Alvarez’s career had long been pockmarked to the point of disgrace, but it was the shooting of Laquan McDonald that shattered it completely.

In October of 2014, Officer Jason Van Dyke killed McDonald, shooting the 17-year-old in the back 16 times in 15 seconds. The video, publicly released more than a year after the incident, shows McDonald moving away from Van Dyke before he was shot. The bullets continue after he falls to the ground, continue after he lies motionless.

Before the video was released, McDonald was just another name on a long list of the dead killed by Chicago law enforcement. The official police story of his death was a brief lie: “one shot to the chest of a man with a knife lunging at an officer.”

Like so many victims of police violence, McDonald has been publicly defined only by the cruelty of his death. But the dead have history, too. Like Alvarez, McDonald was a Chicago native. He had been born to a teenage mother and had lived with various family members and in different foster homes since he was just three. His life was chaotic and emotionally taxing, marked by upending after upending. He spent time in juvenile detention, but in the latter part of his life he had been trying to assemble some order from the pieces of his childhood. He was living with his mother and uncle and attending alternative school when he was killed.

Alvarez had seen the video a year prior to its release. For a year, she knew the police had lied about what happened to McDonald. For a year, she knew it was murder in cold blood. But it was not until a judge ordered that the video of the shooting be publicly released that Alvarez charged Van Dyke with murder. It took her 400 days.

In the days and months that followed, Alvarez was bloated with excuses for the delay. "It’s just so much more complex than one gangbanger shooting another," she said in one interview. "I will not apologize for the meticulous, thorough investigation we did."

Now, it seems, Alvarez is ready to change the subject. "It's unfortunate that this campaign has been focused on one issue," she said a few weeks ago.

So let's change the subject. After all, the cruelty of Laquan McDonald’s death and the depravity of Alvarez's response do not even begin to fully encompass the repugnant job she's done as head prosecutor.

On Tuesday, the Chicago people have a chance to vote out one of the country's worst perpetrators of cronyism and mass incarceration. A November article laid out a portion of Alvarez’s misdeeds. Here's the rest of the story of how Alvarez has destroyed Chicago justice.

Alvarez continues to perpetuate mass incarceration

Alvarez may have taken 400 days to charge Van Dyke, but mere civilians remain at the mercy of her excessive prosecution. Need proof? Just check out Cook County jail, the the biggest and most crowded jail in the country. The People's Lobby reports:

Cook County and Illinois lock up tens of thousands of people annually – mostly poor African American and Latino men – for non-violent and low-level drug offenses. In 2012, 70% of inmates in Cook County’s jail committed non-violent offenses [...] Cook County taxpayers spend $300 million annually to house inmates.

State prisons aren’t any better. From a joint report by the Better Government Association and Chicago Reader:

The state prison population – more than half of which is from Cook County – has grown over the last seven years, records show. Most inmates are there for nonviolent offenses. The vast majority are minorities, and a third or more are thought to be dealing with mental illness. When they’re released, almost all of them return to the same poor, segregated neighborhoods they came from.

Since 2010, Cook County Jail has been under a federal decree requiring in part that the county reduce crowding. Yet in 2013 the inmate population reached a six-year high of 10,000. Many of the inmates are being punished for poverty, locked up because they can't afford bail. Recently, bond reform resulted in a somewhat depleted jail population, but Alvarez can't take credit for that. Those reforms were implemented by county commissioners and the state Supreme Court.

According to Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, the outrageous jail population is also due to a backlogged court and a lack of mental health clinics. “We're sort of the receptacle of every conceivable problem in society here, and now the most convenient one for them to dump on us is the mentally ill,” he said.

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Alvarez, like many politicians, is an opportunist, which means that she often publicly claims that she supports criminal justice reform. Last year a number of criminal justice officials nationwide, including Alvarez, joined a group called Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration. She is an expert in loudly implementing election-year reforms in an effort to get reelected, and this group was less of an adaptation of new doctrine and more like another PR effort. However, she has made some efforts towards change. She often touts the fact that she has increased the number of diversion programs, and last year she announced positive drug reforms, including that she would no longer charge most misdemeanor marijuana possession cases.

But, as the Chicago Tribune stated, “Alvarez is not leading a charge here. In fact, she's late to the parade.” From the Illinois Herald:

Marijuana was decriminalized three years ago and Illinois is even one of the 24 states that legalized cannabis for medical use. For three years now, possession of marijuana was supposed to be a ticketed offense in Cook County, not a crime. But [...] Alvarez and her prosecutors chose to criminally charge 14 marijuana smokers for every 1 smoker they chose to let slide with a ticket. [...] In Illinois, blacks were 7-times more likely than whites to be charged with marijuana possession. In Chicago, some black neighborhoods have 150-times as many marijuana arrests as their white counterparts.

“We had to drag Alvarez kicking and screaming down the path of criminal justice reform,” said County Board President Toni Preckwinkle. "She’s way too vindictive, and she overcharges too many cases," agrees attorney Richard Dvorak. "Trial prosecutors have no discretion now."

