More than 230 attorneys have QUIT Kim Foxx’s office in fury at her ‘abysmal failure’

Cook County’s controversial Progressive Attorney Kim Foxx has seen a mass exodus from her office, with at least one former colleague declaring her soft-on-crime policy a failure.

Foxx, who sparked outrage when she attempted to help actor Jussie Smollett drop the first charges against him for faking a hate crime, has seen 235 people leave her office since July 2021, according to the Chicago Tribune.

It led a prosecutor, who declined to be identified, to say her office has “twice as much work unaided.” And really, you make people fail. Anything can explode in your face. The expectations are not manageable.’

Failure seems to be the watchword among current and former Cook County employees, as former assistant attorney Dan Kirk, who worked in the same office as Foxx under her predecessor, called her “a great person” but an “absolute failure” as an officer. of justice.

He told Fox news: “Foxx has implemented policies that have made Chicago less safe, made people unsafe and encouraged criminals, creating this new level of criminal brutality unimaginable before her…tenure.”

Other staffers speaking to the Chicago Tribune anonymously said they felt unsupported during COVID, resentment over the Smollett case and the departure of a respected head of the county’s Criminal Prosecutions Bureau.

Aside from the Smollett case, Foxx has sparked controversy by dismissing tens of thousands of crimes, reforming the police force and being charged with beating her husband during a domestic dispute last June. In Chicago, crime is up 37 percent by 2022.

The Cook County Attorney’s Office did not respond to a request from DailyMail.com for comment.

Speaking to local news channel WTTV on Tuesday, Foxx said the county has brought in 50 new lawyers who will be sworn in next month.

But she admitted: ‘We are not fully staffed. We are certainly much better than we were. We are on an equal footing with our colleagues across the country. About 15 percent of our positions remain open.’

Foxx claimed that Cook County has about 15 percent of its staff positions still vacant.

Kirk called “the great layoff” an “unprecedented” event for the attorney general’s office and blamed “policy and leadership failure.”

He said: ‘[Foxx] likes to blame it on COVID, except in every other district attorney around Chicago and the other adjacent counties that have maintained their size or, in many cases, have grown.”

Kirk claims that “hundreds” of people in the office say that “morale in the office has never been lower” and that current and former employees “don’t believe the government puts victims first.”

Crime in Cook’s county seat Chicago, like many forward-thinking cities, has risen 37 percent this year.

Thefts have risen by no less than 61 percent, while the number of robberies has risen by 17 percent. Murder and rape has dropped slightly.

Daniel Locallo, a former judge in Cook County, said Foxx’s shortcomings have reduced the treatment of victims by handing out ridiculous sentences.

All of this comes at a time when Illinois will launch a similar bailout policy to New York’s disastrous policy, where bail will only be set and criminals returned to the streets unless “the suspect poses a specific, real, and current threat.”

Foxx began her tenure dismissing more than 25,000 felony cases — including many involving charges of murder and other serious crimes — in her first three years on the job, a new report shows.

In the first three years after Foxx took over as the Cook County prosecutor in 2016, her office dismissed all charges against 29.9 percent of defendants, the Tribune found.

By comparison, Foxx’s predecessor, Anita Alvarez, has dropped charges against just 19.4 percent of the defendants in the past three years.

A total of 25,183 defendants were dismissed under Foxx through November 2019, compared to 18,694 under Alvarez over a similar period, the Tribune said.

Foxx took over as state attorney in 2016 with a promise to reform the criminal justice system and reduce the population of Cook County Jail.

She said she encourages the assistant state attorneys in her office to talk openly about dismissing felony charges with cases that have legal issues.

Foxx added that fostering that kind of environment is important to her, given Chicago’s track record of wrongful convictions and police misconduct.

“Acknowledging the history we’ve had around wrongful convictions, recognizing our ethical obligations as prosecutors … requires us to reinforce that if people think a case is flawed, they can bring it to our attention, and we will turn it down if it’s appropriate,” she said.