“What a great day!”
That was how Eileen O’Neill Burke began her brief address Monday after being sworn in as Cook County’s new state’s attorney.
We agree.
For a city and region that in recent times have felt chaotic and leaderless, the confidence that O’Nell Burke exuded as she began her four-year term was liberating indeed.
She reminded Chicagoans of who we are. “We have unparalleled opportunities here,” she said. “We have world-class universities, we have infrastructure, we even have a fresh water supply. We are primed to boom.”
“But,” she said, “we are being overshadowed by crime right now.”
Chicago has more than one problem holding back its progress, but lack of public safety to our minds is at the top of the list. So many other woes emanate from that source, including an economy that’s stuck in the mud and a stagnant-to-declining population.
Spend some time talking to O’Neill Burke, as we did more than once, and you walk away convinced she means business when it comes to representing victims of crime and making violent criminals pay for the terrors they inflict on this city.
“We have war-zone numbers of people being wounded by gun violence right now,” she said Monday. “Right now we have a mass shooting on a regular basis. We are becoming numb to the numbers. I don’t want to become numb. I want to do something about it.”
As if to underscore O’Neill Burke’s point, just a few hours after she spoke a mass shooting at a home in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood on the city’s Southwest Side killed three and injured five. The shooter or shooters were still at large as of this writing.
O’Neill Burke says the state’s assault-weapons ban is a key tool for prosecutors. Under her leadership, the state’s attorney’s office will ask judges to detain anyone charged with possession of an assault weapon or a handgun equipped with a “switch” to convert it to a machine gun.
That won the approval of Chicago police Superintendent Larry Snelling in a news release O’Neill Burke issued upon taking office; he said her policy “would help keep people safer in every neighborhood.”
That includes his officers. It was just a little over two weeks ago that Chicago mourned the loss of Officer Enrique Martinez, the 26-year-old native Chicagoan shot to death on Nov. 4 in a hail of bullets from a converted handgun during a South Side traffic stop.
In that same release, O’Neill Burke provided an extensive list of other offenses for which prosecutors in her office will press for incarceration while those accused await trial, including “any domestic violence-related, stalking or sex offense where the offender used or possessed a weapon.”
Again, Chicago recently has experienced searing tragedy due to domestic violence. Last month, Lacramioara Beldie, 54, was stabbed to death by her estranged husband, who had choked her and attempted to kidnap her just six weeks before. The judge who in October had rejected prosecutors’ request to imprison Beldie while he awaited trial no longer is hearing domestic violence cases per the order of Cook County Chief Judge Tim Evans.
Evans, one of the region’s most vocal advocates for progressive criminal justice reform, seems now to understand that the public is fed up with policies that leave too many dangerous people walking the streets after they’re charged with a violent crime. Speaking specifically about domestic violence after swearing in newly elected Cook County judges, Evans on Monday told ABC-7, “There are gaps in the system that I hope we can work on with the incoming state’s attorney.”
O’Neill Burke’s solution to those “gaps” is clear: Those charged with committing violent crimes will be presumed dangerous, and her office will be asking Evans’ judges to protect the public from them while their cases are adjudicated. How will Evans respond? Will he wait for more tragedies like Beldie’s killing to take action, judge by judge? Or, will he nod to the public’s desire, reflected in O’Neill Burke’s election, for a tougher approach to violent crime?
Under the landmark SAFE-T Act, the 2021 law (amended in 2022) that ended cash bail in Illinois, prosecutors and judges play huge roles in keeping dangerous people off the streets as they await trial. A judge can’t order a defendant detained if prosecutors don’t first make the request. And then, when prosecutors do ask for detention, judges have to agree. Any mistake from either party can lead to tragedy.
The system can’t be foolproof. As Evans noted in his interview, “Humans are running the system,” and they aren’t perfect. But we surely can do a better job of protecting the public than we have been doing.
What does doing a better job constitute? It means putting the concerns of victims before those of accused criminals (or paroled criminals, for that matter); it means displaying zero tolerance for the carrying or use of illegal weapons; it means protecting women when they’re threatened by their partners or ex-partners.
In those respects and more, Eileen O’Neill Burke has started to check all of the right boxes.
Just as importantly, she also has chosen to begin her new job by embracing and celebrating what has made Chicago great in the past and what is present in the city’s fiber to make it so again.
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