Her tough on crime attitude has been rejected in many Chicago circles. Many officials, including Sheriff Dart and Board President Preckwinkle, have pushed for reform in the state's attorney's office. But Alvarez's office has pushed back. "Our mandate is public safety," said Fabio Valentini, chief of the criminal prosecutions bureau. "We’re not going to stop charging felonies tomorrow because the jail population has become too big."

Remarkably, just a few weeks ago Alvarez advocated publicly for putting more people in jail and raising mandatory minimums. "We need to make sure that these people are being held accountable and staying in custody longer so we keep our streets safer," she said as a guest on “Big” John Howell, a local conservative radio show.

Alvarez and her subordinates suffer from razor-thin narrow mindsets, an obsessive focus on individual charges rather than the big picture. They have fallen into the dangerous black hole of binary perception, slowly viewing defendants as a case file, as something less than human. For years, incarceration has been the office's go-to solution, and prosecutors in Chicago have focused almost entirely on punishment and very little on prevention.

Prosecutors can be effective when they recognize their own failure. Alvarez has repeatedly had the opportunity to make changes, admit mistakes, and hear feedback and input from the community. Yet she has constantly assumed the defensive position in an effort to self-protect. As a result she has done very little to actually engage in a conversation about change.

Mass incarceration is not solving the issues that plague many Chicago neighborhoods—usually because residents in those neighborhoods have long been ignored and abandoned by government officials. Because Alvarez's ethos rejects addressing the origins of criminal behavior, she can't identify truly workable solutions, relying instead on increased incarceration as the way to solve complicated problem.

She is, in a word, dangerous. Chicago can no longer be controlled by someone who believes more mandatory minimums are the way to improve Chicago neighborhoods.

Alvarez is reluctant to exonerate the innocent.

Nina Glover was found strangled to death in a dumpster in November of 1994, her body wrapped in a bloody sheet. The police interviewed four people—a truck driver, a liquor store manager, a guy who lived in the area, and another man who lived about ten miles away— but no one seemed to know anything. The police didn't really have any leads, and over the next few months the tiny threads they did have dried up.

Then, four months after her death, police say an 18-year-old named Jerry Fincher walked into a precinct and volunteered information about Glover's murder. Law enforcement’s official story of Fincher's unprovoked willingness to provide details is curious, to say the least. After all it took two full days of interrogation to get anything out of him. But eventually, Fincher confessed to Glover's rape and murder. He also accused four other teenage boys of being involved.

Terrell Swift, one of the boys, recalls being completely confused when police approached him about his involvement. "Whoa. Raped and beat who?" he asked. "'Nina, I don't know Nina Glover. Can I get my mother in here so I can get a lawyer?' And nothing."

The denial of counsel was only the beginning. The four boys, ranging in age from 14 to 18, were brought in and interrogated for hours. The police threatened and assaulted the boys, hoping to squeeze a confession out of the four boys, allegedly "beating on one’s chest with a phone book and a flashlight," ripping an earring out of another's ear, and threatening to take one of the boys to the railroad tracks and shoot him. Swift said he was questioned for 12 hours straight. Eventually he was told he could leave—if he admitted to the rape and murder. Exhausted, terrified, and confused, he signed a confession. So did the other three boys.

It seemed like a slam dunk for the state's attorney's office, but still there were problems: the boys’ stories didn't line up, and a DNA test of semen found in the victim matched not a single one of the suspects. What's more, a judge found that Fincher's confession had been coerced and was inadmissible. Since no other evidence besides his confession connected him to the murder, his charges were dropped.

But somehow the other four teenagers' cases went forward. Each were found guilty, each of them were sentenced to at least 30 years in prison.

Fifteen years later, after he was released, Swift wanted to access the DNA evidence found on the victim. Forensic science had improved by then, and he was hoping to prove that the person who raped and murdered Glover was not him nor the three other suspects, but someone else entirely.

But Alvarez's office refused to approve a new DNA test, only relenting when the Chicago Tribune became interested in the story. In April of 2011, test results showed a DNA match to another man all together—a man named Johnny Douglas.

Douglas: Arrested 83 times and convicted of 38 crimes in just 18 years. Douglas: one of the four people that police spoke to the morning that Glover was found. Douglas: accused of rape and murder multiple times. Joshua Tepfer, then a lawyer at Northwestern’s Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth, stated that “there has never been a stronger hit in the DNA area. [Mr. Douglas] preyed on at-risk women, on prostitutes, and he engaged in sex and strangled them to death. It’s just an identical situation [to Glover].”

This was great news for the men, especially for the three still languishing in jail. They immediately requested that Alvarez agree to release them and vacate their convictions. But she refused, "arguing that Glover's history of trading sex for drugs made it possible she had consensual sex with Douglas." According to the New York Times:

Anita Alvarez, the state’s attorney, said a DNA match was not automatically cause for dismissal of the convictions. “DNA evidence in and of itself is not always the ‘silver bullet’ that it is sometimes perceived to be,” Ms. Alvarez said. Mr. Douglas, she said, who was shot to death in 2008, was “the type of person that was utilizing prostitutes. He didn’t kill every other prostitute he was with.”

Alvarez, of course, has yet to explain why none of the boys’ DNA was found on Glover.

