All Week Long
Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle joined officials, advocates, and an impacted business owner to endorse the Clean Energy Jobs Act (CEJA, HB 804), praising the bill for advancing equity and helping Illinois to mitigate climate change.
President Preckwinkle was joined by Illinois Rep. Delia Ramirez, Cook County Commissioner Bridget Degnen (Vice-Chair of the Environment and Sustainability Committee), Policy and Advocacy Director Pastor Onque of Faith in Place, and Ramon Hayes, owner of Eco-Energy Solutions to highlight the virtues of CEJA and urge fellow Illinois lawmakers to support passage of the bill.
“We know clean energy and climate change are environmental justice issues,” said President Preckwinkle. “Residents who live in low-income communities have borne the brunt of pollution from the old fossil fuel economy. These residents have also been disproportionally affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. CEJA will directly help these communities by improving air quality and getting people back to work in jobs that pay living wages and support the new clean energy economy.”
Originally published on wgntv.com 03/27/2021 | Image: WGN Video
Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx were joined by hundreds in a downtown Chicago rally against Asian-American and Pacific Islander hate Saturday afternoon.
The event is in response to a sustained rise in hate crimes against the Asian-American community, specifically a recent mass shooting in Atlanta that left eight people dead, including six women of Asian descent.
‘Stop AAPI Hate’, a national advocacy group that tracks hate crimes, has reported more than 3,700 incidents between March 19, 2020 and February 28 of this year. 11.1 percent of incidents reported were of a physical nature.
Three Chinese-Americans who were killed in Chicago throughout the past year were also remembered at the event, which included the deaths of two men in Chinatown in a February robbery and the death of a man in Bridgeport in an armed carjacking.
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Originally published on chicago.suntimes.com 03/28/2021 | Image: Ashlee Rezin Garcia/Sun-Times file photo
Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx says police should heed a new study showing misdemeanor prosecutions increase the likelihood of a person committing more crimes.
The National Bureau of Economic Research released an academic paper Monday showing “non-prosecution of a nonviolence misdemeanor offense leads to large reductions in the likelihood of a new criminal complaint over the next two years” in Boston and its suburbs.
In the more than four years since Foxx became Cook County’s top prosecutor, she’s emphasized that police should search for alternatives to prosecuting people for non-violent misdemeanors, crimes that carry a penalty of up to a year in jail.
Unlike Boston, where prosecutors decide whether to initiate a misdemeanor prosecution, the police in Chicago and the Cook County suburbs can unilaterally charge a person with a misdemeanor and prosecutors then must decide whether to move forward with the case or dismiss it.
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