Chicago mayor calls for federal help in combating crime in the city

The pandemic and its effects on the economy and mental health may be causing heightened crime, according experts

The mayor of Chicago is calling on the federal government for support in combating violent crime in the city, which reached its worst level in nearly three decades this year.

“Keeping you safe is my priority — not one of, but the first and primary priority,” mayor Lori Lightfoot said in an address on Monday.

“I wake every morning with this as my first concern and I push myself and all involved to step up and do more and better because we cannot continue to endure the level of violence that we are now experiencing.”

The mayor asked the federal government to send more agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to cut down on the supply of illegal weapons in the city, as well as to put more federal prosecutors on cases in the area.

The Independent has reached out to the Justice Department for comment.

Ms Lightfoot also called on local courts not to release people who have been charged with violent crimes into the public ahead of their trials, a proposal greeted with outrage from civil rights advocates.

“The mayor’s regressive proposal calls for the pretrial detention of thousands of people who haven’t been convicted of anything and the plan could only be achieved by exploding the population of Cook County Jail in the middle of a pandemic,” Cook County public defender Sharone Mitchell told the Chicago Tribune.

Ms Lightfoot, who campaigned as a police reformer after a series of scandals in the previous administration, has done little to substantively change the Chicago Police Department, according to her critics, as 2020’s racial justice protests saw CPD officers brutalise demonstrators and city officials seal off wealthy areas of the city by literally raising drawbridges.

Not that reform would be easy: the CPD has engaged in a systemic practice of abuse and excessive force against people of colour for decades, according to a scathing 2017 Department of Justice report.

Meanwhile, Ms Lightfoot has also been criticised for not using police aggresively enough, as the city struggles with violent crime.

“By every measure, our city is in crisis and our efforts to keep our communities and our police safe are simply falling short,” wrote Susan Lee, a former top adviser, in a September op-ed in the Chicago Sun Times.

This year, the CPD is down hundreds of officers, she added in the op-ed.

As of early December, 1,009 people had been murdered in Cook County, a nearly 50 per cent jump since 2019, approaching levels seen during all-time record highs in the early 1990s.

“Much of what we believe contributed to the spike in homicides and shootings in 2020 has continued into 2021,” Roseanna Ander, executive director of the UChicago Crime Lab told Axios about the violence. “The population most at risk for gun violence involvement continues to live through an economic crisis and mental health crisis exacerbated by the pandemic.”

A majority of the homicides involve guns, according to police data, and over 90 per cent of the victims have been Black or Latino.

Chicago is not the only city struggling with violent crime in the midst of a combination economic and public health crisis.

“One of the responses to Covid was being there to support people, handing out food and PPE,” Chris Patterson, assistant secretary of Illinois’s new Office of Firearm Violence Prevention, told WBEZ last week. “But we did very little with mental health and being there for individuals as they were suffering through trauma of not only just a pandemic, but seeing violence on a day-to-day basis.”