THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

Sufferdin has been an attorney for nearly 30 year. He was first elected to become a commissioner in 2002. This self-described independent voice of the board and reformer has focused largely on issues such as ridding local government of corruption and patronage.

In addition, he is a gambling lobbyist, , and has worked with a number of non-profits.

Windy City Times: First of all, what has prepared you to be State's Attorney?

Larry Suffredin: The three things that I think you need to be a good state's attorney are, one, you need to be an independent person. I'd say [ former Attorney General ] Alberto Gonzalez proved that if you aren't, you can subvert the federal justice system. You also need somebody with broad-based experience. The third thing is you need somebody who can apply their independence and experience in a fair manner to all people.

What I see is that I've been very fortunate in the whole practice of law for 35 years to do a variety of different things. Each one of these experiences has made me, one, a better person and, two, a better lawyer. This is a lawyer's position that I'm running for. I think my experience on the county board—which would be difficult to describe in any other way than as an independent Democrat who stood up to my own party both with [ former Cook County Board ] President John Stroger and with [ current ] President Todd Stroger—I think that all of those opportunities and experiences only make it easier for me to run for this office and realize that it's a time when you need to have the status quo changed.

I bring a different set of values, experience and independence to this office and a record of being fair. Therefore, I really believe I can cause a total seat change in the way this office interacts with the community and bring a different sense of justice to the overall community. We're still going to have to put people in jail. There are those who commit serious crimes, and we will prosecute those vigorously and lock them up. At the same time, we need to have a greater emphasis on what are the issues that are destroying neighborhoods and people to have a lack of confidence in the criminal justice system. To me, that means taking this office, which is totally courtroom-centered, and getting it re-focused so that it is out there listening to communities. There are 150 different neighborhoods, communities, wards, cities and villages that make up Cook County. One of my goals would be that there is a sense in all those communities that a decision made on a justice issue is the same if it's in Winnetka or Robbins, if it's in Maywood or Woodlawn, if it's in Lawndale or in some South Shore [ neighborhood ] . My whole background gives me experiences to approach this in a different way, but a very constructive way to build upon what's necessary to make people feel safer in their communities.

WCT: You've always been an advocate of reform and accountability, getting rid of patronage and corruption. Will that still be a focus for you?

LS: Absolutely. One of the things that I want to emphasize is that this office will redirect energy so that it takes on public corruption. … Public corruption to me is something that we have to emphasize. That means going after elected officials, appointed officials—that means going after things like the Shakman decree to ensure it's enforced. At the county level, [ former Cook County Board ] President [ Bobbie ] Steele, in the few months that she was there, designated me to negotiate with Shakman and the federal court on the revised decree that we currently have with Commissioners [ Mike ] Quigley and [ Forrest ] Claypool. We passed a whistleblower protection ordinance. [ Those are ] two things I would see clearly trying to enforce and make sure that we're protecting people's rights.

I think we also have to look at vendors who are clearly taking advantage of the system. We need to not let the media tell us where the problems are. We need to be actively investigating and auditing things.

The fourth part was law enforcement. We need to reestablish the confidence of people in the whole criminal justice system. For that to happen, I believe the State's Attorney's Office has got to change its approach, which has got to be an assistant to the police department. Lots of times young state's attorneys become like super-investigators. The adrenaline rush often overcomes their understanding that they have a constitutional duty to protect the rights of the overall community, the victims of crime and the defendants. For us to able to make sure we don't have false confessions, coerced confessions. I need to get a redefining of the role of a prosecutor during a criminal investigation. I think that is one thing I really want to make an emphasis on.

The final part is election fraud. I think that again, almost all of these areas of prosecution have been left to the United State's Attorney's Office—not done by the people of this county. If we are going to reestablish confidence of people in general in government, and specifically in the criminal justice system in Cook County, the State's Attorney's Office has got to take the lead on this and not just react to news stories.

