Lightfoot’s big problem – Wirepoints

By: Matt Rosenberg*

Chicago’s Mayor Lori Lightfoot claims to believe police are so compromised they can’t even protect a politically-charged statue on a flatbed truck without getting shot. We live in a city ruled by fear and it makes us dramatically less safe. Policy reforms and actual political leadership are needed to reclaim Chicago’s streets from the shooters, killers, carjackers, armed robbers, thieves, and race-hustlers who run the show. 

Our current backdrop is both salty and sad. In early March came a lawsuit against Lightfoot by an ex-Chicago Park District attorney named George P. Smyrniotis. He alleged she’d used locker-room talk to attack his work to settle a lawsuit by an Italian-American civic group. They wanted a politically-canceled, sequestered statue of Christopher Columbus to be restored to its rightful place in Chicago’s Arrigo Park. Smyrniotis was negotiating a compromise to let the statue ride in a Columbus Day Parade, for twenty minutes. This at the behest of Michael Kelly, then boss of the Park District. 

And yes: that’s how strange things have gotten here. We politically imprison statues because Antifa says so, and then debate whether to grant them a brief reprieve for a parade.

According to the lawsuit, Lightfoot suddenly called a Zoom meeting last October before the parade and said to Smyrniotis and Park District General Counsel Timothy King, “you d*cks, what the f*** were you thinking? You make some kind of secret agreement with the Italians, what are you doing, you are out there measuring your d*cks with the Italians seeing who’s got the biggest d*ck…I am trying to keep the Chicago Police officers from being shot.” 

Somehow the real thrust of the matter was overlooked. Lightfoot – far from her concerned stage acting in response to Chicago’s escalating violent crime – lives in fear of the criminal class. She actually thought guarding a statue in a parade might lead to gunfire at police from anti-Columbus protestors. 

Lightfoot has been running scared from the bottle-throwers and the hard-core thugs for so long that our city has devolved into a Terror Dome and a national punchline. Chicago’s reputation, safety, and economic viability have become gravely threatened. Now more than ever we need a policy-savvy grown-up on High Command in City Hall.

Murders in Chicago just reached a 25-year high and granular homicide rate analyses reveal alarming truths: 

• The 2021 homicide rate for blacks in Chicago was 81.7 per 100,000, far higher than any major city nationally in recent years. 
• In 2021 the combined homicide rate for the city’s 20 most dangerous community areas was a staggering 90.5 per 100,000 – and for the 20 safest areas a dramatically low 2.4 per 100,000. That gap is greater than at any point in the last sixty years, according to the University of Chicago Crime Lab. 

That’s not all.

• The city’s 1,836 carjackings in 2021 were 204 percent more than in 2019. 
• Reported expressway shootings in Cook County more than quintupled from 51 in 2019, to 273 in 2021, notes an Illinois State Police data dashboard on the subject. 
• Reported violent crimes on Chicago’s transit system, the CTA, in 2021 were almost 40 percent greater than in 2015. 

Armed robbery crews pop out of carjacked SUVs at will, downtown and on the Near North Side, to Hoover up wallets and smartphones from pedestrians. Yet City Hall has all but ruled out car and foot pursuits of criminals by police. 

Foot patrols are another political third rail. Lightfoot’s Director of Constitutional Policing and Reform, Robert Boik, in an autumn 2021 meeting accented her administration’s ongoing hesitation about letting cops out of their cars in high-crime areas. The Trib reported, “Boik, speaking on behalf of CPD, said the department needs to do a better job of ‘going to where people are’ rather than asking people to come to them. That could mean efforts like getting out of patrol cars and walking through neighborhoods on foot, he said.”

 “Could mean?” That’s weak.

Chicago clearly needs more cops on foot, in hot spots. Almost 24-7, and 365 – not just every now and then. Targeted foot patrols under Rahm Emanuel and then-Chief Garry McCarthy helped put a material dent in Chicago violent crime during Operation Impact in 2013-14. 

Targeted foot patrols also dovetailed closely with crime reductions in Philadelphia, in San Francisco, in London, and yielded myriad benefits – The Police Foundation learned – in New Haven, Kalamazoo, Evanston, Cambridge, and even Portland. 

Police reform activists are ever-ready to call foot patrols “over-policing.” It’s a false narrative.

