West Cook News

Riverside Public Safety Director and Police Chief Matt Buckley was recently reminded of why he supports House Bill 4176.

“The reason I’m speaking on this is we recently had a case where the offense did not occur here in Riverside but it touched our town,” Buckley said at a press conference held earlier this month addressing the issue. “This case took place back on Aug. 15, where two young girls were shot while being put in the backseat of their car by their mother. They were 6 and 7 years old. The 7-year-old actually succumbed to the injuries. There were 29 shots that were fired. They arrested the alleged offender here in Riverside, at which time they looked at the state's attorney to approve felony charges. The state’s attorney refused and advised them that they needed to CI the case, which means continuing the investigation because the state’s attorney did not believe they had clear and convincing evidence.”

HB 4176 seeks to amend the Counties Code to stipulate that in a criminal investigation in counties in excess of 3 million people, a law enforcement agency in the jurisdiction of the alleged crime would have the authority to override a State’s Attorney’s decision not to file felony charges or designate the case as a continuing investigation if the evidence supporting such a course of action is clear and convincing and the case is filed with the clerk of the circuit court.

The measure further establishes if the court determines that a law enforcement agency's decision to override is based on sound reasoning, “the State's Attorney must proceed with a preliminary examination or seek an indictment by grand jury within 30 days from the date the suspect is taken into custody.

“When evidence supports the case and it's clear and convincing evidence, we need to file the charges and those offenders need to be brought into court and let the judicial system do its work to actually determine whether they’re going to be held on bond or charged or released,” Buckley said.

In the case of the two young girls who were shot, he later said the officers who sought to file charges “were told by the State's Attorney's office that if they did that the case would be dropped as soon as they brought it into court. So, at the end of the day, this case was CI-ed. The offender was brought back to Riverside and released to his residence here in Riverside. He was re-arrested last week on Oct. 13 and charged with the murder of the 7-year-old girl. By having a person who is charged with a homicide or accused of a homicide, the court needs to do their job to make sure that this person is no longer a danger to our society.”

A recent Chicago Tribune analysis concluded that the number of felony case charges under Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx have dropped since she replaced former State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, including for such serious offenses as murder, attacks on police officers and sex crimes.

Data shows over the last three years, Foxx’s office moved to drop all charges against 29.9% of felony defendants, compared to a rate by Alvarez of just 19.4% during the final three years of her tenure. A total of 25,183 people had their felony cases dismissed under Foxx through November 2019, up from 18,694 for a similar period under Alvarez.

Foxx was ushered into office on the strength of a reform-minded platform that included a pledge to reduce the population of Cook County Jail. While not disputing many of the details outlined in the Tribune report, Foxx argues the numbers give an incomplete picture of her commitment to keeping the public safe.

“It is always eye-opening to be able to look at our own data and compare it to my predecessor’s past,” she said. “I can’t reconcile what her decision-making was, and how they chose to (dismiss) cases in the past. But I will say that this administration has been clear that our focus would be on violent crime and making sure that our resources and attention would go to addressing violent crime.”