PRESSURE’S ON LIGHTFOOT
2nd round of looting puts retail base, population growth at risk; alderman says, ‘This is on her’
The coordinated looting that overwhelmed police and left huge swaths of downtown and the Near North Side ransacked threatens to turn Chicago into pre-renaissance Detroit. If it does, Mayor Lori Lightfoot will pay the price, whether or not she was powerless to stop it.
Businesses that survived the stay-at-home shutdown and sustained heavy losses during looting in late May triggered by the death of
George Floyd may be reluctant to rebuild, fearing they won’t be protected. Even if they do, customers may not feel safe shopping, dining or going to the theater downtown.
Empty-nesters and young people drawn to the city by the nightlife and cultural attractions may abandon the city as well because they, too, no longer feel safe.
Population gains downtown and on the Near North and Near West sides have helped offset the loss of Chicago’s Black middle class. If both groups continue to leave, the city will hemorrhage population and lose its tax base.
That’s something Lightfoot can ill afford, with the coronavirus pandemic blowing a $700 million hole in her precariously balanced 2020 budget.
“There’s a limit to how many times retailers are willing to be kicked . . . . It will be difficult after retailers who have invested millions in reopening
. . . have to do it again. There has to be a lot of confidence that they can be protected and, so far, that confidence is lacking,” said Rob Karr, president of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association.
“There has to be a long-term plan for protection. Retail is the largest generator of revenue . . . through the sales tax. As goes retail, so goes government finances.”
Jack Lavin, president of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, said Lightfoot must “get this situation under control as quickly as possible,” or her plan to rebuild long-neglected South Side and West Side neighborhoods will suffer.
“The best solution to equity issues is jobs. Your Central Business District creates jobs,” Lavin said. “We can’t afford any more hits like this.”
Downtown Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd) said his constituents had their “sense of security stolen from them . . . . They can’t walk out the door without risking their lives — even in the middle of the day.”
Lightfoot called the second round of looting an “assault on our city” and warned looters: “We are coming for you.”
Hopkins was not impressed. “It sounded identical to the tough talk that we heard from her on May 31, the last time this happened. What adjustments were made? What’s different today? What did they do to prevent this? What have they changed? I don’t see it,” Hopkins said.
“This is on her. Mayor Lightfoot owns this and she needs to solve it.”
Hopkins said, there is “no way to defend” the Chicago Police Department’s response.
“That is not to criticize the blue shirts on
the ground. It’s to criticize the strategy and the tactical decision-making of the senior command, who were unprepared for this. . . . They acknowledged they had intelligence that this was going to happen. Yet it happened. So if there was an attempt to intervene at the earliest stages and to stop it, it failed,” the alderman said.
Lightfoot reacted angrily. “Alderman Hopkins has a penchant for letting his mouth run before he actually gets the facts,” the mayor said. CPD “got the intelligence, acted on it quickly, brought 400 officers downtown. And what we need now is not Monday-morning quarterbacks and sideline critics.”
Downtown Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd) said he’s not about to blame Lightfoot or her hand-picked Police Supt. David Brown.
Still, a “major course correction on resource deployment is necessary,” along with a “deep review of police intelligence-gathering capability,” Reilly said.
“Caravans and U-Haul trucks. Stolen vehicles lining blocks. Divvy bikes scattered everywhere . . . . All of this was pre-packaged and ready to go. All it took was an all-systems go on social media for this thing to play out,” he added.
“If this is the new crime threat, we need to make bigger investments in our social media capabilities so we get more than a 30-minute heads-up.”
Garry McCarthy, former CPD superintendent, said it was “refreshing to hear the mayor” demanding accountability from prosecutors — albeit without naming Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx.
“You can’t say this was First Amendment action. This was criminal activity and people are fed up and tired of it. This is an opportunity to plant the flag,” McCarthy said.
“She could do it. She could definitely get it going in the right direction. But it’s got to be a hard stand now.”
Ald. Michael Scott Jr. (24th) harkened back to the 1968 riots in communities like North Lawndale that followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“It gave businesses an excuse to say, ‘I’m not coming back,’ collect their insurance money and go somewhere else. There was a lot of flight from this community and it has not come back since then,” he said.
“I hope and I pray that is not the case that happens all around Chicago — downtown and in communities like Englewood and Auburn-Gresham and all the neighborhoods that are struggling — because, then, we become something like Detroit.”