let that number sink in.
Even as Laterria Smith, Jayden’s mother, saw Brand face justice a little over a year after that horrific day, women aren’t being adequately protected from the men in their lives who abuse them.
Under O’Neill Burke, prosecutors already are making some progress on this front. The rate at which Cook County judges now are detaining those accused of domestic violence while they await trial has increased to 81% from around 50% before she took office, she told us.
Part of the reason for the increase is a change in procedure. At O’Neill Burke’s request, Cook County Chief Judge Tim Evans granted her prosecutors rapid access to a far broader range of records on criminal defendants than had long been the case. So when assistant state’s attorneys now stand before judges and request pretrial confinement, they have at their disposal records on defendants providing crucial context for judicial decisions that can mean life or death for victims.
An example: Just after O’Neill Burke took office, one of her young prosecutors sought detention for a man accused of leaving gifts for his children at the doorstep of the mother, who’d obtained an order of protection against him. That by itself seemed innocuous, and thus the prosecutor (who did not have easy access to the explanatory data) was unable to explain to the judge why the office had decided to seek confinement.
It turned out the father had previously abducted the children, taking them to Indiana, and they’d been traumatized, O’Neill Burke told us. But the prosecutor didn’t know that while standing before the judge, who to his credit took it upon the court to look up the back story. O’Neill Burke said she’s fixed that problem by improving prosecutors’ access to the information they need.
The change in procedure was a relatively straightforward fix, but far more needs to be done to give O’Neill Burke the tools to keep turning her office around. And for those items, funding will be needed.
We were surprised to learn that the state’s attorney’s office has no automated case-management system to speak of. For felonies, there’s a system created in-house more than a decade ago on a platform that no longer is tech-supported. Assistant state’s attorneys must input into spreadsheets procedural developments in each of their many cases — something prosecutors themselves don’t have the time to do and paralegals ought to be handling. Oh, except the office has no paralegals.
An opinion piece we published recently took O’Neill Burke to task for removing information the office had been posting online under her predecessor, Kim Foxx, on the status of felony cases. O’Neill Burke said she did so because much of the information was incomplete, incorrect or unverifiable due to the technology deficiencies. Transparency, of course, remains important.
The state’s attorney’s office, which has a current-year budget of $187 million, badly needs a bona fide case-management system, and that will cost millions. Money well spent, we say, because the public would have access to this important information, and the office itself could make better decisions about resource allocation and — critically — move criminal cases through the process much faster than the current woefully slow pace of prosecutions.
But that’s not all. If anything, we were more shocked to hear that our local prosecutor’s office essentially has no internal forensics unit. Cook County is virtually the only major urban local prosecution office in the nation without one.
In this day and age, DNA analysis, drug content analysis and of course fingerprint analysis are integral components of most felony cases. The office currently has a single scientist handling its forensics needs. Veteran lawyers with significant forensics-evidence experience left during the previous administration, we’re told. An effective forensics team needs to be established as soon as possible.
O’Neill Burke will submit her first budget request in July to Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle. The two have a less-than-warm relationship; Preckwinkle staunchly backed O’Neill Burke’s Democratic primary opponent last year. O’Neill Burke acknowledged the friction to us, but also expressed admiration for Preckwinkle’s administrative skills and professionalism. For the sake of the well-being of all Cook County residents, Preckwinkle should do her part to help O’Neill Burke modernize the office.
That returns us to the tragic killing of Officer Rivera, who’d been on the Chicago police force for four years and is survived by a young daughter. Police Superintendent Larry Snelling told reporters that Rivera had processed two guns she’d removed from Chicago’s streets on Thursday before yet another gun took her life that night.
O’Neill Burke pledged during her campaign to seek pretrial detention for anyone caught with an assault weapon, and that includes handguns with contraptions converting them to automatic firearms. She’s been true to her word. And anecdotally, she says, word is reaching the streets.
There’s no statistic that definitively captures the deterrent effect of believing consequences will be severe for violating gun laws, and O’Neill Burke doesn’t toot her own horn like other local politicians when it comes to the current improving crime stats. But she deserves her share of the credit.
Now Cook County should get her what she needs to be even more effective.
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