Mayor Lori Lightfoot discussed during a cable TV interview the spasm of violence over Memorial Day weekend when 41 people were shot and 7 killed.
In her remarks, Lightfoot sought to draw a connection between the weekend carnage and difficulties she is expected to encounter negotiating a new police contract with the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, which represents thousands of rank-and-file officers.
“You know, there were rumors floating around about — and I didn’t verify this — but rumors floating around that they were telling their officers, ‘Don’t do anything. Over Memorial Day weekend, don’t intercede,’” Lightfoot said on CAN-TV’s “Chicago Newsroom” program. “‘If you see some criminal activity, just lay back, do nothing.’ I hope to God that wasn’t true because, man oh man, if that happened there’s going to be a reckoning.”
While we are not in the habit of delving into a claim prefaced as rumor, the suggestion from the newly minted mayor that union brass may have told cops not to police cried out for a closer look.
We weren’t alone in being taken aback by Lightfoot’s assertion. Moments after she leveled it, the show’s host, Ken Davis, asked the mayor whether she bought in to the rumor.
“Do you have any reason to believe that that happened?” Davis asked.
Without answering directly, Lightfoot contended past leadership of the police union had previously pushed for something similar.
“Leading into Labor Day in 2016 when we had this catastrophic level of violence, the then-(union) administration — which, there are some carryovers from that — put out a memo telling officers that they should not show up for work, that they shouldn’t do their job, that they shouldn’t be the police,” she said.
That exaggerates the record. According to an August 2016 Chicago Tribune story, the union called for officers not to accept overtime requests during Labor Day weekend — but it said nothing about the officers’ regularly assigned work, as Lightfoot suggested.
What’s more, that example does not back up the claim Lightfoot made about Memorial Day weekend, which she acknowledged was unverified but chose to publicly repeat nonetheless.
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