The four teens, now men, had to file a motion with the court if they wanted justice. Luckily, the court agreed to vacate their convictions, but Alvarez still wouldn't back down and threatened to retry the case. Finally, realizing she had no evidence, she dismissed all charges. She did not, however, apologize for the years they spent in prison. According to the Chicago Tribune, "While extending sympathies to the Glover family, [she] did not say she believed that the four men were innocent of Glover's murder [in her statement]."

That's not the only example of Alvarez being reluctant to vacate convictions even when DNA evidence implicates someone else. In 1991 Cateresa Matthews, age 14, left her grandmother's house and never came back. Her body was discovered a month later, abandoned in a field near the highway, killed by gunshot through her mouth.

For almost a year, the cops had no leads. Then, in November 1992, they arrested five black boys ranging in age from 14 to 16. Police allegedly threatened and physically abused them for hours during questioning. Eventually all of them confessed.

One of the boys had developmental disabilities and an IQ of 56. According to his attorney, he “could not read when he was arrested and signed a confession not knowing what it was.”

Again, there were clear indications of misconduct by the police. The Innocence Project reports that their confessions were highly inconsistent, and "DNA testing was conducted on sperm cells from swabs of the victim’s body, and the profile pointed to a single unidentified male—excluding all five teens." Yet, all five were charged.

Two of the boys agreed to plead guilty and testify against the other three in exchange for shorter sentences. Those two boys served 10-year sentences. Two of the others got 80 years. One got 85.

Then, 20 years later, the state's attorney's case fell apart. In March 2011, a DNA test from the victim implicated someone else entirely—a man who had been arrested 39 times, a man with a record of sexual assault and armed robbery, a man who was 32 when Matthews was killed, a man alive and living in Chicago.

Yet, again, the state's attorney was reluctant that the man whose sperm was found in the girl's body was the actual killer. On an episode of 60 Minutes:

[Attorney] Peter Neufeld says prosecutors rejected the DNA evidence and instead came up with an unusual theory to explain it all away. Peter Neufeld: They suggest perhaps after the kids killed her this man wandered by and committed an act of necrophilia. [Host] Byron Pitts: Necrophilia. A lot of our viewers won't know what that means. Peter Neufeld: Having sex with a dead person. Anita Alvarez: It's possible. We have seen cases like that. Byron Pitts: Possible? Anita Alvarez: It is. We've seen it in other cases. Byron Pitts: It's possible that this convicted rapist, wandered past an open field, and had sex with a 14-year-old girl who was dead? Anita Alvarez: Well, there's all kinds of possibilities out there, and what I'm saying is that I don't know what happened.

Months after the DNA tests, all five boys had their sentences vacated.

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In the months before the 2012 general election, Alvarez’s office opened a Conviction Integrity Unit. She framed it as a "shift in philosophy" and promised that her office would "increase our focus and our openness about these cases." Since then, the unit has vacated 14 convictions. But while even her opponents note she’s gotten better. many say that’s “not enough in a county that has led the nation in wrongful convictions. By comparison, Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson vacated over 10 convictions his first year in office,” says the Sun-Times. In addition, Better Gov reports that, “some attorneys who’ve worked with the office say it maintains a defensive posture, as if investigators are out to prove that a case stands up rather than looking at it with fresh eyes.”

Alvarez likes to win, and she sees a high conviction rate as a measure of success. But justice isn't synonymous with conviction, and a good state's attorney should be able to employ both discretion and restraint. Alvarez's lack of humility and perspective has resulted in an office that overvalues convictions as a measure of success versus seeing it as one metric among many, and it has created a dangerous incentive structure. The fact that such priorities are common in prosecutors' office makes it no less dangerous. It is, in fact, this incentive structure that is one of the primary drivers of mass incarceration.

Her Conviction Integrity Unit has been a step forward, and yet it lacks most of the protections that exist in other similar more successful departments. Even among prosecutors, Alvarez’s unwillingness to vacate convictions—even where DNA evidence implicates someone else—is unusual. The New York Times reports that in a study of DNA exonerations, only four percent of prosecutors opposed motions to vacate convictions even when DNA matches another suspect.

Other state’s attorney candidates, primarily Kim Foxx, have been extremely vocal about reforming incentives in the prosecutor's office. In Chicago Mag, Foxx recalled her time working under Alvarez:

One of the most disturbing things to me was—we have the gangs unit at 26th and California, and when you’d walk into that unit there’d be mug shots of the various people who were convicted. It was almost like a trophy wall of humans. And for a lot of people there, it was quite crass. And there was the belief that [Alvarez], too, thought it was crass, and that when she came on board they would take that down. And it never came down. She took away discretion; she was very much needing to prove that she would be tough on crime, as opposed to thoughtful or smart on crime, and was very much concerned about her image as a state’s attorney, as opposed to what justice looked like.

Alvarez remains disturbingly insensitive to the injustice perpetuated by her office. Her reluctance to pursue justice for the innocent is matched only by her reluctance to prosecute people in positions of power.

Alvarez protects politicians and the powerful.

Alvarez was elected State’s Attorney in 2008. Although she had been working as an assistant state's attorney for over 20 years—it was, in fact, the only job she had ever held—she ran as an outsider. "It’s time for a change," she said, criticizing her predecessor. "It’s time to have someone in there who’s honest and has integrity."

