, Foxx was a trailblazer in the national movement to elect so-called reform prosecutors who emphasized the need to change the criminal justice system and address its wrongs from within.
Asked why she isn’t running for a third term, Foxx said she promised her family that she would leave after two. She said she hasn’t “allowed myself the whimsy to think” of her next step. The moves have been both cheered and criticized, with Foxx, at times a lightning rod for controversy and nearly always central to conversations around criminal justice over the past nearly seven years.. She encouraged prosecutors in her office to read the American Bar Association admonition that their duty is to “seek justice, not merely to convict.” She has encouraged her staff to think about mitigation and rehabilitation and not lose sight of the bigger picture.
“It was so much about, ‘ooh, Jim Murphy doesn’t like Kim Foxx.’ But I was wondering when anyone’s going to ask, how I had to console our assistants who saw that happening,” Foxx said, particularly Black women in the office who witnessed it. “Couldn’t pin 2016 on me, I came in December,” Foxx said. “No one could say that Kim Foxx in 2016 was the reason that we had homicides in the city of Chicago.” Over the next three years, Foxx said, crime continued going down, recording double digit drops until the pandemic changed the national landscape.She noted that some of the opposition to her over the years was “just plain racist,” like a protest organized by the Fraternal Order of Police in front of her office that also drew hate groups.
She started to face more questions in 2020, Foxx said, when Lightfoot’s choice for police superintendent, David Brown, started blaming her for crime, a narrative she rejects, saying that non-fatal shooting arrest rates “were ridiculously low.” Years later, Foxx’s office dropped charges against 15 men who said they were framed by Watts and his crew, then in 2017 believed to be the first mass exoneration in Cook County history.By last year, Foxx’s office had agreed to throw out more than 200 convictions connected to Watts and his crew, part of a larger reckoning with convictions tied to disgraced Chicago police officers.
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