O’Neill Burke focuses on experience, Fioretti on migrant crime as they vie for Cook County state’s attorney

As the Democratic nominee for Cook County state’s attorney, Eileen O’Neill Burke has the inside track to take over an office that hasn’t been led by a Republican in 28 years.

But Republican nominee Bob Fioretti — a former longtime Democrat and Chicago alderman — is leaning on some central GOP policy talking points in the apparent hope it will reverse his steep political odds with county voters.

Either candidates’ victory will bring a noticeable departure from the sometimes-contentious but unquestionably progressive reforms implemented by outgoing Democratic State’s Attorney Kim Foxx. But each is coming at that change from a different direction.

Fioretti is pledging to focus on cracking down on crimes committed by migrants and to ask lawmakers in Springfield to tweak provisions of the year-old SAFE-T Act — the bail reform legislation that has become a popular target of conservatives in recent elections — to put more discretion back in judges’ hands.

O’Neill Burke, meanwhile, has touted the importance of the SAFE-T Act and also plans to create a dedicated unit to defend Cook County Hospital against anti-abortion lawsuits and prepare charges to defend other local abortion providers related to picketing, noise violations or bomb threats.

In securing a razor-thin victory this spring over a Foxx-backed Clayton Harris III to become the Democratic nominee for state’s attorney, O’Neill Burke said at times that she’d take a tougher-on-crime stance than Foxx yet also embraced many of the outgoing top prosecutor’s reforms.

Now in the general election, O’Neill Burke is contrasting herself with Foxx critic Fioretti by focusing on her broader legal experience and stressing her plans to improve the office’s technology, training for young attorneys and boosting staffing retention.

‘I got a game plan’

“I have been in this system for 33 years. I have been on every side of the table: I’ve been a defense attorney, I’ve been a prosecutor, I’ve been a trial court judge, and I’ve been on the Appellate Court and that’s what’s needed right now … we need experience right now,” she said. “I got a game plan for almost every single aspect of the office.”

“Bob says a lot of things and I don’t really pay attention to a lot of it,” she said. “I haven’t heard a lot of what he’s going to do to make it better.”

Strictly on policy issues, O’Neill Burke and Fioretti do have some overlap. Both used the same quote in saying they would enforce “the law as written” if elected. The two also promised friendlier relationships with local police departments than those that existed while Foxx led the office, and both stressed they’d welcome back attorneys who left during Foxx’s tenure. Each also pledged to bulk up the unit dedicated to rooting out local government corruption and to reverse Foxx’s policy for when to charge retail theft as a felony, bringing the threshold back down to $300 from $1,000.

They’ve agreed even on key initiatives Foxx has championed. Both said they would maintain diversion and rehabilitation programs for men and women facing criminal charges and both also support Foxx’s unit dedicated to examining potential wrongful convictions.

During the primary election, the Cook County Democratic Party run by County Board President Toni Preckwinkle endorsed Harris, O’Neill Burke’s opponent. But the party organization has welcomed her since her victory and O’Neill Burke has increasingly paired some of her tough-on-crime talk with pledges to “get people back on track before they turn to violent crime.”

Party leaders, meanwhile, said O’Neill Burke won the primary because she was a good fundraiser and deftly appealed to the business community and those rattled by crime while also pledging to keep many lodestar Foxx reforms in place.

Rebranding himself as a Republican

Fioretti is a longtime civil rights attorney and former South Loop alderman who has run and lost several campaigns since leaving City Hall. After being remapped out of his City Council ward, he ran but finished near the bottom in both the 2015 and 2019 nonpartisan races for Chicago mayor. He ran as a Democrat for a seat in the Illinois Senate in 2016, for County Board president in 2018 and for state’s attorney in 2020, but never won one primary. He then left the Democratic Party and ran as a Republican, going up against Preckwinkle in the 2022 general election for County Board president. Again, he lost.

Chicago Board of Elections records show Fioretti has voted Democratic since 1990 but switched to Republican in 2022. Asked about his departure from the Democratic Party, Fioretti cited its current control “by a whole host of socialists,” and its retreat from “fiscal responsibility” and “family values.”

O’Neill Burke won endorsements during the primary of several moderate Democrats and also the head of the city’s largest union representing Chicago cops, John Catanzara, a supporter of former President and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Catanzara urged members to “hold their noses” and pull a Democratic primary ballot to support O’Neill Burke, adding that Fioretti’s chances of victory in November were slim.

The general election race has since been relatively quiet. There have been no debates or ad blitzes from either candidate. Nor have there been major endorsements, aside from the Rev. Jesse Jackson announcing his support for Fioretti over this past weekend. Jackson praised Fioretti’s “integrity as a community servant” and criticized O’Neill Burke’s prosecution of a young Black boy for murder, a conviction that was later overturned. The Tribune detailed the case during the primary .

Despite Catanzara’s support of O’Neill Burke during the primary, he and other FOP members last week demanded she commit to retrying Alexander Villa or lose their support. Villa was convicted of killing Chicago police Officer Clifton Lewis in 2011 but the conviction was vacated. A judge ordered a retrial, but Foxx’s office said it will not prosecute him again. Villa is slated to be released after Foxx’s office “discovered evidence that had not been previously or timely provided to the defense.” Catanzara said if O’Neill Burke did not commit to taking up the case again, she would lose any chance of the police union backing her.

O’Neill Burke spokeswoman Aviva Bowen described the FOP “conditioning a political endorsement on a charging decision” as “wildly inappropriate.” Bowen also noted that O’Neill Burke previously said Catanzara’s support during the primary was improper given the professional relationship between prosecutors and police.

In an interview with the Tribune Editorial Board last week, Fioretti did not commit to retrying the case. He said he wanted “to view the whole record, but if there’s an opening to charge him again, I will.”