When she was elected, people were cautious but optimistic about her. Journalist Dan Rose called her a "mixed bag. She won without most of the Machine behind her," said Rose, "but they will envelop her in November. There is no question she is a competent professional prosecutor, but her association with the incumbent administration—which is soft on public corruption and police misconduct—makes her suspect to many progressives and those engaged in issues such as police torture."

The suspicion Rose identifies was warranted. Alvarez has repeatedly proven herself to be the ultimate insider, a member of the establishment who protects cops and politicians. Her focus, she repeats ad nauseam, is violent crime—largely at the expense of corruption and police brutality. “Our core mission is violent crime and I would never want to be in a position where I’m looking at a rape victim in the eye and say, ‘Well, ma’am, sorry. We’re not going to do anything to find the man who brutally raped you because we have now diverted all of our attention to weeding out bad police officers and fighting corruption,’” Alvarez has said.

This statement is a strange one, because it implies that Alvarez has to make a choice. But the truth is, of course, that her office is entrusted with the power to hold bad police officers accountable, address corruption, and prosecute violent crime. It is not a choice but an obligation. For Alvarez, it isn’t really a question of capacity. Because of her position and political connections, Alvarez is always hesitant to investigate and punish the powerful.

The most famous of these examples is the story of Richard Koschman, a young boy who was killed by Richard Vanecko, the mayor's nephew.

In 2004, Koschman and Vanecko along with their respective groups of friends had a heated confrontation outside of a bar. Things escalated, culminating in Vanecko punching Koschman in the face. He fell and hit his head on the pavement. Twelve days later, his mother removed him from life support.

Not only was Vanecko never charged, law enforcement didn't even identify him as the one who hit Koschman. Instead, they framed Koschman as the aggressor, concluding that whoever punched him was doing so in self-defense. The investigation was cursory and quickly closed by then-State's Attorney Richard Devine. At the time Alvarez was Devine's chief of staff.

When the Chicago Sun-Times started to reinvestigate the case in 2011, Alvarez immediately tried to prevent a new investigation. From the Chicago Sun-Times:

The Cook County state’s attorney’s office says it stands by its initial conclusion that no one should be charged. Though its files are missing, officials say the original prosecutor who recommended no charges be filed still works there. They would not identify him. “They declined charges, but they can’t find the file?” said Richard Kling, a criminal-defense attorney who is a law professor at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. “I’ve been doing this for 39 years, literally thousands of cases. I’ve never seen a felony-review file missing. Ever. Never heard of one."

Eventually, the Sun-Times investigation discovered that there had been a cover up. A "recently discovered" police report quotes a witness that saw Vanecko act "very aggressive" towards Koschman. The witness's statement had been scratched out. Other "recently discovered" documents included a report on the incident with the words “V DAILEY SISTER SON” making note of the fact that Vanecko was the nephew of the mayor.

The evidence implied an extended cover-up where police and prosecutors avoided charging Richard Vanecko for the death of another man. Alvarez's office claimed lost documents while the police claimed "recently discovered" ones. Neither police nor prosecutors even admitted that Vanecko had thrown the fatal punch until 2011.

And yet, Alvarez was still denying evidence of misconduct. From the Sun-Times:

“I don’t see any evidence – despite the theories of the journalists who are writing about this case – of a grand conspiracy here either by the police or any prosecutor,” Alvarez said [...] Alvarez called the Sun-Times’ reports on the case “really unfair.” “They’re just putting forth their theory, with so many mistakes, ignoring the facts, ignoring the evidence,” Alvarez said. She added: “I don’t think any detective would have hesitated to charge a family member of the mayor.”

Vanecko was finally charged with a crime and would be forced to face a trial. But a judge decided that Alvarez was not fit to prosecute the case. From the Sun-Times:

Declaring “the system has failed” David Koschman, a Cook County judge took the rare step Friday of appointing a special prosecutor to re-examine the 2004 case[.] The judge had harsh words for police and prosecutors. He singled out their assertion that the 6-foot-3, 230-pound Vanecko, who was never charged, acted in self-defense when he hit the 5-foot-5, 140-pound Koschman, who never threw a punch. “This was a defense conjured up by police and prosecutors,” Toomin said, noting that Vanecko never spoke with police and calling it “the fiction of self-defense.”

Eventually Vanecko was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter by special prosecutor Dan Webb and served 60 days in jail. The lying police and prosecutors, however, were never held responsible.

“We, as taxpayers, literally spent $2 million to pay a private firm and a wonderful lawyer in Dan Webb to do her job because there were several police officers involved,” [criminal defense attorney Sam Adam Jr.] said of Alvarez. “All you have to do is pick up the actual indictment that Dan Webb came out with and see the number of state’s attorneys listed who either didn’t do their job or may have concealed evidence and the number of police officers who were involved in that same cover up. No one investigation or one person indicted in that.”

