Frank Main
Staff reporter
Frank Main began his newspaper career in 1987 in Tulsa, Oklahoma and worked in Louisiana and Kentucky, covering local politics and crime. He was on the ground for Hurricanes Andrew and Katrina, the Bosnia conflict, the first Gulf War and the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in New York. In 2011, Main, another reporter and a photographer won the Pulitzer Prize for their stories in the Sun-Times about a ‘no-snitch code’ among Chicago’s victims of gun violence. For that project, Main spent six months embedded with homicide detectives. He’s a graduate of Emory University and Northwestern University’s graduate journalism program and teaches journalism at Loyola University.
Alexandra Block, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, said the Chicago police department’s approach to reform has amounted to “a box-checking exercise,” and the promises of overhauling the culture haven’t been kept.
COPA Chief Administrator Andrea Kersten raised “grave concerns” about the officers in a letter to Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling last week.
An exchange of gunfire during a traffic stop last month killed the driver and wounded one of the several Chicago police officers involved in the gunfight.
Federal prosecutors are less likely than those in most other places — including New York and Los Angeles — to approve gun charges. Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul is taking up some of those rejected cases.
Another federal judge in Chicago who also has dismissed gun cases based on the same Supreme Court ruling says the high court’s decision in what’s known as the Bruen case will “inevitably lead to more gun violence, more dead citizens and more devastated communities.”
Reed’s life sentence was commuted by Gov. J.B. Pritzker in 2021, but Reed’s lawyer says that doesn’t prevent prosecutors from retrying him.
One critic says suing a gun maker over its design is like suing an automaker for cars that go too fast and crash.
Joseph Burgos was caught at Chicago’s downtown Greyhound bus station with a backpack full of opioid pills, authorities say.
In her lawsuit in 2020, Officer Cynthia Donald accused Johnson of forcing her to have sex and continuing to harass her after she was demoted.