Lightfoot: City violence a ‘public health crisis’
Mayoral candidate says ‘Rome is burning and Nero is fiddling’
Chicago’s never-ending cycle of gang violence has triggered a “public health crisis” requiring a “Marshall Plan” to rebuild long-neglected neighborhoods, mayoral challenger Lori Lightfoot said Friday.
“We don’t need another Riverwalk when we have neighborhoods literally crying out for the smallest crumbs. Rome is burning and Nero is fiddling. . . . When you see communities suffering from this level of violence, it shows they are communities in distress. We’ve got to approach this like it is a public health crisis,” Lightfoot said.
Lightfoot said she would “institute a comprehensive plan focused on uplifting those neighborhoods, identifying what’s working, what the community assets are and backfilling that with the levers of city government” in areas like economic development and access to affordable health care, including mental health care.
Caron Brookens, a spokesperson for the Rahm Emanuel campaign, issued a statement accusing Lightfoot of “hypocrisy at the highest level” because she spent part of her legal career leading “a plan to help return five more Republicans to Congress,” she said. “Republicans who would have repealed the Affordable Care Act, taken away healthcare for people in need and who passed a law making it easier for mentally ill people to get guns.”
Brookens was referring to when, as a private attorney, Lightfoot represented Republicans in the Illinois Congressional delegation on electoral issues.
Lightfoot has argued her legal work was designed to empower racial minorities against “hyperpartisan” Democratic power brokers.
Emanuel has spent the last three years trying to shed his “Mayor 1 Percent” label and rehabilitate an image with black voters that took a beating after his handling of the Laquan McDonald shooting video.
The mayor hired Chicago Urban League President Andrea Zopp to serve as a $185,004-a-year deputy mayor and chief neighborhood development officer. Zopp has since moved on to World Business Chicago.
He also proposed: a series of incentive programs aimed at boosting minority contracting and employment; a $100 million Catalyst Fund to bridge the funding gap outside the downtown area; and a Robin Hood plan to let downtown developers build bigger and taller projects so long as they share the wealth with impoverished neighborhoods.
Millions of dollars in grants have been doled out to minority-owned businesses to rebuild vacant commercial strips.
More recently, he has used public buildings — like the new fleet maintenance facility in Englewood and the controversial new police and fire training academy in West Garfield Park — as catalysts for economic development.
Lightfoot dismissed those efforts as too little, too late.
She said it’s no accident much of the weekend bloodbath that left 71 shot, 12 of them dead, was concentrated in Chicago’s “poorest, most economically distressed, least-invested-in neighborhoods.”
“These neighborhoods are crying out for resources and we are not listening to them,” she said.
“Having a Whole Foods — which sells products that, frankly, even the most well-off people are hard pressed to pay for — in Englewood, that’s not doing it. We need a real comprehensive plan on a neighborhood-byneighborhood basis that is focused on uplifting those neighborhoods and investing private capital.”
To prevent another violent weekend, Emanuel and Police Supt. Eddie Johnson have temporarily reassigned 600 additional police officers to Chicago’s five most violent districts and declared plans to break up large, unsanctioned street parties.
Lightfoot dismissed that response as a “Band-Aid on a gaping wound.”
“Those parties, particularly the ones on the West Side, many of them were advertised on Facebook . . . . Why didn’t we know something and use the data analytics he’s been trumpeting to make sure that we were … patrolling those parties?” Lightfoot said.
“All the things he’s talking about now should have been in place last week.”
Lori Lightfoot’s interview