Alvarez has also allegedly protected major donor from prosecution. In 2012, her office subpoenaed Harold Davis Jr, "who had accused a major county contractor in a lawsuit of trying to use his company to defraud taxpayers in a minority-contracting scheme." But despite the subpoena, nothing has come of the case. In 2012, Davis said he called Alvarez monthly, trying to discern the status of the case. But supposedly he was repeatedly told it's "too sensitive" to discuss.

He began to suspect that Alvarez wasn't pursuing the case intentionally. After all, the major county contractor in question was McMahon Food, which included Frank McMahon and his two daughters, Mary and Frances as owners. Both Mary and Frances are assistant state's attorneys in Alvarez's office. And the McMahon family has contributed almost $50,000 to her Alvarez's campaign fund.

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The AP reports that "Alvarez casts herself as a reformer who can win without establishment backing." Similarly, Better Gov reports that:

Referencing her first victory for office in 2008, Alvarez’s campaign web site reads: "Anita scored a dramatic upset in Cook County politics." One newspaper endorsement during the campaign called Alvarez "a rare Hispanic [woman] in an old boy’s club" – an endorsement highlighted on her campaign site.

But the truth is that Alvarez has a serious establishment backing and gets plenty of money from Chicago's infamous political machine.

Alvarez benefits from plenty of old-boy political support financially and organizationally. She’s raised almost $4 million in campaign donations since the fall of 2007, including large contributions from well-known power brokers and thousands of dollars from her own employees, the Illinois State Board of Elections web site shows.

In 2011, Rose wrote another piece on Alvarez, retracting his original optimism. "Many of us thought that breeze might be a breath of fresh air, since she owed her victory to smart commercials and a strong women’s and Latino vote rather than to the Chicago machine. Unfortunately, that air now resembles the foul winds that once emanated from Chicago’s stockyards."

Alvarez has been a typical crony politician, more concerned with political power than justice.

Alvarez protects the police.

Laquan McDonald is not the only victim of Alvarez's refusal to hold the police accountable. Over and over, Alvarez has stood in the way of justice in cases where the police inflicted violence.

Take the case of ex-Chicago Detective Reynaldo Guevara. Guevara has been repeatedly accused of lying, coercion, physical and mental abuse including beating people into confessions, and intentionally mistranslating witness statements. In his time as detective, he allegedly framed at least 40 people.

"Convictions in two murder cases Guevara investigated have been overturned,” reports the Sun-Times. “Eight other prisoners claim in court filings that Guevara framed them for murder. One … said he falsely confessed after Guevara beat and interrogated him for more than 40 hours, causing permanent hearing loss in one ear, according to court records."

Yet, Guevara has never been held accountable for his misconduct. In fact, many of his victims are still stuck in prison— and Alvarez refuses to help them.

Four men in particular stand out: Roberto Almodovar, 40, Robert Bouto, 39, Jose Montanez, 48, and Armando Serrano, 43. Buzzfeed reports that an official investigation commissioned by the mayor's office found that all four were likely innocent, and had probably framed for murder by Guevera. The investigation is currently under court-ordered seal.

This is joyous news for the men. After all, Almodovar is currently serving a life sentence, while the other three are serving 45 years. Yet, Alvarez's office continues to fight their appeals, claiming that the investigation should be kept secret.

Even federal authorities have gotten involved —U.S. Attorney Scott Lasser encouraged Alvarez to review the report from the Mayor's office. Yet, the state's attorney still refused to budge. "We don’t feel these guys are innocent guys," said a spokesman from Alvarez's office.

These men continue to languish in prison. Total, the city of Chicago has paid $19.8 million to "investigate, defend and settle allegations against Guevara."

Meanwhile, Guevera is retired, never charged, and collecting two government pensions, including a police pension of $73,904 a year.

There are others. Days before McDonald was killed by police, so was a 25-year-old man named Ronald Johnson. The video of his killing was released not long after the Laquan McDonald video, and in another press conference last December, Alvarez detailed the ways Johnson had been a threat, including 911 calls alleging gunfire and his possession of a gun. From Tremr:

But in truth, Johnson was fleeing from police and never once pointed an alleged weapon (that could not be seen in the video) at police officers who were chasing him. And none of the police officers who chased Johnson fired on him, in spite of what Alvarez asserted was a threatening environment. Yet Chicago Police Officer Hernandez was only on the scene a few seconds after stepping out of his car and with gun drawn fired five shots hitting Johnson in his back. Alvarez claimed that Johnson was running in the direction of a police car that was in a park, that may not have been visible to Johnson and was not visible to anyone watching the video.

Other officers protected by Alvarez include Richard Fiorito, a Chicago police officer that repeatedly arrested people for false DUIs, allegedly to collect overtime pay for appearing in court. Between 2007 and 2008, he made 313 DUI arrests, about one for every work day. But when in 2009, one of his reports contradicted dash-cam footage, people began to get suspicious. When he resigned in 2011, "Fiorito stood accused of fabricating at least 40 DUI charges, and the Cook County state’s attorney’s office had to drop charges against more than 130 motorists arrested for drunk driving by Fiorito."

But Alvarez never charged Fiorito. From In These Times:

Despite the 40 witnesses accusing Fiorito of falsifying charges, and the video footage which showed Fiorito lying about one arrest, Alvarez refused to bring any charges against him. Her office claimed at the time to have been investigating the officer for a year, but one source ChicagoPride.com it was really closer to one month. And in fact, Fiorito had been allowed to keep working as a police officer, making arrests and testifying under oath, even as civil rights lawsuits against him piled up.

