Chicago Alderman Howard Brookins, Jr., wants to change the culture of the Cook County State's Attorney's Office by focusing on integrity and efficiency.
Brookins is currently serving his second term as alderman of the South Side ward, where he has focused largely on crime and police brutality. His father is former state Sen. Howard Brookins.
Brookins also has a background in the courtroom. He has served as an assistant state's attorney, assistant public defender and special assistant Attorney General over the years.
Windy City Times: Let's talk a little about some of the key issues. One of the main issues in this race is tackling corruption. It looks like you're not just looking at corruption within law enforcement, but also the state's attorney's office?
Howard Brookins: Wherever we find it, we need to step up and prosecute it. That means city hall, county government, local municipalities, the state's attorneys themselves, whether there may be a conflict of interest—those cases need to be referred over to an independent agency who can investigate those types of things. We cannot continue to rely on the federal government to prosecute corruption. They take very few cases, number one. The State's Attorney's Office is by far and away the largest law firm in the state of Illinois, with more than 900 attorneys. They have access to more than 30,000 law enforcement officials. … To say that we don't have enough resources to do this is one disingenuous. I believe they have squandered some of the resources, and not thought of approaches to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of the office.
Specifically, one of the things I point to is they still do things the old-fashioned way at the State's Attorney's Office: pen and paper, three-by-five index cards to write notes and dates down, so on and so forth. That's horse-and-buggy stuff. We should have long since gone to computer modernization to keep docket information together, but also so that we can cross reference various other types of information such as police reports, etc.
WCT: So, you need to make things more efficient?
HB: Exactly. There was a story in the papers … about when one of the assistant state's attorneys was riding along with a police officer who had been celebrated as one of the best police officers, and decorated by MADD and all these other agencies because he had written tickets for DUIs. Then, they found out he was doing the information wrong, so they had to dismiss all of these more than 150 cases, and they were reviewing other cases that he had written. If these police reports were put together and put in a form where you could analyze data of various police officers, they could have seen this pattern long before it got to that position.
WCT: What are some of the plans that you propose that would help boost the public's opinion, not only in law enforcement, but just the justice system in general?
HB: I think a lot of what public officials do is symbolic. You have to change the tide of the culture of the State's Attorney's Office. But, if we put it out there that these are our priorities, this is what we're going to do: We are going to prosecute anybody who is found in violation of the law, regardless of political affiliation, regardless to what side of town and what side of the tracks they come from. We make it our policy to go out there and do that. I think that the message will be sent from top to bottom, and people will start having faith in the system again. These guys are playing politics with whom they prosecute and who they don't. If there is public pressure to prosecute somebody, they do it. When there is not public pressure, they don't. I think everybody's life is equal and everybody deserves fair treatment. … I don't think that has been done with respect to the biggest profile cases. … People have lost faith that the government is actually working and the justice system is blind and balanced. They believe the lady is peeking and the scale is off [ laughs ] .
WCT: As alderman of the 21st Ward, you've probably seen the impact the State's Attorney's office can have on people.
HB: Absolutely. I think all African Americans, no matter where you live in the city of Chicago, have felt it. What I mean by that is, as an African American, and especially as an African-American male, you can get racially profiled no matter what state you are in. If it can happen to [ US. Rep. ] Danny Davis, then it can happen to anybody. More importantly, we've seen the impact of people who are reluctant to get involved, come forward, testify when they see crimes, come forward and tell the police and the State's Attorney's Office when they are victims of crime.
… The other point is we need law enforcement to be credible and believed by the mass public when they go to court and raise their hand and testify in these thousands of cases that occur every year. … People don't have the faith and belief in the police that they once did. I'm not on a witch hunt. Some of my opponents have tried to shade me as being anti-police. I think because we have allowed these few bad apples to get away with this unchecked, this has tarnished the reputation of all of the police officers out there.
WCT: Two of your opponents are higher-ups within the State's Attorney's Office. What do you think you can bring to table that they can't?
