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Lori Lightfoot declared victory on April 2, 2019. On her victory speech, she gave a shout out to one of the groups that shilled for her, Moms Demand Action:
She assumed office on May 20, 2019. This article isn’t going to be about the moms though, it’s about how people saw a “breath of fresh air” in Lightfoot, but she failed them and quickly became just another backstabbing politician that screwed over her voting base and her city. Let’s quickly look at why.
First, TAX TAX TAX and PAY THE FINES AND FEES:
Lightfoot, the city’s first Black female mayor and first openly gay mayor, ran as an outsider in 2019, promising a commitment to social justice and equity as well as vowing to reform Chicago’s notorious political machine. Her $12.8 billion budget includes a $94 million property tax hike, a 3¢-per-gallon increase to the gas tax, a $30 million draw from reserves, and more funds raised from speed cameras, parking meters, and other fines and fees. The city is also refinancing and restructuring $1.7 billion in debt for a half-billion dollars in savings, a tactic referred to as “scoop and toss” that’s generally frowned upon by fiscal watchdogs.
Fine, that’s boring stuff. So let’s fast forward to where she really screwed up: the summer of 2020 (this becomes important at the end of this article after what came out on 5/6/21). The summer of 2020 was the worst amount of unrest and violence the city had seen since the late 1960’s (because of all of that, Illinois now has the FOID card). Lightfoot let Chicago burn and did very little to control it. The worst of it was not first amendment activity (which regardless of your opinion of BLM, they have a right to peacefully protest), it was full on riots and destruction.
During all of this, homicides and shootings (not done by law abiding gun owners who have FOID cards) skyrocketed:
After three consecutive years of declining violence, Chicago’s murder tally soared in 2020 as city leaders — including a new Chicago police superintendent — were forced to confront widespread civil unrest and the COVID-19 pandemic.
As of Dec. 31, the city recorded 774 murders in 2020, an increase of more than 50% from the 506 murders in 2019, according to a database maintained by the Chicago Sun-Times. The uptick was felt across the city, as 20 of the CPD’s 22 police districts recorded more murders in 2020 than the year before. The number of overall shooting incidents skyrocketed, too, rising from 2,120 in 2019 to 3,237 as of Dec. 27, 2020.
During the chaos, one Chicago alderman asked what Lightfoot was going to do about all of the violence being committed by gangbangers and others. Her response? “You’re full of shit”.
At the same time, reporters were asking about people taking matters into their own hands to protect themselves, their property and their communities. Lightfoot’s response?
So, increase in violence is all a myth and people shouldn’t protect themselves and should “call the police” instead. Well, Lightfoot knew she was “full of shit”, which is why half of the Chicago Police Department was protecting her home:
Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Thursday defended the heavy police presence outside her Logan Square home, at a time when police officers are stretched to the limit, citing “specific threats” made “every single day” to “my person, my wife and my home.” “Given the threats that I have personally received. Given the threats to my home and my family, I’m gonna do everything to make sure that they are protected. I make no apologies whatsoever for that,” the mayor said.
“I’ve talked to my fellow mayors across the country and, seeing the kind of things that have been done to them and their family members, I’m not gonna have that happen. That’s not what my wife and my child signed up for. It’s not what my neighbors signed up for. We have a right in our home to live in peace.”
Must be nice.......
There’s plenty more to talk about, but let’s move on to something her base, including Moms Demand Action, should be pissed about. From Moms Demand Action:
Everytown, the gun grabbers who want to erode a constitutional right, all of a sudden want cops who violate constitutional rights to be subject to lawsuits? Great (on the surface)! So what did their buddy Lightfoot do behind the scene? This just came out yesterday:
Despite widespread grassroots and legislative momentum toward ending qualified immunity, the practice that protects police officers from being personally sued for civil rights violations, documents reviewed by the Weekly indicate Mayor Lori Lightfoot and her staff were already lobbying against efforts to ban the practice last summer.
On March 25, the Illinois House Restorative Justice Committee advanced legislation to end qualified immunity. Two states have banned it, and the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives and endorsed by President Joe Biden in his April 28 address to Congress, would limit it in every state. In Illinois, the SAFE-T Act, a wide-ranging criminal justice reform bill signed into law by Governor J.B. Pritzker in February, established a task force to “review and reform” qualified immunity.
The documents—emails between Lightfoot and staff—indicate that in July 2020, the mayor instructed her staff to “gather data” on qualified immunity to prepare for “the push during budget to ‘defund’ the police, and efforts underway in Springfield,” according to one.
The mayor was likely referring to last year’s efforts by grassroots groups and some City Council members to reduce the CPD’s outsize share of Chicago’s budget, as well as legislative efforts last year to enact statewide reforms in policing.
The emails also revealed that civil rights lawsuits due to police misconduct have cost the City more than $500 million since 2009, while individual officers were responsible for paying about $2 million in settlements. The emails were published online by the groupDistributed Denial of Secrets.
The communications indicate the mayor’s staff prepared data to present to U.S. Senator Dick Durbin’s staff regarding those issues. In public, Lightfoot—who included police reform as a pillar of her 2017 campaign for mayor—has remained tight-lipped about qualified immunity. Privately, her staff were apparently lobbying Durbin’s office to convince him qualified immunity is not a roadblock to holding police officers accountable for misconduct.
Because it’ll cost the city money, Lightfoot doesn’t want this legislation. Personally, being able to sue bad cops for violating constitutional rights isn‘t a bad idea (think of the impact that could have in states like Illinois in regards to BS gun charges). As always though, money money money. I hope people on all sides of the aisle can now see what a fraud this mayor is. She doesn’t care about your safety, but she cares about her own and is willing to take cops off the street to guard herself during a crisis and had the nerve to tell people to NOT protect themselves. Further, she proposes to defund the police (what left leaning activists want), yet is against legislation that would hold “bad cops” accountable because it’ll cost money. How could anyone support this mayor, regardless of political ideology?