State's Attorney Foxx Pledges Greater Transparency As She Takes Office
CHICAGO (CBS) -- The new Cook County State's Attorney, Kim Foxx's, pledged to make the office more open – in many ways – than it has been before.
Foxx was sworn in Thursday during a ceremony at the Harold Washington Library Center in the Loop. She said she planned to spend the afternoon getting reacquainted with the office before her first full day as Cook County's top prosecutor on Friday.
She was an assistant state's attorney in Cook County from 2001 to 2013, when she became chief of staff to Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle.
Foxx said she's proud to rejoin the ranks of some of the best lawyers in the world, and she looks forward to working with the police, but she also pledged to restore trust in law enforcement.
"We cannot deal with the violence in our communities simply as a law enforcement effort. The community needs us, and we need them; and the obligation is on us to meet them where they are, and tell them that we hear them, we acknowledge them, and we owe what has happened to them," she said.
Foxx said that will mean having some hard and frank conversations, but it needs to happen.
"It's okay to say where we are, because we don't have to stay here," she said.
She has sworn to promote openness and equal justice more than her predecessor, Anita Alvarez. So when will people be able to see results in efforts to rebuild trust between law enforcement and the community?
"It's why I remind people that these are problems that have been decades in the making, and certainly there will be a concerted effort to shift policy, but changing culture takes time," she said. "So I'm optimistic that we'll be able to have programming, we'll have initiatives that people can see an immediate impact. The transparency piece alone will be a dramatic change from how the office operates now."
Foxx also previously pledged to make changes at the office in the wake of Alvarez's handling of the fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald.
Alvarez waited more than a year to charge Officer Jason Van Dyke with murder for shooting McDonald 16 times as the teen was walking away from police.
Foxx said she supports the idea of having special prosecutors investigate police-involved shootings, arguing assistant state's attorneys have a conflict of interest because of how closely they work with police on a day-to-day basis.
