Cook County’s New States Attorney

There’s a profile of the new Cook County States Attorney, Eileen O’Neill Burke, by Ted C. Fishman at Chicago:

A ew days before Eileen O’Neill Burke would be elected the new Cook County state’s attorney, the top prosecutor in a jurisdiction of 5.1 million people, she tells me a story about her great-grandparents. We’re sitting in her campaign office on North Dearborn Street, where O’Neill Burke has laid out 15 old family photos on an otherwise bare table. Among them are antique studio portraits of her forebears, a snapshot of her as a young girl with her older brother outside their home in Edgebrook, and a recent picture of her with her lawyer husband, John, and their four children, in their teens and early 20s, all beaming. Two of O’Neill Burke’s top staffers crane over the table to see the photos for the first time.

Modern political strategies put family histories and personal struggles at the center of campaigns?—?the more bittersweet, the better. Yet O’Neill Burke did not run on her personal story. For over a year in candidate mode, she rarely mentioned the people or chapters that forged her morals or mettle. Instead, her pitch was her record as a lauded judge and her outrage over a justice system that she argued was enabling too much theft and violent crime. The photos, though, reveal another wellspring for her yearnings to help the region: her own family’s century-and-a-half history in Chicago. For O’Neill Burke, 59, that history hardly feels distant. It lives on inside her. She relates it with the emotional intensity of someone recapping her own story of love and heartache.

I wish her well. Her experience as an appellate court judge should serve her well in dealing with the judiciary. As I’ve said before one of the major improvements we need is for the police, the public prosecutors, and the judges all to be pulling in the same direction. The last states attorney clearly would have preferred the title “Public Defender at Large”. Rescinding Kim Foxx’s directive not to prosecute retail thefts under $1,000 as felonies is a step in the right direction.

I wish the article had expanded on what SA O’Neill Burke sees as “root causes”. I don’t think that the root causes of crime in Cook County are guns, poverty, race, or racism. The real root cause is gangs and that is downstream from dysfunction in black urban society. Sixty years ago that was probably an outcome of racism but, well, that was sixty years ago and the dysfunction remains. I don’t think addressing that is within the states attorney’s scope.

But enforcing the law is as is ensuring that the police department understands that the law should be enforced and convincing judges that the law should be enforced.

3 comments… add one
  • bob sykes Link

    The root cause is black genetics, which is incurable.

  • Unlikely since, based on the FBI’s statistics, the homicide rates for rural blacks and rural whites are about the same and both are lower than the homicide rate for urban blacks. That suggests a cultural origin of some sort. I think the source is the cultural pattern that came to prevail among urban blacks: black men were unable to secure jobs that would allow them to support a family, black women could secure such jobs, that plus “War on Poverty” reforms made men in the household a burden on families, absent families black men needed an alternative support structure, and that was provided by gangs.

  • Grey Shambler Link

    It is very, very difficult to see through the culture to the man.
    I believe discrimination and racism and Jim Crow are responsible for poverty, but are not the root causes of crime, nor does poverty cause crime, except perhaps pilferage.
    It’s the culture of the South freed from responsibility by the welfare programs of the’60’s and the development of gangs which is quite natural for unattached young men. Beginning as just cousins or friends and growing from there.
    They don’t want or need information or advice from the sources the rest of us rely on, theirs is a different world with different rules and customs, we can do little more than hire police and build our prisons.
    Interesting blog here I’ve linked, forgive my memory if I got it right here.

    https://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/?m=1

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