“Chicago, like all other major cities, has areas that have higher crime rates than others,” says retired New York City police officer Jillian Snider, now an adjunct lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “While Chicago does have higher violent crime rates compared to the national average, other cities such as Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Chattanooga, Dallas, Memphis, Nashville, are experiencing higher rates of crime than Chicago.”

“The referendum question is misleading and manipulative, and we believe it is important to see this through,” Farzin Parang, the executive director of the Building Owners and Managers Association of Chicago, said in a statement. “The Appellate Court’s opinion implies that an illegal referendum cannot be challenged until after an election — after voters have already been harmed.”

Reconstruction Era Reparations Act Now, or RERAN, founder Howard Ray Jr. said slavery took away the ability to create generational wealth for Blacks, and those in Chicago are living that reality. “We need to be isolated, taken care of and brought back into society,” Ray said. They want 400,000 signatures to support a referendum on the November ballot.

For the Soldier Field project, the Bears and the NFL kicked in a combined $200 million. The Illinois Sports Facilities Authority issued bonds for the remaining $398 million, backed by Chicago’s 2% hotel tax. But because of the way the deal was structured – and several refinancings later – the ISFA now owes $375 million in principal and $214 million in interest on those bonds. Also backed by the hotel tax under ISFA’s jurisdiction is $50 million in debt on Guaranteed Rate.

Mayor Brandon Johnson said Chicago learned lessons from Los Angeles in crafting the referendum now before voters, and he defends the measure. “There’s an ordinance that will follow, in the event that this particular referendum passes, that ordinance will ultimately establish that revenue stream, the outcomes, how we appropriate is those dollars,” Johnson said.

CTU Vice President Jackson Potter wrote in an email “Do you remember your first time? Were you nervous? Excited? Confused at what to do? What if instead of standing in a long line and feeling overwhelmed by a mountain of conflicting information, you were able to get voting support from the candidates themselves and vote for the first time alongside your friends and classmates? That’s exactly what we want to offer voting age students from CPS schools across the city at the Students Power Forum.”

In 2020, the first year of COVID, Cook County evictions dropped to about 3,000 — about 10,000 less than the year previous. Then they dipped even further in 2021 before moving back up.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago is one of the busiest in the nation, handling everything from terrorism, gang conspiracies and bank robberies to financial fraud and political corruption. The office has more than 300 employees, including about 130 prosecutors and more than two dozen attorneys who focus on civil litigation.

Robbery reports citywide were down 1 percent from last year’s decade-high pace as of last Monday. However, the Town Hall District, based in Lakeview, is not enjoying any improvement. In fact, robberies are up 89 percent compared to last year. Sunday’s other robberies occurred in the Shakespeare District, where cases are up 24 percent this year.

No arrests were made in any of the incidents.

Ed Burke’s wife, Anne Burke, served as a member of the state’s highest court between 2006 and 2022 and was its chief justice for the final three years of her tenure; Four of the court’s justices reviewing the state Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission’s petition for an interim suspension of Ald. Burke’s law license served alongside her. “It is a most Chicago and most Illinois of absurdities that you have identified,” Civic Federation President Joe Ferguson said when asked about the Supreme Court’s surprising incapacity to discipline the former alderman.

In a statement provided by a spokesperson, CEO and President Kevin Warren said the Bears will contribute over $2 billion to build a stadium and improve open spaces “for all families, fans and the general public to enjoy” in Chicago. While the team hasn’t said if the stadium will be located adjacent to Soldier Field, the lawmaker did say that the project will provide access to the lakefront.

Micky Horstman, of the Illinois Policy Institute: “… (Mayor Brandon) Johnson hopes using progressive jargon will mobilize the young voters who elected him to support this unaffordable tax hike. Young voters trying to ‘do good’ should be wary of Johnson’s real estate transfer tax hike: It’s not going to deliver on his promises, which are pretty vague, and it will hit the places where people who are unhoused are most likely to find jobs.”