Fiorito died in 2014.

In late December, Alvarez finally filed charges against Officer Brandin Frederickson, more than two years after he slammed Randolph Holmes against a door and then punched him in the face while he was in custody. From Better Gov:

The incident was caught by surveillance cameras inside the Lynwood station. The village wouldn’t release a copy of the tape or police reports until the Better Government Association’s lawyer got involved. Alvarez did not initially bring charges against Fredericksen – but instead charged Holmes with aggravated battery of a police officer for allegedly spitting on Fredericksen just before the altercation.

Many on both sides wonder why it took two years to charge him, and both the officer’s attorney and advocates against police brutality have called the move blatantly political in light of the recent McDonald case.

In a previous statement defending her office from charges of political opportunism, Alvarez said that since she’s been state’s attorney, "she has brought charges against 96 law enforcement officers when those charges were appropriate." It's a claim she constantly repeats—a claim less impressive once you consider just how corrupt Chicago law enforcement is known to be.

What Alvarez doesn't mention is that only 12 of those charges resulted in jail time, and nine of those 12 were sent to jail in her first year. In the past seven years of her tenure, only three police officers have had to serve time.

Meanwhile, since Alvarez was elected state's attorney, four law enforcement officers have been charged with domestic abuse and eight have been charged with sexual misconduct or sexual assault. Not a single one has been forced to serve time. Of the 14 officers charged with aggravated assault, only one spent time in prison. (Note that some of these cases are pending.)

The historically corrupt Chicago Police Department has also seen its fair share of officer-involved shootings, and evidence indicates patterns of racial discrimination. From The Nation:

According to an unpublished study of 259 officer-involved shootings in Chicago between 2006 and 2014, 95 percent of the victims were people of color. While less than a third of Chicago’s population is black, 81 percent of victims were African Americans, according to the study by Georgia State University law professor Nirej Sekhon, based on data from the Independent Police Review Authority, which investigates police shootings. The study found that almost 90 percent of the shootings took place in census tracts where minorities outnumbered whites. Of those, 73 percent occurred in tracts where blacks made up at least 90 percent of the population. The tracts in which the shootings took place are among the poorest in the city.

Yet, Van Dyke is the first Chicago cop that Alvarez has ever charged in an on-duty killing.

Alvarez is hurting minorities and women

Alvarez was elected in 2008 in a six person race after winning 26 percent of the Democratic primary vote, making her the first Hispanic and first female state's attorney in the county. In a race dominated by bickering men, Alvarez managed to stay on the sidelines when things got messy and overly personal. "As they brawled, she often looked ready to blow a whistle and announce that recess was over," reported the Chicago Reader.

In the end, her victory was largely due to her support from women, which "was stimulated largely by her self-financed, pitch-perfect, gender-oriented ad campaign." She also had a solid voter base in Latino communities. And somewhat unexpectedly, Black women were also largely responsible for her victory, as many voted differently than predicted and drained 15 percent of the black vote from Alvarez's opponent.

Yet, there are countless stories of the state's attorney's office exploiting the women and minorities that got her elected.

In 2013, a Hispanic woman testified against her alleged rapist in court. Before she went on the stand, she made clear to the state's attorney's office that she didn't understand English very well, and yet they did not get her a translator. During the defense's cross-examination, the woman was obviously having trouble understanding. From a 2013 Sun-Times article:

The attorney cross-examining the Spanish-speaking woman asked if it would be easier for her to answer with an interpreter, and she said, "Yes, please." Instead, Cook County Judge Laura M. Sullivan asked the defense attorney to rephrase the question, and the preliminary hearing continued[…]

Here's the transcript of the referenced exchange between the woman and the public defender:

Public Defender: “Isn’t it true that you wanted to have sex with him and you wanted him to wear a condom?” Woman: “Yes.” PD: “And he did wear a condom, didn’t he?” Woman: “He didn’t.” PD: “He did not?” Woman: “No.” PD: “Then you wanted to have sex a second time; isn’t that right?” Woman: “No.” PD: “Did you have sex a second time?” Woman: “No.” PD: “You only had sex one time at the [relative’s] house?” Woman: “No. Never.” PD: “I thought you said that you did have sex?” Woman: “No, because I didn’t, that’s why I told my lawyer that sometimes I don’t understand because I don’t completely speak English. I’m trying to explain the best I can.” PD: “Would it be easier for you if you had an interpreter?” Woman: “Yes, please.”

The judge found no probable cause and dismissed the case again Luis Pantoja. A few months later, Pantoja allegedly "brutally sexually assaulted" a 15-year-old girl and was back in custody.

When asked about the interpreter issue, Alvarez's chief of staff Dan Kirk said, "From what I can glean, nobody in that courtroom, you know, came to the conclusion that an interpreter was legitimately needed."

But the woman told the Sun-Times in Spanish that "she warned prosecutors she might need an interpreter. The transcript indicates she previously told a lawyer about her trouble with English. 'That's why they dropped my case, because I didn't understand well,' she said. 'I needed to understand.'"

