I am deeply troubled by Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke’s decision to expand the Expedited Felony Review (a misnomer) pilot program citywide in low-level gun cases. This policy change will allow Chicago police officers to file charges in unlicensed gun possession cases directly, without initial scrutiny by a prosecutor who was not involved in the arrest and has the ability to take a critical look at the evidence.
A well-run felony review unit, under proper leadership, can help screen out cases that are not supported by probable cause or are tainted by police misconduct. This can prevent wrongful charges and convictions and expose bad actors in the Chicago Police Department.
O’Neill Burke’s unconditional faith in the CPD is wholly unwarranted. It ignores the U.S. Department of Justice’s lengthy report documenting serious patterns of misconduct, particularly by officers in units that frequently arrest people on gun charges, leading to the federal consent decree.
What’s more, there is simply no reason to trust Chicago police. Just last week, an investigation by the Invisible Institute and ProPublica revealed CPD promoted two officers even after Civilian Office of Police Accountability investigators found they had engaged in sexual misconduct.
Past misconduct and abuse has and continues to cost the city millions of dollars every year. If a robust felony review unit had been in place when former Chicago Police Detective Reynaldo Guevara was manipulating eyewitnesses and arresting innocent people, scores of residents would have been spared years in prison.
Misguided decisions like O’Neill Burke’s don’t do justice to anyone affected by a prosecution, including victims, people who are arrested and impacted communities. Similarly, it fails to contend with history, including Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge’s torture victims and the over 180 people who collectively spent approximately 200 years locked up based on evidence fabricated by former Chicago Police Sgt. Ronald Watts and his crew. These victims and their families, many of whom are Black and Brown, could have been spared the trauma and disruption of these wrongful convictions had a prosecutor applied scrutiny to charges before bringing them to court.
O’Neill Burke’s policy fails to acknowledge the fact that CPD has not earned the benefit of the doubt. Instead of taking away scrutiny, the state’s attorney should be increasing it.
Daniel Massoglia, director, Civil Rights Clinic, First Defense Legal Aid
Don’t shortchange Chicago Public Library
Chicago public libraries are lifelines for thousands of students, including my younger brother, a high school junior who studies at city library branches every day after school. For many young people like him, our libraries are sanctuaries for focus, imagination and opportunity. I was deeply concerned to learn that Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposed 2026 budget includes a 50% reduction to the public library’s collections funding. I urge the mayor and city leaders to reconsider that decision.
Public libraries are the heart of Chicago’s ecosystem, shaping civic life by providing equal access to learning across all 77 neighborhoods from Englewood to Lawndale to Lincoln Park.
On July 16, 1960, my grandfather, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, was first jailed for protesting for the right to use a public library in Greenville, South Carolina. Sixty-five years later, I am defending those same public institutions in my city. Sharing my grandfather’s passion for books, I founded my nonprofit, Handwoven Youth, which aims to raise literacy rates, amplify diverse stories and increase opportunities for young Chicagoans.
Mayor Johnson, you’ve spoken often of your desire to be “the education mayor.” Separating the library from the city’s educational mission is overlooking one of Chicago’s most effective and equitable learning tools. According to a Better Government Association analysis, the Chicago Public Library is among the city’s most efficient and well-managed departments, spending 99% of its collections budget last year and maintaining one of the highest fiscal accuracy rates in city government.
Chicago’s 81 public library locations are community anchors, often providing safe havens for students and families before and after school.They keep residents warm in the winter, cool in the summer and connected to public services and resources. Defunding the system would jeopardize many Chicagoans’ need for spaces that not only offer books but safety.
Fully restoring the library’s funding would require just 0.1% of the city’s total budget, roughly the equivalent of two days of the Chicago Police Department’s spending. And because the library is supported by its own dedicated property tax levy, restoring funds would not reduce other essential services.
Chicago should reaffirm its commitment to literacy and maintaining public spaces that benefit to all. Equal access to knowledge, culture and safety should be a priority. I urge the restoration of the library’s full funding to reflect the values we proclaim and the city we aspire to be.
Skye Alex Jackson, founder, Handwoven Youth
Not Christian to deny atrocities in Gaza
I graduated from the Moody Bible Institute believing truth mattered more than comfort. At Moody, I learned that Christians should speak the truth even when it’s costly. That we should, as Jesus did, resist those who subjugate or erase a people. This moral conviction instilled in me is what compels me to write.
Moody has long supported theologies shaped by Zionist ideology. But in recent weeks, many in school leadership have gone further, denying the genocide unfolding in Gaza, promoting organizations that reject the reality of Israeli apartheid and framing the crisis in ways that equate all Palestinians with Hamas militancy. These statements ignore the reality on the ground in Palestine and fall short of the ethical formation Moody claims to offer its students.
