Tag: Cook County

  • New Chicago Mayor Pledges Dedication To Revolutionary Technique, Asks For Cohesion

    CHICAGO (AP) — Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson started his first time period of place of job Monday, asking Chicagoans to put aside deep variations, confront demanding situations in combination and construct “a town that works for everybody.”

    Johnson, 47, whose victory was once touted through progressives as proof that daring stances result in victory, should in an instant confront an inflow of migrants in determined want of refuge, drive to construct enhance amongst skeptical industry leaders, and summer time months that traditionally deliver a spike in violent crime. His first time period main the country’s third-largest town will take a look at the previous union organizer’s skill to show his proposals into answers for cussed issues worsened through the coronavirus pandemic, together with public protection, financial enlargement and housing affordability.

    “Let’s display the arena, Chicago, the place our center is,” Johnson stated in his inaugural cope with prior to a cheering crowd. “Let’s construct a Chicago that’s the financial surprise of our the state, the Midwest and this country. Let’s construct a Chicago that suggests our financial system will get to develop through rerouting the rivers of prosperity to the bottom of disinvestment. In order that nobody is going thirsty.”

    The previous organizer for the Chicago Lecturers Union was once little recognized when he entered the mayoral race in 2022 and has no revel in inside town govt. However the two-term Cook dinner County commissioner regularly climbed atop a crowded box with the enhance of the influential union he as soon as labored for, endorsements from Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and native progressives to knock off the incumbent mayor, Lori Lightfoot, and win a tricky runoff in April.

    Looking to attraction to those that didn’t again him within the election, he has stocked his transition staff with acquainted names from Chicago firms and philanthropies beside leaders of arranged exertions and innovative teams. He decided on a veteran of Chicago’s emergency control company as his leader of workforce and a retired police commander who’s widespread amongst rank-and-file officials as meantime chief of the Chicago Police Division.

    There may be little question that public protection will stay town’s most sensible worry and Johnson’s reaction will form his dating with industry leaders, elected officers, his innovative activist base and citizens of each Chicago group.

    “A secure Chicago approach a secure Chicago for all, it doesn’t matter what you appear to be, who you’re keen on, or the place you are living,” Johnson stated Monday, promising a method rooted in additional psychological well being care, violence prevention techniques and police duty.

    Brandon Johnson swears in as Chicago's 57th mayor at UIC's Credit Union One Arena in Chicago, Illinois, United States on May 15, 2023.
    Brandon Johnson swears in as Chicago’s 57th mayor at UIC’s Credit score Union One Area in Chicago, Illinois, United States on Would possibly 15, 2023.

    Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu Company by way of Getty Photographs

    Asiaha Butler, co-founder of the Resident Affiliation of Higher Englewood at the South Facet, stated she hopes Johnson remains dedicated to his wholesale option to crime — and that Chicagoans give it a possibility to make a distinction. Butler stated making improvements to protection on her block took as much as 15 years of cooperation with neighbors and different neighborhood teams.

    “Realizing the depression that our town once in a while faces, it’ll take a little time to take that cloud away,” Butler stated. “I wouldn’t put somebody as much as that process in a single time period.”

    Chicago has a better per-capita murder charge than New York or Los Angeles, however the newest federal knowledge presentations it’s not up to different Midwestern towns, akin to St. Louis and Detroit. Nonetheless, the choice of homicides in Chicago hit a 25-year top in 2021 with 804, consistent with the Chicago Police Division.

    That quantity diminished ultimate 12 months whilst different crimes, akin to carjackings and robberies, larger.

    Chicago industry leaders overwhelmingly counseled Johnson’s opponent, former Chicago colleges CEO Paul Vallas, most often swayed through his pitch to beef up policing, or Johnson’s quite a lot of tax proposals affecting huge corporations and the rich.

    The mayoral race was once ruled through questions of easy methods to cope with crime, and Johnson argued {that a} policing-first method has failed.

    As a substitute, he proposed larger psychological well being remedy, hiring extra detectives, increasing adolescence jobs techniques and extending taxes at the sale of houses over $1 million to enhance extra inexpensive housing. Johnson may even have the general say on naming town’s subsequent police superintendent, although for the primary time an appointed citizen fee will choose 3 finalists.

    Andrea Sáenz, president and CEO of the Chicago Group Consider basis, stated she’s hopeful that Johnson can deliver philanthropies, companies, police and activists in combination to create a wide-ranging approach to save you violence now and chip away on the prerequisites that allow it flourish.

    “It seems like this can be a second — the instant — to have the ones conversations, for a mayor to deliver everyone to the desk,” Sáenz stated.