As black Chicago lawyer Sandra Wortham, the sister of a slain Chicago cop, has stated, “I cringe when I hear people say black communities are over-policed. My neighborhood is not over-policed…I have never, ever had a neighbor ask me how we can reduce the police presence in our neighborhood. I am, however, consistently asked how we can increase our allocation of police resources.” 

Similarly, a Wirepoints/Real Clear Opinion Research poll in October 2020 found 77 percent of black Chicagoans wanted police to spend more or the same amount of time in their communities. The figure was 87 percent for Hispanics and 79 percent for whites. 

Another false narrative is that even as crime reports proliferate, overall the sense of danger is exaggerated because serious crime remains rare and isolated. In truth, crime is much worse than news reports and official data indicate. 

Nationally, 60 percent of non-murder violent victimizations aren’t even reported to police, nor are two-thirds of property victimizations, according to The Bureau of Justice Statistics. In Chicago where reprisal fears are great, unreported major crimes are likely to run higher. 

Compounding our degraded public safety, Chicago has a depleted, overworked, and demoralized police workforce. Mayor Lightfoot and more City Council members must use their bully pulpits to vocally support police. Three aldermen recently did so. It’s a start. But the policing landscape in Chicago remains a political Superfund site. Retired CPD lieutenant Bob Angone nailed it in a January letter to the Sun-Times.

Angone wrote, “…the limitations placed on Chicago’s cops…include limited car chases, limited foot chases, an almost nonexistent stop-and-frisk policy…and the institution of a time-consuming investigatory stop report that immediately reduced street stops by as much as 80 percent…the department has been significantly reduced in numbers both by retirements and officers seeking other employment.” 

CPD lost 900 officers in 2021 but graduated only 247 from its training academy. Chief David Brown wants to see another 520 to 600 Chicago police recruits graduating this year while some aldermen are calling for as many as 1,200 or 2,000 new cops to fight a growing “sense of lawlessness.” At just shy of 12,000 now, CPD is down 1,000 from approved officer staffing levels even after 614 vacancies were disappeared by Lightfoot to help balance the city’s 2021 budget. 

Monday is the first-shot deadline for city employees including nearly 3,000 police who’ve opted for reasons including natural immunity to decline the Covid vaccine process. They could theoretically be placed on no-pay status or even fired, though Lightfoot says she’ll take a go-slow, collaborative approach to compliance. Still, a dozen aldermen concerned about police manpower are urging Lightfoot in a recent letter to avoid disciplining or firing cops over vaccination. They want a comprehensive policy in place first, which considers the science of natural immunity.

Alderman Anthony Napolitano (41st) is a former Chicago firefighter and cop. He told the Sun-Times, “This is gonna be probably the bloodiest of all summers because we’re in lawless land right now. We just can’t afford to lose anybody right now at all…The pandemic is coming to an end. We’re gonna hit variants. No one’s denying that. But the variants are weakening. People who were in the field during this whole thing have built an immunity to this. They’ve caught COVID, and they beat it without being vaccinated.” 

Angone in his January letter adds that CPD, “…is a beleaguered, fatigued, low-morale department that needs all the support leaders can muster…” 

Yet police suspensions and firings over vaccinations loom and Lightfoot shrinks away from strong policing like a scared turtle. The optics of serious, sustained foot patrols in crime hot spots are too racially charged for her. The toe-in-the-water timidity of her police reform honcho Boik on foot patrols is one big tell. 

How could she back blanketing the pavement with cops in Chicago’s killing fields when she thinks they can’t even protect themselves guarding a Columbus statue in an Italian Pride parade? A statue ludicrously banished in the first place because she fears the Progressive mob.

You never give in to the shakedown artists, Ms. Mayor. Or it only gets worse. 

What you do is hire some muscle. A lot of muscle – in this city at this grave time. And then within sensible boundaries, you give them real license to operate.

*Matt Rosenberg is senior editor of Wirepoints, and author of What Next, Chicago? Notes of a Pissed-Off Native Son.” He has worked in journalism, public policy, and communications for more than three decades.

Read more from Wirepoints:

• Five reasons why Gov. Pritzker’s gas tax “relief” isn’t relief at all
• Another pension sweetener? State lawmaker proposes a week of paid mental health leave for teachers
• Illinois used to have one competitive advantage over its neighbors: its flat tax. Now that’s largely gone
• This is our best moment to draw a line between reformers and anti-reformers
• Gov. Pritzker can’t take credit for Illinois’ improved budget projections when it’s the feds that bailed the state out