In the passage of just a few days, Lori Lightfoot’s mayoralty transitioned from initial cool command of the new job to a kerfuffle over an unproved rumor to another blistering putdown at the start of a City Council meeting.
The recipient this time was Patrick Murray, vice president of the Fraternal Order of Police. He had the temerity, at the start of Wednesday’s council meeting, to criticize Lightfoot for not including the FOP in the police reform process.
The mayor pushed back. “Any time the FOP wants to do any other thing than object and obstruct (reform), I’ll be more than willing to meet with you,” Lightfoot said.
The crowd in the council chambers loved it, clapping loudly for the style and substance of Lightfoot’s remarks.
The dismissive smackdown is becoming a signature of the mayor’s first days in office. She similarly silenced Ald. Edward Burke, 14th, at her first council meeting. With this one, Lightfoot regained her footing after an unsteady few days. A few days earlier, the Better Government Association, of which I am president, called her out for repeating an unsubstantiated rumor that before the violent Memorial Day weekend the FOP had told its members, “If you see some criminal activity, just lay back, do nothing.”
Lightfoot seemed not to realize that the mayor of the city of Chicago can’t deal in gossip. Words and facts matter. Lightfoot had said she hoped the rumor wasn’t true. But simply by repeating it she breathed life into it.
It cost Lightfoot two days of trying to undo the damage. This yielded two early lessons for the first-time elected official. First, don’t circulate rumors. Next, don’t turn a one-day story into something bigger with unconvincing denials and obfuscations.
Spin control doesn’t come naturally to Lightfoot, and she hasn’t needed much of it. The public elected her with 74 percent of the vote, and she still has widespread support.
After Lightfoot’s putdown of the FOP’s Murray, and after the chamber erupted in applause, a community member offered fulsome thanks for the mayor’s earlier attack on aldermanic privilege. Next came a speaker who announced Lightfoot has been “anointed by the Holy One of Israel.”
Talk about high praise.
Lightfoot likely will need all the powers she can muster, beyond just her sharp tongue and withering stare, to get what she needs from the FOP.
Lightfoot has a fair point about the FOP’s approach to police reform. The union’s leadership has been obstructionist and unreasonable. It has blindly defended bad cops and tolerated blatant racism, from the top of the union to the cops on the beat.
First appointed by then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2015 to lead the Police Board and then the Police Accountability Task Force, Lightfoot has deep knowledge of the FOP in all its obstinate shortsightedness.
She also knows that it’s altogether possible that ineffective policing — whether ordered up by the FOP or not — may have been a factor as Chicago had at least 43 shootings and seven fatalities over Memorial Day weekend, an increase in violence over the previous year’s holiday weekend.
The Chicago police consent decree, between the city and the Illinois attorney general, was approved by a federal judge less than six months ago. Academic studies show that arrests often fall, and reported crime increases, in the immediate aftermath of police consent decrees.
The phenomenon is so common, it even has a name: “De-policing.”
Admittedly, that’s a pretty clunky term, so experts have another vernacular for it too: the “drive-and-wave syndrome.” In other words, cops serving under the microscope of reform drive through the neighborhoods and do little but wave as they pass by in the safety of their patrol cars.
Stephen Rushin, a professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, studied the 31 police departments that have reached settlements or consent decrees with the U.S. Department of Justice since 1994. He found increased crime rates in the immediate aftermath of such agreements.
Murder, robbery, assaults and other violent crimes rose in the months after consent decrees. Property crimes jumped at an even higher rate, according to data compiled by Rushin and his co-author Griffin Edwards, of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Numerous factors likely contributed to the crime increases, the authors argued. Working under new rules of policing, cops behaved cautiously. The criminals knew the cops were being watched, so they were more aggressive. Community members likely reported crimes more than they typically might, due to all the attention on reform.
Mayors who want to achieve lasting reform first must address the de-policing problem. “You have to get buy-in from the officers to get real reform,” Rushin said.
In jousting with the FOP leadership, it’s possible Lightfoot may be wrongfooting herself on the path toward reform. And while Lightfoot’s “Accountability Mondays,” in which she meets with police leadership to assess the Chicago Police Department’s work over the prior weekend, sound like a smart hands-on approach, she’ll need to make certain they don’t also convey an us-versus-them message from City Hall to the city’s cops.
Lightfoot has gone out of her way to draw a distinction between FOP leadership and rank-and-file officers. After the council meeting, she softened her tone when talking to reporters about the police. Most cops support reform, she said. She singled out suicides on the Chicago police force as a worrisome indicator of the pressures cops face.
Policing is complicated. Police reform is complex too. Lightfoot may need more nuance, and a bit less bluster, to bring about the reforms the city dearly needs.
David Greising is president and chief executive officer of the Better Government Association.
Note: Lori Lightfoot served on the board of the Better Government Association in 2014 and 2015. She has no association with the writer, who joined the BGA in 2018.