On March 15, the people in both Chicago and Cleveland achieved a victory by successfully ousting incumbent prosecutors who had sanctioned the ongoing murder of Black people in their cities. In Cleveland, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty, who refused to seek justice for the police murder of 12-year old Tamir Race, lost his primary re-election bid, while in Chicago Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez was soundly crushed by her opponent Kim Foxx.
In Chicago, Alvarez achieved notoriety for waiting over 400 days to charge killer cop Jason Van Dyke for the October, 2014 murder of Black teenager Laquan McDonald. Even then she only acted after her hand was forced by the the court-ordered release of the brutal dashcam video of McDonald’s killing.
In the large, militant and often spontaneous actions and protests that sprung up around the city in the wake of the video’s release, Alvarez, along with Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police Superintendent Gary McCarthy, became synonymous with the racist police system of brutality and oppression which rules the lives of so many Black and Brown people of the city.
And with good reason. Alvarez’s criminal negligence was certainly not isolated to her handling of McDonald’s murder. For years her office covered up police crimes and refused to seek justice for the overwhelmingly Black victims of cop terror. Between 2010 and 2015 90 people were shot down by Chicago cops. Alvarez filed zero murder charges during her tenure before being forced by overwhelming public pressure to finally bring charges against Van Dyke.
When Rahm Emanuel fired McCarthy as a way to deflect responsibility from the systemic issue of police terror, a common slogan at protests throughout the city became “One down, two to go.” Now, with two down, Emanuel sits directly in the movement’s cross hairs.
The campaign of resistance to Alvarez was initiated and led by the city’s Black youth who have risen up in the streets to fight against the racist violence committed by the police and enabled by the State’s Attorney’s office. In the days leading up to the election in Chicago groups knocked on doors, organized banner drops around the city and even arranged for a plane to fly a banner against Alvarez.
After the victory, the organization Assata’s Daughters, which led much of the campaign against Alvarez, celebrated her defeat while explicitly withholding support from her opponent, Kim Foxx. Their statement on the election reads in part:
“Terrorist police are a product of a system that devalues black life and promotes genocide in the black community. The system as it is will never justly favor black people. Mostly because elected officials are complicit with the anti-black institutions that have shaped this society since the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. ”
Under the capitalist political system, the role of the prosecutor is to protect police and maintain “law and order,” i.e.locking up children and the poor, especially those that are Black. While removing a State’s Attorney from office won’t change the fundamental fact that the next State’s Attorney will still find themselves at the head of the same apparatus of repression and incarceration, the ability for the movement to effectively fight back by winning electoral victories is a clear sign of its growing strength.
There’s power in being able to kick out officials who blatantly enable police crimes like Anita Alvarez and Tim McGinty. If that power is developed and realized, the people have it within them to not only change who their prosecutor is, but to change the “justice” system into a system that actually provides justice for the people.
