Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez has covered up police killings, condemned the innocent, and doomed children to the school-to-prison pipeline. But on Tuesday, Chicago area voters said that they’ve had enough.
Alvarez lost her bid for a third term to Kim Foxx, a former assistant state’s attorney and a candidate backed by activists from the Black Lives Matter movement. Activists turned the local race into a crucial battle to unseat the controversial top prosecutor who has mishandled cases involving police brutality and allowed miscarriages of justice against men and women of color in Chicago.
The controversy surrounding the shooting of Laquan McDonald was perhaps the most high-profile of Alvarez’s recent failures as state’s attorney. Despite evidence and dashcam footage that showed that the police officer shot McDonald 16 times, Alvarez covered up the incident for more than a year and did not bring charges until less than a day before the video was released to the public. And she still refuses to acknowledge her mistakes.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/03/15/3760660/bye-anita/
Alvarez lost her bid for a third term to Kim Foxx, a former assistant state’s attorney and a candidate backed by activists from the Black Lives Matter movement. Activists turned the local race into a crucial battle to unseat the controversial top prosecutor who has mishandled cases involving police brutality and allowed miscarriages of justice against men and women of color in Chicago.
The controversy surrounding the shooting of Laquan McDonald was perhaps the most high-profile of Alvarez’s recent failures as state’s attorney. Despite evidence and dashcam footage that showed that the police officer shot McDonald 16 times, Alvarez covered up the incident for more than a year and did not bring charges until less than a day before the video was released to the public. And she still refuses to acknowledge her mistakes.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/03/15/3760660/bye-anita/