I recently returned from the occupied West Bank. In Bethlehem, steps from the birthplace of Jesus, a Christian man told me his brother had been taken by the Israel Defense Forces and has been missing for more than 50 days. Muslim mothers described being kicked out of their refugee camp in the middle of the night, beaten and left in the streets with nowhere to go. In the Jordan Valley, Bedouin families told me about daily harassment, theft and arson by extremist settlers intent on driving them from their ancestral lands.
I walked streets lined with shuttered businesses and drove on roads designated for Palestinians that took two to three times longer to travel than the roads for Israeli settlers. Everywhere I turned, walls and checkpoints cut communities apart. What I saw was an entire people being systematically erased, eroded and dehumanized.
Telling the truth about this requires no political allegiance. It requires honesty and a refusal to accept narratives that reduce millions of ordinary Palestinians to the actions of Hamas. Such framing gives American Christians — and others — permission to look away.
Let me be clear: To deny or minimize a genocide — or respond with silence — is a sin. Moody’s words carry weight, shaping how future Christian leaders understand the world. I don’t believe Moody intends harm, but impact matters.
As an alumnus, I ask Moody’s leaders to listen to Palestinians — many of whom are Christians — to human rights experts — including at least two Israeli organizations — and to those living with the consequences of these narratives. This is not about politics, but about whether a Christian institution can tell the truth about human suffering.
The Rev. Dave Davis, chief operating officer, the Telos Group, Glen Ellyn
LaSalle Street building not worthy of landmark status
I was puzzled reading about the city’s preliminary landmark recommendation and now approval by the Commission on Chicago Landmarks for the bland office tower at 30 N. LaSalle Street in Lee Bey’s recent columns. Perhaps I am biased by having worked in a city department in the building for several decades. I agree with Bey that the building is, at best, mediocre and that the fact that it replaced Louis Sullivan’s masterpiece Stock Exchange — where architectural photographer and preservation activist Richard Nickel met his maker while taking a few final photos — is tragically ironic.
But reading a bit deeper, Bey seems to be suggesting that the city’s recommendation and vote somehow relates to the developer’s need to fund a residential conversion of the building. If so, this is well outside the criteria of the landmark ordinance. The Sun-Times photo accompanying Lee’s initial column shows several other humdrum glass and metal boxes about which similar unconvincing arguments could be made. If what is “historic” and deserving of preservation is now up for sale, we are truly going down a sorry path.
Andrew S. Mine, Rogers Park
An ‘architectural travesty’
I respectfully disagree with the Commission on Chicago Landmarks granting landmark status to the generic steel-and-glass tower that replaced Louis Sullivan’s gorgeous Chicago Stock Exchange Building of 1894, which was shamefully demolished in the early 1970s. It’s not an architectural “irony.” It’s an architectural travesty.
The city’s Department of Planning — which spearheaded this bogus effort intended to cut taxes for a powerful real estate firm, which is seeking to convert one of the Loop’s many white-elephant office buildings into housing — calls the McSkyscraper at 30 N. LaSalle Street “exemplary.” But exemplary of what? Only shortsighted greed, poor urban planning and Chicago’s willingness to vandalize its history in order to enrich vision-free, clout-rich developers.
Sullivan’s motto was “form follows function.” But his Downtown masterpiece was razed to make way for a hulking monolith that never had form and now lacks function. Hence, the desperate attempt to turn it into something it was never designed to be, and to claim virtues for it that it never possessed. Kudos to Sun-Times architecture critic Lee Bey for spotlighting this outrageous scam.
Hugh Iglarsh, Old Town
City drivers need relief
The new Inrix Global Traffic Scorecard placed Chicago as the worst U. S. city for gridlock and third in the world, behind Mexico City and Istanbul. Most of this was due to our congested expressways. Perhaps the “Crosstown Expressway,” part of the original expressway plan, would have helped.
When it comes to city streets, the Chicago Department of Transportation doesn’t help to alleviate gridlock, as they decrease the number and width of lanes for motorized vehicles with bumpouts, large safety islands, protected bike lanes, bus stops in the middle of the street and concrete in the walkways — all which cost money. Chicago needs more City Council members who are concerned about this, and drivers need an advocacy group to fight for us.
Larry E. Nazimek, Logan Square
Holiday truce
Out of the massive horrors of World War I came not one peace but two. The earlier and lesser known of them was the Christmas truce of the war’s first winter in France in 1914. Conceived in the trenches with the opposing lines within shouting distance of each other, this featured revelry all down the long Western Front, with provisions and accommodations such as they were. All this and more was recorded in various online sources. There were even impromptu soccer matches reportedly staged in the mud in the vast no-man’s land between the lines, improvised goals fashioned with caps and helmets.
In principle, doesn’t this sound like something we could use in America right now? Let’s declare a ceasefire on the politically motivated domestic right-wing/left-wing sniping this holiday season. Let’s invest some time in contemplating that, ideology aside, all of us are pretty much functionally alike. As indeed mankind as a class has always been.
It’s an indispensable truth to recall, and may this awareness continue beyond the immediate set of festivities.
Tom Gregg, Niles