HB: I think they haven't been able to see the forest but for the trees. … Early on in our first debates, they thought we were crazy when we would talk about people who have a distrust of law enforcement and the State's Attorney's Office. Since they've been on the campaign trail, and they are hearing it from ministers and regular people, they now know that there is a large segment of society and of Chicago and Cook County where I was telling the truth, and they are now finding that out. I think they've been in the forest so long that they don't see the trees. It's part of the problem. There needs to be a fresh and different perspective. They believe that the way you resolve these problems is if you throw more money at it. I'm not convinced that they are effectively using the resources they have.
… When I was a kid and I would go to my pediatrician, she would treat me, she would look in my nose, ears and throat, ask me all the pertinent questions, she would weigh me, do everything and give me the shot. Nowadays, there is a nurse, nurse practitioner … that does the heavy lifting. They get all of that done and checked and then the doctor will come in for five or 10 minutes and then go on to the next patient. That way, they can better utilize and make more efficient their time. Well, major law firms have long since gone to that model. We use paralegals and other professionals that may be abstracting depositions, that may be putting files in order, sending out subpoenas, setting up dates, there are a variety of things paralegals can do that you don't need an attorney to do. Well, in the courtrooms throughout this county, they have three attorneys in the overwhelming majority of these courtrooms. One of the attorneys ends up most of their day doing administrative work.
… By the time you get to a felony courtroom, you've been in the office maybe five or six years, you're making $60-70,000 a year. If you're having this person essentially do clerical work, why don't you hire somebody, a paralegal at maybe $45,000 or $40,000 … to sit there are do those things, and then we can utilize the attorney on stuff that only an attorney can do. … I think there is some efficiency that we are not capturing out there in this particular office. I think the focus has been misplaced for too long.
I think some of the overcrowding in our jails has been the way they decide to prosecute too many people. … All I'm saying is that we need to be smarter on our prosecution, which will alleviate some of the jail overcrowding because we will be putting cases in the system when we are ready to put them in the system, and not when the defense is ready for them to be in the system.
WCT: Do you have any experience working with or on behalf of the LGBT community, and also how will any of your ideas for change benefit our community?
HB: The short answer is no, I have not worked directly in the gay, lesbian bisexual and transgender community, but I have talked to [ Alderman ] Tom Tunney a lot and supported him in the various things he has done in city council as far as the gay and lesbian community is concerned. But we share common experiences. African-American men and the gay and lesbian community have been a convenient target. I have been racially profiled and arrested by the police. … I'm going to send a strong message when I'm elected that we're not going to tolerate that behavior by police officers by disrespecting people, by picking on them because they are gay or so on and so forth. ... We're going to treat everybody equally and there is going to be justice and fairness for everybody, whether you happen to get arrested in Skokie or Arlington Heights and go to the courthouse in Rolling Meadows, or if you get arrested in Chicago or Markham and Maywood and go to the courthouses in Markham and Maywood. There are no set policies that each of the state's attorneys offices are following from courthouse to courthouse and from town to town and that has to stop.
We believe that part of the other problem of this office is that there no diversity. Black and white is one thing, and Hispanic. But there is no diversity of thought in this office. Everybody is group thinking, and that leads to the same similar results to what we had in the system, as the Tribune pointed out, that African-American men are 58 times more likely to be prosecuted for drug offenses because we have the same people doing the same things and expecting a different result.
Hopefully, you watched The Andy Griffith Show. It is like our approach to stopping drugs and violence in our community is to continuously arrest and prosecute Otis, the town drunk. We don't spend the energy to go after the true root of the problem by doing targeted, long-range investigations. We don't target the people who are bringing the grosses of illegal guns in our community to stop this violence. We pick on one or two businessmen who have a gun in their car because they have a business in a rough part of town. … We need to stop the illegal guns and concentrate on those who are apt to commit violence in our community. I don't think we've been doing that.