    Johnson has proven no signal of backing clear of his marketing campaign methods. When violence broke out as teenagers flooded Chicago’s downtown streets in mid-April, he issued a observation asking that individuals now not “demonize adolescence who’ve in a different way been starved of alternatives in their very own communities.”

    Paying for his marketing campaign guarantees, together with the general public protection reaction, hinges on plenty of tax will increase aimed toward top earners and big corporations more likely to submit a political combat. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, the state’s maximum influential Democrat, declined to again Johnson’s proposal to tax monetary transactions, which will require sign-off from state lawmakers.

    Johnson could also be taking up a rising migrant disaster. Chicago is one of the U.S. towns already suffering to offer refuge and different lend a hand to loads strolling back from the southern border, with households snoozing in police station lobbies. The go with the flow of arrivals is predicted to extend now that pandemic-era restrictions on migrant crossings have ended.

    Johnson stated Monday that he’s dedicated to welcoming all who arrive right here, announcing the energy of a town will depend on the way it treats the susceptible. He supplied no new information about his management’s technique.

    Illinois state Rep. Kam Buckner, a Chicago Democrat who additionally ran for mayor, stated Johnson should use the similar technique that received him the mayor’s place of job to succeed in his many priorities.

    “What Lori Lightfoot discovered is that during Chicago, your defenders can in no time develop into your detractors,” Buckner stated. “We would like our leaders to be original, have conversations with us concerning the long term. So long as he continues to do this, I feel folks will give him a possibility.”

  • Chicago Prosecutor Shedding R. Kelly Intercourse Abuse Fees

    CHICAGO (AP) — A Chicago prosecutor mentioned Monday that she’s losing sex-abuse fees in opposition to singer R. Kelly, following federal convictions in two courts that make certain the disgraced R&B celebrity might be locked up for many years.

    Prepare dinner County State’s Lawyer Kim Foxx introduced the verdict an afternoon forward of a court docket listening to associated with state fees accusing him of sexually abusing 4 other people, 3 of whom had been minors.

    Since Kelly used to be indicted in Prepare dinner County in 2019, federal juries in Chicago and New York have convicted him of a raft of crimes, together with kid pornography, enticement, racketeering and intercourse trafficking associated with allegations that he victimized girls and women.

    Kelly, born Robert Sylvester Kelly, is serving a 30-year jail sentence within the New York case and awaits sentencing on Feb. 23 in Chicago federal court docket. He’s interesting the ones convictions. In response to the New York sentence on my own, the 56-year-old gained’t be eligible for free up till he’s round 80.

    Any other sexual-misconduct case is pending in Hennepin County, Minnesota, the place the Grammy Award-winner faces solicitation fees. That case, too, has been on dangle whilst the federal instances performed out. Minnesota prosecutors haven’t mentioned whether or not they nonetheless intend to take Kelly to trial.

    Prosecutors occasionally make a choice to move forward with extra trials out of a priority that convictions in different places may well be reversed all the way through appeals. They see a possibility for extra convictions as insurance coverage.

    Identified for his wreck hit “I Consider I Can Fly” and for sex-infused songs corresponding to “Bump n’ Grind,” Kelly bought thousands and thousands of albums even after allegations about his abuse of younger women started circulating publicly within the Nineties. He beat kid pornography fees in Chicago in 2008, when a jury acquitted him.

    Standard outrage over Kelly’s sexual misconduct didn’t emerge till the #MeToo reckoning and the discharge of the Lifetime docuseries “Surviving R. Kelly.”

    After that collection aired in early 2019, Foxx pleaded with accusers to return ahead in order that prosecutors may just pursue fees. She introduced the Prepare dinner County indictment months sooner than the federal instances in New York and Chicago. Foxx’s administrative center alleged he time and again sought out women for intercourse, together with one he encountered at her sixteenth birthday celebration and some other who met the R&B celebrity whilst he used to be on trial in 2008.

    Federal prosecutors in New York informed jurors at his 2021 trial that Kelly used his entourage of managers and aides to fulfill women and stay them obedient, an operation that prosecutors mentioned amounted to a felony endeavor.

    Final yr, prosecutors at Kelly’s federal trial in Chicago portrayed him as a grasp manipulator who used his reputation and wealth to reel in star-struck enthusiasts, a few of them minors, to sexually abuse then discard them. 4 accusers testified .

    Whilst prosecutors if that’s the case gained convictions on six of the 13 counts in opposition to him if that’s the case, the federal government misplaced the marquee rely — that Kelly and his then-business supervisor effectively rigged his 2008 kid pornography trial.

    Want assist? Seek advice from RAINN’s Nationwide Sexual Attack On-line Hotline or the Nationwide Sexual Violence Useful resource Middle’s site.