Crime easy to target, difficult to solve

It was a stunning rebuke. On Tuesday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago, the first Black woman and first openly LGBTQ person to lead the city, failed to advance to a runoff, becoming the first incumbent mayor in 40 years to lose a reelection bid.

Four days before the election, I interviewed Lightfoot in her Chicago office. She choked up and fought back tears when discussing the sacrifices her parents had made for her and her siblings. She puffed with pride when discussing her proudest moments as mayor, including how she and her team had dealt with the COVID-19 crisis.

Lightfoot belongs to a group of recently elected Black mayors of major U.S. cities, including Eric Adams in New York, Sylvester Turner in Houston and Karen Bass in Los Angeles.

In those cities, Black people are outnumbered by other nonwhite groups, and in New York City and Chicago, their ranks are dwindling.

Each of these four mayors was elected or reelected around the height of two seismic cultural phenomena: Black Lives Matter and the pandemic. Of the four, Lightfoot would be one of the first to face voters and test the fallout.

It clearly did not go well. On one level, the results of Tuesday’s election speak to how potent the issue of crime can be and how it can be used as a scare tactic. Lightfoot said it was absolutely used as a political tool in her race: “You’ve got people who are using it as a cudgel against me every single day. You’ve got the only white candidate in the race who’s acting like he’s going to be a great white savior on public safety.”

That white candidate is Paul Vallas, who finished at the top of the crowded field Tuesday with 34% of the vote. Vallas had run a tough-on-crime, law-and-order campaign in which he told one crowd that his “whole campaign is about taking back our city, pure and simple.”

Lightfoot called the remark “the ultimate dog whistle.”

But two things can be true simultaneously: There can be legitimate concerns about rising crime, and crime can be used as a political wedge issue.

In this moment, when the country still has not come to grips with the wideranging societal trauma that the pandemic exacerbated and unleashed, mayors are being held responsible for that crime. If all politics is local, crime and safety are the most local. And when the perception of crime collides with ingrained societal concepts of race and gender, politicians, particularly Black women, can pay the price.

Crime often comes in waves, but a question lingers about how people, even liberals, respond when a crest arrives under Black leadership: Are Black mayors too quickly and easily blamed for rising crime, and if so, why? Because of an unwillingness to crack down on criminals, or because of a more insidious, latent belief in ineffectual Black leadership in times of crisis?

Lightfoot said she understood that as a woman and as a person of color, “I’m always going to be viewed through a different lens — that the things I do and say, that the toughness that I exhibit, is viewed as divisive; that I’m the mean mayor; that I can’t collaborate with anyone.”

Even so, she conceded, “If you feel like your life has been challenged because of the public safety issues coming to your doorstep, it doesn’t matter what the numbers are; you need to feel safe.”