Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx announced Tuesday that she would not seek re-election next year as the top prosecutor for America’s second-most populous county, which is home to Chicago and several of its suburbs. The departure of Foxx, a prominent criminal justice reformer whose 2016 win made her the first Black woman to hold this post, is likely to set off a wide-open Democratic primary to replace her. Whoever wins that contest, which is scheduled to coincide with Illinois’ March presidential primary, should be the favorite in next year's general election for an office Republicans haven’t won since 1992.
Foxx was chief of staff to County Board President Toni Preckwinkle in 2015 when she decided to challenge the incumbent state’s attorney, Anita Alvarez, whom she'd previously worked for. Foxx faulted Alvarez as someone who “was very much needing to prove that she would be tough on crime, as opposed to thoughtful or smart on crime,” and received a boost early in her campaign when the county Democratic Party declined to take sides.
Alvarez’s standing took a huge hit later that year for her long delay in indicting a white Chicago police officer named Jason Van Dyke for the murder of Laquan McDonald, a Black teenager. Alvarez had waited until 13 months after McDonald’s death to bring those charges and only did so just hours before the court-ordered release of dashcam video depicting the crime. While Alvarez claimed she’d already decided to indict Van Dyke weeks earlier and denied she’d been involved in covering up the footage, the story became Foxx’s central argument for why a change was needed. (Van Dyke was found guilty of second-degree murder in 2019 and was freed halfway through his seven-year prison sentence.)
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