Cook State's Attorney Foxx Blasts Mayor, As Men In Shootout Walk

CHICAGO — Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx is "mortified" for all the wrong reasons.

On Tuesday, she called a news conference to bash Chicago's mayor for "inappropriate" and "wrong" comments the day before about the still-lacking charges against men captured on camera — and then by the cops — after engaging in a shootout with people inside a house on the West Side.

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Lightfoot had answered a reporter's question about news reports that Foxx's office balked at charging five men who had been arrested, on the grounds that they were "mutual combatants," a legal term that in this case means shooters were willingly engaged in a gunfight.

"We really urge the state’s attorney herself to get personally involved, look at the evidence, and I believe that there are charges that can be brought at a minimum against the individuals who initiated the gunfire," the mayor said at an unrelated news conference Monday.

It was the mayoral finger-pointing in Foxx's direction — not the top prosecutor's decision to release of five men arrested after a shootout that left one man dead and another wounded — that compelled her rare public appearance before reporters to join in the blame game.

"This isn't a press conference that I intended to have," Foxx said. "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."

Such is the skewed view of what's important that folks in Cook County have come to expect from Foxx, who has repeatedly showed off her inability to ensure professionalism and transparency in the prosecutorial handling of high-profile criminal cases.

MORE ON PATCH: Kim Foxx Keeps Proving She's A Politician In Prosecutor's Clothes

Plenty Chicagoans, like me, believe Foxx should be mortified that her office allowed five men captured after a shootout to walk away from a police lockup without being charged with anything — not fleeing from police, not possession of the AK-47 found in one of the fleeing cars, and not under the latest version of Illinois' felony murder statute that attorneys told the Sun-Times would allow prosecutors to bring felony murder charges against people involved in certain crimes that lead to another person's death.

Instead, Foxx lashed out at the Area 5 investigative unit on the Northwest Side that she says leaked details about shootings and murders to reporters after her office initially declined to press felony charges in violent cases at least three times this year — including the West Side shootout between "mutual combatants" — that each led to negative news headlines and a barrage of criticism.

She criticized Chicago top cop David O. Brown for not having a comprehensive, data-based strategy for fighting violent crime.

Foxx even highlighted a handcrafted statistic that seemed to suggest that the Chicago Police Department should take the heat for spiking violence, for making arrests involving shootings only 18 percent of the time since she took office in 2016.

"This isn't me playing defensive, this is us in the state's attorney's office wanting to work with our law enforcement partners," she said. "Because when we know we have that many unsolved shootings, there is a sense that people can get away with murder with impunity."

What Foxx didn't mention was that that her office only approved felony charges on 64 percent of those cases, which resulted in a 78 percent conviction rate, a detail her office provided me after the state's attorney's grandstanding was done.

“We have to tell the truth about what’s happening here. We need to stop playing the political games and get to the work of healing in our communities," Foxx said. "We will continue to work with our law enforcement partners to build the strongest cases possible, not just for arrests but for conviction, to hold those who cause harm accountable. … However, we will do it with the Constitution and abiding by the civil rights that are afforded to all.”

The Tuesday sermon for the TV cameras — a fire-and-brimstone scolding, complete with a soliloquy on constitutional law — was an act of political self-preservation that failed to address the overwhelming public perception that her state's attorney's office has gone soft on charging shooters, murders and repeat gun offenders wreaking havoc in the streets of Chicago.

For that, Foxx should be mortified.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docuseries on CNN and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary "16 Shots."

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