The story of Tiawanda Moore, told in the November companion piece on Alvarez, underscores her failure to seek justice for women when it is inconvenient to her political goals.

In 2010, Tiawanda Moore filed a complaint with the Chicago Police Department, claiming that she had been sexually harassed by law enforcement. She said that a Chicago police officer had come to her house because of a domestic complaint, asked to speak to her in the bedroom, and then touched and grabbed her breast. After she filed a complaint, she was threatened by two internal affairs investigators who tried to convince her not to pursue the issue. Sensing something shady was going on, Moore recorded her conversation with the investigators on her cell phone. But when she approached authorities with the recording, it wasn’t the officer and investigators that were charged. Instead Alvarez's office charged Moore with violating the state's (now non-existent) wiretapping law. The charge could have landed her in prison for up to 15 years. Luckily, in a great example of jury nullification, she wasn’t convicted. Said one juror, "Everybody thought it was just a waste of time and that (Moore) never should have been charged."

There is more to it than just gender—Alvarez's employees have demonstrated blatant racism, as well. In one case, Assistant State's Attorney Celeste Slack was giving an opening statement during a hearing for defendants Serrano and Montanez.

"The widow saw them," Stack said, pointing to defendants Serrano and Montanez. "These mutts." Mutts? Spectators gasped. "That's flat-out racist," shouted Maria Serrano, Armando's sister. Others voiced agreement, while the prisoners' mothers began weeping. "Objection!" exclaimed Jennifer Bonjean, Serrano's pro bono lawyer. Stack apologized before the judge could rule, but the din in the courtroom continued. "It was cruel," Maria Serrano told me later. "It's not enough they wrongfully take my brother away for 20 years. They want to slap us in the face by calling us trash."

Later, Alvarez's spokesperson called the prosecutor's comment "unfortunate."

Dan Gallagher, chief of Cook County State’s Attorney’s Civil Actions Bureau, resigned last October after the local news station found racist and sexist comments on his Facebook page.

On a post about Al Sharpton, Gallagher commented "sounds like black privilege to me." He referred to First Lady Michelle Obama as "Moosechelle", and on a post about Hillary Clinton he wrote "Da Bitch Ugly." Fox32 Chicago reports that one of his comments "responds to a satirical picture showing President Obama taking away a kid's Legos by saying 'and if you complain, you will be a racist and expelled from school.'"

Alvarez and Gallagher knew each other before he began working at her office. In fact, he donated more than $13,000 to her over five years. They were also Facebook friends.

Alvarez has lacked the racial literacy necessary to pursue justice in a city like Chicago, where segregation and income inequality runs rampant and violence tends to be concentrated in poor minority neighborhoods. As a result, minorities in Chicago are still feeling the heavy hand of criminalization, from police brutality to over-incarceration.

But Alvarez doesn't speak up much against mass incarceration, nor police violence. You won't find her denouncing our criminal justice system that skews against minorities. Instead, Alvarez has framed the conversation about minority injustice as one about victims. "Minority communities are disproportionately victimized," said Alvarez, the first Latina and the first woman to hold the state's attorney's office. “And that's who I'm fighting for each and every day."

She is right—the Chicago Police Department reported last year that 75 percent of homicide victims in the city are black, while another 19 percent are Hispanic. Less than five percent, on the other hand, are white.

But what she doesn't acknowledge—which she has never seemed to acknowledge even to herself—is that minorities in Chicago can be victims of more than street or interpersonal violence. State violence in black communities in Chicago is real, saturated in historical precedence. And Alvarez herself has been a perpetrator of violence on thousands and thousands of minority victims—who have spent too long in jail, have been incarcerated unjustly, and have been over-policed and underprotected. The way she discusses victims of civilian violence as opposed to law enforcement violence suggests that Alvarez's definition of victims is uncomfortably narrow.

Alvarez keeps the public in the dark.

Here's the truth: No one really knows what goes on in Alvarez's office. Bits and pieces are discovered through deep dives on the internet, hours on Lexis Nexis, searches of paper archives and state records. But there are almost no accessible public records from the office directly.

Alvarez is obsessively secretive. She has done everything she can to avoid fulfilling Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and her office doesn't even release an annual report. In other words, she holds an enormous amount of power in the nation's third biggest city, and we have almost no idea what she's doing.

As the Chicago Justice Project said, “The Cook County State's Attorney's Office is very adept at the art of information control.”

Recently, the Chicago Justice Project decided to sue Alvarez's office for repeated violations of the state's open-records law. If they win, the office will have to make public a number of records that the organization has requested through the Freedom of Information Act. According to the group, "Alvarez’s office continues to deny FOIA requests despite a 2014 unanimous Illinois Supreme Court ruling upholding that prosecutors’ offices are public bodies bound by FOIA law."

The CJP has been public about the efforts they've made to obtain data:

In 2015 alone, we filed four FOIA requests that were denied, not based on law but because of Alvarez’s fundamental resistance to transparency. Her office even refused to release data as simple as the type and number of requests they receive and how many they fulfill. In 2011, we put together the Sexual Assault Data Practices and Transparency Task Force. It was co-chaired by the offices of Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Mayor Rahm Emanuel and its members included groups opposing violence against women, academic researchers, policymakers, and other stakeholders. We negotiated with Alvarez’s office for nearly two years to obtain release of anonymized sexual assault case data but the project ground to a halt when they demanded control of which research results would be released to the public.