SAFE-T Act is key issue

Whoever succeeds Foxx as state’s attorney, a key duty will be continued implementation of the pretrial changes included in the state’s SAFE-T Act, which went into effect last year. The year-old law eliminated the use of cash bonds to secure pretrial release and put the onus on prosecutors whether to push for defendants to be held in jail under a prescribed list of offenses.

O’Neill Burke, while saying she’s a SAFE-T Act supporter, has pledged to prosecute defendants accused of violent crime more forcefully. The office’s new policy, she said, would be to request detention “each and every time” an arrestee was found with an assault weapon, accused of threatening anyone with a weapon or involved in violent crime on the CTA. Such a change would likely boost the county jail population, a change O’Neill Burke said she received “no pushback” about when she discussed it with Sheriff Tom Dart.

Fioretti wants to see legislative changes made in Springfield to the SAFE-T Act that would give judges “more discretion,” he said. He did not offer examples of any specific tweaks he’d want to see other than making possession of a machine gun, or a gun converted to an automatic weapon, a detainable offense. According to the ACLU of Illinois, it already is.

Libertarian candidate Andrew Kopinski, a Norridge real estate attorney and accountant, is also on the ballot. He opposes the SAFE-T Act and said the state should have maintained some cash bail policies to deter shoplifting . Aside from a pledge not to prosecute those who fail to register their assault weapons under the state’s new ban, he has not publicly detailed other policy proposals.

Any top prosecutor would face an uphill battle to drastically change the law in the state legislature, which is controlled by a Democratic supermajority.

Though Fioretti flyers read “If Kim Foxx did it, Bob will do the opposite,” he told the Tribune he intends to maintain Foxx’s oft-touted conviction integrity unit as well as diversion programs for youths, veterans and those with drug or mental health issues. So would O’Neill Burke, she said. The conviction integrity unit investigates innocence claims and recommends policy changes to the state’s attorney. Under Foxx, the office has led to at least 250 cases being overturned.

‘My philosophy has not changed’

Fioretti is no stranger to wrongful convictions. As an attorney, he counts the case of LaFonso Rollins, wrongly imprisoned for rape, as one of his most important. Rollins was exonerated in 2004 and won a $9 million city settlement .

“My philosophy has not changed. When I was in the City Council I stood up and commended police officers every meeting,” he said, suggesting he would work with the superintendent to address “the 0.1% and 1%” of officers “that may make mistakes.”

The two do diverge on a key issue splitting their political parties — immigration.

On his website, Fioretti said the needs of illegal immigrants have been put “ahead of citizens in historically disenfranchised communities” and he pledged to cooperate with federal law enforcement “to remove violent illegal alien criminals from our streets and neighborhoods.”

“I’m going to make sure that we’re working with our federal officials on who’s who and what’s what,” Fioretti told the Tribune.

How that would be put into practice, however, remains unclear.

County policy bars federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from having access to immigrants in county custody or using county facilities for interviews or other purposes. The sheriff is also required to decline ICE requests to detain individuals unless the county is reimbursed for holding those individuals for extra days. The state’s attorney’s office “has no involvement” with federal ICE detainers, Foxx spokeswoman Eugenia Orr told the Tribune in an email.

While he told the Tribune he supported the Republican ticket, Fioretti also said he was “squishy” in his support for Trump. Still, Fioretti’s immigration policy echoes some Trump talking points, including the suggestion that migrants’ presence in Chicago was fueling an increase in human trafficking, drug and gun crimes.

But a Tribune analysis of Chicago crime data from the first 19 months of the migrant crisis found most CPD arrests of individuals born in Venezuela were nonviolent and often involved driving violations, shoplifting, or leaving a business without paying. The analysis found there were 21 arrests of native Venezuelans for felonies involving violence and most involved allegations of violence against other migrants or police officers attempting to arrest them.

Asked whether he supported Trump’s promise to deport millions of migrants, Fioretti told the Tribune, “I have no idea what mass deportation means — picking up everybody and deporting them? I think that has a long way to be refined … but we need to look at those,” he said, later alluding that some migrants living in city shelters “have been registered to vote.”

O’Neill Burke said she would prosecute criminals across the board. She added she was more troubled by members of the migrant community being victimized through child labor, wage theft and domestic violence.

“What I am concerned about is our lack of resources in Spanish, language interpreters,” she said, as well as the slow processing of orders of protection involving domestic abuse.

Doubling down on diversion programs

A key measure of her success if elected, O’Neill Burke said, would be whether positions for victim witness coordinators, attorneys and paralegals were fully staffed in the state’s attorney’s office.

Staffing has increased in the office since February, when much of O’Neill Burke’s criticism during the primary race focused on attrition in the office. Foxx has hired 55 assistant state’s attorneys, bringing ASA staffing to 804. While administrative staffing has dropped slightly, from 431 to 426, the office has added six investigators, bringing the total up to 118, Orr said.

O’Neill Burke also said voters could hold her accountable for the county’s crime rate going down, but her campaign did not specify which crimes were a reasonable metric.

“I think if we have a downturn in crime, then we’re successful. But we’re not going to measure success on how many people we lock up, we’re going to measure success on how many people we get turned around,” she said, promising to “double down” on diversion programs and pilot new juvenile pretrial programs to ensure defendants are occupied with community programming or job training after school.

“Tons of” community organizations are “excited about the possibility” of partnering for those programs, she said.

Key crime rates such as murder and shootings have already dropped year to date in Chicago. Murders are down 8% compared with this time last year and 30% compared with 2021, according to Chicago Police Department data. Shooting incidents are down 5% compared with this time last year and 34% compared with 2021. Car thefts are down 24% compared with last year, but up 130% compared with 2021, which was the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.