Lori Lightfoot, mayor of Chicago, on who’s hurt by defunding police.

By David Marchese @ NYTimes.com/Magazine, June 22

When Lori Lightfoot was elected mayor of Chicago in April 2019 — as the first black woman and the first lesbian to win the office — she was seen as a figure uniquely positioned to usher in sweeping change. Lightfoot, who had never held elected office, took power with a promise to reduce the deep-rooted corruption of the city’s political machine and to redress its longstanding racial and economic disparities (or least honestly try to do so). That was last year. The Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent economic collapse rapidly shrank the scope of many possible near-term reforms, and this spring’s protests added necessary urgency to the calls for social justice and police accountability. For the 57-year-old Lightfoot, though, the upheaval “hasn’t changed my thinking,” she said. Instead, “it’s deepened my resolve.”

The Chicago Police Department has a brutal legacy with the city’s black community. Earlier in your term, you proposed changes to police licensing, discipline and supervision. Do those measures seem insufficient now? Don’t we need to be talking about more sweeping ideas like defunding? 

What I’ve learned is that the cultural dysfunction in the Police Department is so deep that it’s going to take enormous effort to disrupt it. You’ve probably seen the story of the officers in the campaign office of Bobby Rush.

 These — I pick my words carefully — idiots are trying to spread a defense that Bobby Rush invited them into his office. Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther — he did not invite them into his office. They stayed there for four or five hours while the city was burning all around them. If you’re comfortable doing that, then what do you do when there’s not an emergency? So it may feel as if the police licensing requirement is nibbling at the edges, but for us that’s a big deal. Changing the police contracts is something we wouldn’t have conceived trying to spend political capital on, but this moment has given us an opening to break apart these contracts — for the first time in the history of collective bargaining in the city — that have caused so much harm and left us with a Police Department that is culturally bereft.

So is it fair to say that even in this moment, you don’t believe you have the political capital to start a conversation about defunding? 

When I hear this issue around defunding, I hear, “We don’t have enough resources in communities of color, and you spend way too much on the police.” I agree with that piece. But let’s break down the practicalities of what defunding means. In our Police Department, about 90 percent of the budget is personnel. When you talk about defunding, you’re talking about getting rid of officers. Most of our diversity lies in the junior officers. So when you’re talking about defunding the police, you’re talking about doing it in a context of a collective-bargaining agreement that requires you to go in reverse seniority, which means you’re getting rid of the younger officers. Which means you’re getting rid of black and brown people. Which means you are eliminating one of the few tools that the city has to create middle-class incomes for black and brown folks. Nobody talks about that in the discussion to defund the police.

But you can’t license or discipline someone into believing in racial equity. So, defunding aside, how do you address the fact that police dysfunction is a symptom of larger cultural dysfunction? 

You have to have an honest discussion about what the job description for the police should be. We have been happy for too long to let the police be the social-service worker, the domestic-violence intervener. I’m not saying that there isn’t a reason to be angry at the police. There is. But when we force them to reckon with problems that are beyond their training, we’re setting the police up for failure. So going back to the narrative of “defund the police,” what I know is that we must do a better job of answering a call of need in our communities — and the answer isn’t the police. It’s something different. It’s a Marshall Plan, if you will, for infusing our urban cores with the resources that we need to connect people to hopes of a better life. If we don’t give people the ability to connect with the legitimate economy, with legitimate institutions, and help them think of themselves as having value and meaning, we will, every single time, lose them to the streets.

Your predecessor, Rahm Emanuel,  [....]