It's kind of strange because I'm running against the first assistant and the second assistant [ to Cook County State's Attorney Dick Devine ] . They want to say the office is running perfectly because they are responsible for it. But, when it comes to public corruption, there are only two cases they can come up with. … We need to be proactively out there auditing police reports and looking for any irregularities. … My plan is to really come up with an internal audit procedure to watch all police activity. In so doing, for the 99 percent of police officers who are doing a great job, this will help buttress them and help people have confidence in their work while we make sure that those who cross the line are punished.

WCT: One of your goals is to also increase diversity within the office.

LS: Right now, 7 percent of the office is African-American, 4 percent of the office is Hispanic and 4 percent is Asian-American. I passed a resolution on the county board about four months ago saying that all county offices should report to us on diversity by population distribution and by region. One of the things that I'm very concerned is that we've had some studies done on where county employees come from. They come from very, very narrow parts of the county, not a broad spectrum. My plan is this: To increase diversity initially, what I'm going to have to do is go out and try to convince lateral transfers of practicing lawyers who are members of a variety of different diverse groups. I believe if I can convince them, they'd be willing to come into the office, especially if I give them some supervisory powers.

This would mean restructuring of how cases are assigned. The problem besides recruiting is that you have to hold onto people once you've recruited them. This office, right now, takes almost 11 years for somebody to get the better assignments. Any law firm knows that when you recruit young lawyers, you're goal is to be working very hard to give them quality experience, keep them interested, and keep them with you. With 950 lawyers, it's the largest law office in Chicago. We've got to be more creative in making sure every one of our lawyers is being trained correctly and given opportunities to show off their talents. The final part of this is, for many young lawyers, especially for those with minority backgrounds, the student loan problem when you finish law school, is loans in excess of $150,000 dollars. What we've got to do is come up with some solutions to help this lawyers pay down those loans.

WCT: Tell me a little bit about how you will continue your commitment to the LGBT community. You, back in 2003, co-sponsored the board passing domestic-partner registry, so you've been a friend of the community.

LS: I think the issues with the community is that, right now, we have to protect it as one of the mainstream communities of Cook County, which means that discrimination is the number one issue we need to be looking at. We need to make sure that all of our human rights provisions and all of our constitutional bill of rights provisions are uniformly enforced to protect the rights of all people. That means we need to be looking and being aggressive on where there are hate crimes, even if they are subtle, and where there is discrimination in employment, housing, loans and business opportunities. … This office has been very passive. When issues have occurred, they reacted to them. That's again waiting for the media to raise issues. We need to be aggressively going forward. … My jurisdiction is not just Chicago. It would be the full county. There are still pockets of places where the kind of training and sensitivity that may exist in Chicago, because the community is so important, still have not reached some of these other places where the community may be smaller, but it may be more vulnerable. My goal is to be aggressively looking at what is going on.

One of the things I want to do is move this office away from the courthouse and into the community. I want to set up on a regular basis in the county what I would call community advocacy centers. Now some of my opponents want to open community prosecution offices. The world prosecution is not a word I think that invites in the community. I would hope I could do something like at the Center on Halsted and other community centers, where on a regular basis, we would have an assistant state's attorney come and listen. If people tell us that a form of discrimination is an issue that is going on, we would deal with it. If they tell us it's guns and drugs, we would deal with it. If they tell us its mortgage predators or loan creditors or an environmental issue, we would listen to the community and respond. I would hope that by being in regular communication with all communities, I would be able to anticipate need before people are discriminated against.

I think I've been very fortunate at this point to have strong supporters such as Alderman Tom Tunney, Rick Ingram, Debra Shore, Art Johnston and Rick Garcia. I value my interactions with the community and the leaders of the community, and I just make a pledge that to me, the most important thing in justice is to make sure it's uniform and predictable. That's what I'll be working with to find those problems, root them out, and in an equal and predictable way, make sure that justice is there to get people confidence.