The CJP has also claimed that "A source within the Chicago Police Department recently informed CJP that for every ten arrests the Chicago Police Department makes for sexual assault the CCSAO prosecutes one.” However, they concede that "There is no way to validate this statistic because access to information about the practices of the CCSAO is restricted."

Last April, Alvarez was also sued by Freddy Martinez, a Chicago activist, for failing to comply with a FOIA requesting details from her office about “stingray” cell phone surveillance technology. The State’s Attorney office spent about 340,000 over 5 years on such equipment and spent $120,000 on legal fees to try to keep details about the equipment hidden. In January, the state’s attorney’s office lost a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

Alvarez is losing support.

In November, Alvarez named the county recorder of deeds, Karen Yarbrough, as her campaign co-chair. The Tribune reported that, "at the time, Yarbrough touted the state's attorney's 'smart approach to crime.'" Yarbrough, who is black, decided not to serve as co-chair after the Laquan MacDonald video was released. From the Tribune:

"It just shows that either she's callous to the sensitivities of different communities or she somehow just doesn't get it. The things that she's done recently are just serious missteps in my opinion. It calls into question whether you have the ability to prosecute on behalf of the citizens of Cook County," said Yarbrough[.] Yarbrough described Alvarez, who got her start in the office when former Mayor Richard M. Daley held the state's attorney's job, as "the same old good-old-boy — more of the same."

State Representative Luis Gutierrez, a prominent Latino politician in the state, also retracted his support for Alvarez. “Laquan McDonald deserved justice: not last week, but thirteen months ago," he said in the letter he sent her. "You failed in this regard. The delay was inexcusable."

What’s more, six of the 10 Hispanic Chicago aldermen, including Alderman Garcia, demanded that Alvarez resign. “As we seek now to heal our city and our county, and as we as a society seek to enact long-overdue reforms of our criminal justice system, we need law enforcement officials who are honest, fair, and professional,” Garcia said. “Too much is at stake to allow Anita Alvarez to continue in the position of Cook County state’s attorney, and accordingly, we call on her today to resign immediately.”

Meanwhile, the Cook County Democratic Party has endorsed Kim Foxx, as has Preckwinkle, Foxx's former boss. Former Governor Pat Quinn has also endorsed Foxx. And grassroots groups have been organizing around Alvarez's removal for months.

Every day it seems her support grows smaller and smaller. Even if she were to win, Alvarez will face much more public scrutiny than she ever has in her 30 year career at the State's Attorney's office.

———

Tomorrow, Kim Foxx and Donna More will also be on the ballot. More is a strange candidate, and arguably unprepared for the office. She has not been a prosecutor for almost 25 years and has been a lobbyist for the gaming industry for decades. Unsurprisingly, her platform translates as slightly out of touch. She stresses her dedication to prosecuting everyone equally, but does not have a strong enough platform for addressing inequality, and she does not seem adequately aware of the lack of trust that exists between the prosecutor's office and poor minority neighborhoods.

Foxx is the much stronger candidate. Her platform includes addressing issues like the school-to-prison pipeline and improving juvenile justice. She also wants to implement progressive practices like restorative justice, which has proven successful in other jurisdictions. She wants to reduce waste and spending, including ending the practice of every senior staff member being given a city car. She wants to increase the diversity of the office, engage the community, and fight against those illegal practices that disproportionately harm minorities and the poor, such as wage theft.

What's more, Foxx has been continually outspoken about the racial disparity in Cook County's incarcerated population. "I am deeply concerned about the gross disparity of the Cook County Jail's population. 86% of Cook County's inmates are Black and Latino, despite only representing 50% of the county population. Additionally, the juvenile justice system is comprised of 94% Blacks and Latinos. The issue of disproportionate minority contact with the criminal justice system is not unique to Cook County, however there has been no efforts on behalf of the current State's Attorney to address these disturbing trends," she stated to the Daily Herald.

She has also said she would prosecute law enforcement officers that commit misconduct. When asked about the Laquan McDonald case, Foxx stated, " As State's Attorney, I would not have given Officer Van Dyke 400 days to be on the streets in uniform as a threat to public safety before charging him with murder."

———

There is much left to be said, but perhaps the end is time for brevity.

It is not easy to be a prosecutor. Alvarez's job is tough and requires an infinite balancing. She needs a good relationship with law enforcement, she needs to look good, she needs to keep crime in check. She needs campaign money.

But Alvarez has been so focused on the political benefits and the personal gain, she has lost sight of her job's ultimate requirement. She must ensure justice, justice in all its nuance and complicated layers. She must make the community better, not worse. She must focus on rehabilitation, not just prosecution. She must be fair. She must be thorough. She must be unbiased. She must be transparent.

Alvarez has failed in almost every way. She has betrayed Chicago citizens over and over. Tomorrow it is time to vote her out.

For Part I of this article, click here.