There’s been great coverage of the successful effort to elect the excellent Kim Foxx and throw Anita Alvarez out of office. Among Alvarez’s many, many execrable positions, she’s most known nationally for waiting 13 months to bring charges against the Chicago police officer who murdered 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014.
But as-yet unreported on this site is the successful defeat of Tim McGinty by challenger Michael O’Malley. McGinty oversaw (and many say purposely poisoned) the grand jury proceedings filed no charges against officers responsible for the police murder of an unarmed child, 12-year-old Tamir Rice.
As Slate reports:
Together the two results represent a major victory for the Black Lives Matter movement, whose organizers have now decisively demonstrated their ability to mobilize voters and change the direction of local politics.
I’m not sure Black Lives Matter (and the movement it inspired) necessarily aspires to mobilizing voters as its primary goal — in founding the organization, activists Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors wrote:
Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.
So political intervention is just one aspect — “political” being broader than just electoral efforts — and the primary goal is reasserting Black humanity. There are lots of organizations under the big umbrella Movement for Black Lives (or racial justice generally). And it’s unfortunate that those groups get erased:
But it’s still clear that racial justice activists were behind these two successful campaigns, and this is a big win for them.
Again, from Slate:
It’s rare for incumbent prosecutors to be voted out of office. According to one study, they win re-election 95 percent of the time, and typically they run unopposed. [...]
Foxx, who won by a huge margin Tuesday night, benefited from a highly organized and relentless opposition campaign against Alvarez staged primarily by young activists. Leading up to Tuesday’s vote, supporters of Black Lives Matter buffeted Alvarez with one protest after another: On Feb. 17, her speech at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics was cut short when members of a group called Black Youth Project 100 started chanting “We will not let Laquan be covered up!” The following week, activists interrupted a forum with Alvarez and Foxx by standing up and counting to 16—a reference to the number of bullets that killed McDonald. The catchphrase “Bye Anita” showed up on posters and T-shirts and, of course, as a hashtag on Twitter.
Kim Foxx is straightforwardly fantastic — she “believes the justice system puts too many black and Latino men in jail and prison, and sees prosecutors as key figures in the push to end mass incarceration.” She ran on criminal justice reform generally, not just on the murder of Laquan McDonald and mishandling of the case against the police.
Michael O’Malley is much less of a movement candidate. McGinty’s mishandling of the murder of Tamir Rice was not necessarily O’Malley’s biggest argument against the DA. O’Malley refused to say whether he thought the police officer who murdered Tamir had broken the law. And consequently it’s not easy to say that he lost solely as a result of the anger over Tamir’s death — but it’s clear that this played some role.
And as Leon Neyfakh summarizes:
[W]hat appears to be changing from the law-and-order days of the recent past is that, in 2016, the scandal that can get you bounced out of office as a prosecutor involves not being hard enough on cops.
Congrats to activists in Chicago and Cleveland for these huge wins, and looking forward to their future power!