Inside the messy one-issue contest for Chicago’s top job

“The boiling point didn’t start with Floyd’s killing, but it was a boiling point of social unrest,” said Teny Gross, founder of the nonpartisan Institute for Nonviolent Chicago. “Those things, it was a pretty big blow to trust in governmental institutions.”

Lightfoot, like many Democratic mayors across the country, is now trying to communicate an alternative to defunding the police — a slogan popularized after Floyd’s killing — that moderates and progressives can live with.

“What we’ve tried to do is go back to common sense, which is recognizing that you need officers, and you need violence prevention and there’s not going to be one or the other,” said Kansas City, Mo., Mayor Quinton Lucas, a Democrat who chairs the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ Criminal and Social Justice Committee.

Lucas, who has discussed policing and public safety with Lightfoot, sees it as a “problem on both sides” of the Democratic Party — left-leaning “defunders” and right-leaning Democrats who eat up “Fox News criticisms that are inaccurate and fetishize violent crime.”

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey also opposes defunding police as his city searches for more solutions.

“We have to dropkick ideological lines just to figure out what works,” Frey said in an interview. “Granted, most big cities, including myself, are staunch Democrats, but purity tests for right or left don’t get the job done.”

Lightfoot’s top rivals, Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2015, and former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, have both vowed to hire more cops and oust Police Superintendent David Brown if they win the Feb. 28 race and the likely April 4 runoff.

Vallas, who is backed by the city’s conservative and confrontational police union, has proposed a 14-point plan that centers on rebuilding the police force. He blames Chicago’s crime problem in part on “the abandonment of a community based policing strategy,” he said in an interview.

García’s public safety plan doesn’t differ all that much from what Lightfoot has already put into place. But he criticizes the city for not meeting all the goals set out by the federal consent decree.

“It shouldn’t have taken four years to get that done,” he said in an interview. He wants officers “to get out of their cars and knock on doors and rebuild trust. Trust is critical to getting the department back on track.”

And candidate Brandon Johnson, who is backed by the powerful Chicago Teachers Union, won’t say “defund” but he would like to see the agency’s resources moved to other areas, especially publicly funded mental health centers.

“It’s about treatment not trauma,” he said in an interview, echoing his campaign speeches.

The mayor has so far stood behind her police chief but she, too, wants to see more new recruits — particularly among people of color. Lightfoot is banking on the recent opening of a police training center to further that goal and she’s directed more money and personnel to the South and West sides.