“On Monday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot and five West Side aldermen sent a letter to Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx asking her to reconsider the decision not to bring felony charges. ‘Giving these kinds of violent offenders a pass when their crime is fully captured on video and with police on the scene is simply unacceptable,’ they wrote. Amen to that.”

“I cannot remember a time in my lifetime that it has been as violent as it is right now. … Most people I know feel that our city is out of control when it comes to safety,” said Far North Side Ald. Harry Osterman.

Griffin said there is still time for Chicago and the state to reverse course, citing solutions he has proposed before. They include reforming the city’s pension system, beefing up law enforcement and improving the city’s schools. Griffin’s full remarks at the Economic Club of Chicago are linked here.

An April 2019 audit by the office of Inspector General Joseph Ferguson determined the city’s gang databases were a “deeply flawed collection of gang data, with poor quality controls and inadequate protections for procedural rights.” A follow-up audit released in March found that the Chicago Police Department “continues to collect and rely upon data that it has acknowledged is seriously flawed.”

Crime is out of control in Chicago, Griffin said, and political leaders are doing little to address it. “It is a disgrace that our governor won’t insert himself into the challenge of addressing crime in our city…He says, ‘It won’t look good for there to be men and women on Michigan Avenue with assault weapons,'” Griffin said. (Pritzker’s chief of staff, Anne Caprara, tweeted that she was on that call and the governor “never said that.”) Griffin said today: “If that saves the life of a child, I don’t care.” Pritzker’s office responded: “Ken Griffin

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx said, “I don’t play politics. We do prosecutions. And it’s why we do our best to not engage in public conversations about cases because we recognize that as tragic and horrific as these incidents are, that if we want to see criminal justice and accountability, we do that in the courtroom.”

“But we really urge the State’s Attorney herself to get personally involved, look at the evidence, and either that there can be charges that can be brought at a minimum against the individuals who initiated the gunfire,” Mayor Lightfoot said. “…if they do not feel like the criminal justice system is going to hold them accountable, we’re going to see a level of brazenness that will send this city into chaos. And we cannot let that happen. We simply cannot let that happen.”

“No injuries were reported in the shooting, but that will likely do little to reduce the embarrassment for Lightfoot and Brown who are struggling to convince Chicagoans that they have a handle on the city’s violence.”

The tax breaks don’t allow “businesses to open and create jobs — and provide services and amenities — that the residents in these communities need,” said Tonya Trice, executive director of the South Shore Chamber of Commerce.

“We’re still in the pandemic, but when things were really, really slow, a lot of production of gas kind of was scaled back,” said David Kolata, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board.

Mark Konkol: “It only takes a quick search of campaign finance records to see Preckwinkle’s connections to the corrupt Democratic Party status-quo span decades.”

The police report acknowledged that victims of the shootout (more than 70 shell casings were found) weren’t cooperating with investigators. But the report also framed the state’s attorney’s office’s decision to decline charges in a different light: “Mutual combatants was cited as the reason for the rejection.” Mutual combat is a legal term used to define a fight or struggle that two parties willingly engage in.