If Cook County Commissioner Richard Boykin (1st) had his way, the offender in last
week’s armed robbery at the BP gas station in Oak Park, which left one man wounded from a bullet in the leg, would be charged as a domestic terrorist.
Boykin wants shooters and their accomplices to be slapped with the charge in order to mitigate Chicago’s outbreak of gun violence. But whether that law would also apply to shooters and accomplices in areas of Cook County beyond Chicago is not clear. Boykin couldn’t be reached for comment.
Boykin announced his proposal at a press conference in May on the fifth floor of the Cook County Building. At the press event, Boykin also unveiled a collage dedicated to victims of gun violence, noting that the artwork “will be a reminder of our responsibility to come up with policies to reduce this violence.”
Boykin called gun violence offenders and their assailants a “minority of the community” that is “determined to destabilize communities.” He added, “We must put an end to it, or else this violence will put an end to us.”
Boykin also outlined a seven-point plan for violence reduction that includes holding parenting workshops, creating job training programs and expanding drug courts, along with “other therapeutic court models.”
But it’s his idea to charge shooters and assailants, many of them gang members within Chicago, as domestic terrorists that has gotten the most attention and incited widespread criticism from media outlets and community members.
According to the Bean Soup Times, Boykin’s push for domestic terrorism charges “ignores the history and the facts and gets people to waste time and energy on a solution that has already been proven to fail.”
And on its Twitter feed, the Bean Soup Times noted that the charges could “result in shoddy police work and false convictions.”
The publication’s criticisms prompted Boykin to respond with a tweet of his own, which noted that the domestic terrorism charges could be “a valuable law enforcement tool” and that the charges “bring investigative resources to bear that are essential.”
Ronald Lawless, an Oak Park-based political and educational consultant who ran against Boykin during last year’s race for the commissioner’s seat, said that there are “critical differences between the black ‘gangbangers’ and ISIS militants.”
Lawless said, unlike terrorists such as the Ku Klux Klan, “there is nothing political about” the behavior of Chicago gang members.
“Maybe Commissioner Boykin would be more careful about [calling] young black men [terrorists] if they became political in their actions,” Lawless said. “Because those terrorists could vote him out of office.”
Austin attorney Blake Sercye, who also ran against Boykin in last year’s election, said that the source of domestic terrorism laws is the Patriot Act, “a federal statute that, although probably well-intentioned, has been used to justify domestic and international civil and human rights violations for more than a decade.”
During an interview with Fox 32, Boykin, an attorney by profession, said his idea has been tested in New York, but that the courts “tossed out that case.” He said because the case wasn’t tossed out by the U.S. Supreme Court, the charges can still be written into law in Illinois.
In April, Boykin drew media attention after pressuring Mayor Rahm Emanuel to add more police officers in the Austin neighborhood. Adam Salzman, Boykin’s policy director and an Oak Park village trustee, said as a result of the commissioner’s pressure, the sheriff “deployed its Mobile Command Center and more than 70 its police officers to the Austin community [on May 6] to provide local law enforcement.”
Boykin is planning a joint summit on gun violence between Cook County and the City of Chicago for Sat., June 13 at 10 a.m. at the University of Illinois’s Chicago School of Public Health.
CONTACT: michael@oakpark.com