County State's attorney, the Honorable Aileen Burke.

Good morning all.

Before we start, I wanted to give Chairman Daly a little gift from me that I think would be useful.

It's a little stress gavel for him.

Yeah.

And if somebody's talking too long, feel free to use it.

Thank you.

Good morning all.

Thank you, Chairman Daly.

Thank you all at commissioners.

And this year, I am really kind of excited to tell you all of the things that we have done with the funds that you gave us last year and what we're hoping to do next year.

So as the nation's second largest prosecutor's office, we are not only responsible for prosecuting everything from traffic cases to murders, but we are unique in a major city's prosecutor's office in that we have a very large bureau that represents Cook County, the Civil Bureau.

Throughout this office, we have dedicated personnel from assistant states attorneys, investigators, admins, and victim specialists.

I am so fortunate to be able to lead more than 1,300 people who are committed to our mission.

Our mission is to uphold the law.

Protect the people of Cook County, seek justice for victims, and safeguards the public's trust in our justice system.

Can we chief of staff, Don Black, Chief Assistant States Attorney for Policy and External Affairs of At Loisen, and the man who needs no introduction, the Chief Financial Officer John Hurrihan.

Many of our Bureau Chiefs are also in the gallery today.

Our office is comprised of nine different bureaus criminal, juvenile, special victims, multi-jurisdiction, legal resources, civil administration, and victim services.

When I appeared before this committee nine months ago, I shared my vision of rebuilding the Cook County State's Attorney's Office into the most effective and highly trained prosecutors' office in the country.

We have taken the resources which you allotted to us last year, and I would like to briefly walk you through where we are today.

To begin, the crux of our success during this fiscal year has started with staffing.

When I took office, every courtroom and every unit across the Cook County State's Attorney's Office was critically understaffed.

Those vacancies hampered our ability to do our job and created a backlog that reverberated across every part of the criminal justice system.

It meant that victims and families had to wait longer for justice, come to court more frequently, and relive their trauma with every delay.

It meant that communication between defense attorneys and prosecutors slowed, making it harder to resolve cases efficiently.

It meant defendants did not get resolution to their cases in a timely manner.

It meant that assistant states attorneys were forced to juggle unsustainable workloads, leading to an exodus of talented prosecutors from this office.

Our turnover rate exceeded 8%, and with every departure, we lost valuable courtroom experience and institutional knowledge.

But with support and investment from this board, we have reversed that trend.

Over the last year, we launched an aggressive hiring effort to rebuild the ranks of this office to a point where this office could perform its function.

We have focused on adequately staffing courtrooms, recruiting exceptional graduates from law schools across the country, and bringing experienced prosecutors back to public service.

Today, we are on the verge of reaching an important milestone.

For the first time in at least a decade, the Cook County State's Attorney's Office will have virtually zero attorney vacancies.

To put that in perspective, consider this.

More attorneys working here means we have more capacity to focus on our work, and we are already seeing tangible and positive impacts of this.

Just one example of this is over the last several years, our Civil Actions Bureau contracted with outside counsel for over 300 worker workers' compensation cases that it didn't have the bandwidth to handle.

Now we utilize outside counsel for two cases in workers' compensation.

And the only reason that those two cases have remained with outside counsel is because they are at the end stage of litigation.

This is a tremendous savings to the county.

In August, we will welcome a class of more than 90 new bar takers.

Nearly 40% of these brand spanking new lawyers come from communities of color, reflecting the residents that we serve.

That is significantly above the national average, where just 23% of the legal profession in 2024 were lawyers of color.

Because we are beginning to meet our most basic staffing needs, we are now able to do more than triage the caseload.

We are now able to launch some innovative programs that are alternatives to detention and expand deferred prosecution programs.

As prosecutors, we have a unique opportunity to identify individuals who can benefit from early intervention to help them get back on the right track.

I'm really proud of the work that we are doing in this space and the creative ways that we are finding funding and external partners to bring these programs to life.

Some of the programs are the juvenile detention alternative program.

It was partly funded by the Steens Family Foundation.

The targeted abuser call in domestic violence program, private funding from Arnold Ventures, public transit, including an internal training team and a public external task force to tackle transit crimes.

The gun accountability program, which was the result of legislation that we championed, we already have more than 90 participants enrolled.

Domestic violence homicide unit to address the uptick that we've seen in domestic violence in 2025 and 2026.

Last year we asked for more resources to create a training curriculum for every single level of the Cook County State's Attorney's Office.

The reason why we needed that is a third of our attorneys have been practicing three years or less.

That means they're very new at this.

So we've made good on that plan, and we've tripled our training budget compared to last year.

We are enhancing how our prosecutors and our staff are doing their job.

To formalize our professional development, we have a director of training, Cordelia Copelson, who came to us from the AG's office and is a former ASA who knows the programming our prosecutors need to be at the top of their game.

In the last six months alone, the training department has put on more than 200 trainings.

I refer to Cordelia as the Energizer Bunny because she is always so busy.