Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot criticized Southwest Side Ald. Matt O’Shea for not supporting her budget, saying that the alderman should vote for her spending plan to prove his support for the police.
O’Shea responded, meanwhile, that he can’t vote for a budget that he believes “fails to address our police hiring crisis.”
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The back-and-forth played out over two days on WGN Radio, after Lightfoot appeared on the station Wednesday to talk up her budget, days ahead of an expected City Council vote. And while mayors often exchange words with their critics, the public clash between Lightfoot and O’Shea this week highlights a recurring theme of the mayor’s administration: falling outs with former friends and allies.
In response to a question about crime, Lightfoot said residents should ask their aldermen to back her budget and criticized aldermen who say they support police but don’t vote for her spending plan.
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“You can’t say ‘I’m pro-law enforcement, I’m pro-public safety’ and not support the budget and the revenue,” Lightfoot said.
Asked who she was referring to, Lightfoot specifically called out “the alderman of the 19th Ward.”
A day later, O’Shea appeared on the program to criticize Lightfoot for not doing enough to hire officers. He also said the city was facing a “public safety crisis” due to crime.
“Since this mayor took office, carjackings are up nearly 100%,” O’Shea said. “Murders up more than 30%.”
[ What is the true cost of policing in Chicago? It’s not all found in the CPD budget. ]
Lightfoot, for her part, regularly points out that shootings and homicides are down year over year, though they remain higher than they were before she took office in 2019.
In her interview, Lightfoot highlighted her budget’s funding of social service organizations, street outreach workers and police, though she’s also faced criticism for not spending enough of the money allocated to these groups.
And the mayor noted that her administration created a recruitment team to help bring in more cops, which she said “is hitting college campuses, we are going to the military and they are going to every job fair, every community organization, and it’s paying dividends. We’re seeing one of the largest hiring and recruiting classes that we have seen in a number of years.”
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She added the city must “make sure that we’ve got the resources to be able to support them. We’ve got to have the resources to support the constitutional policing as mandated by our consent decree. All of those things are paid for by a budget with revenue.”
O’Shea, however, said the city needs to be looking at incentives to keep officers rather than simply trying to recruit new cops. He warned that there are more officers leaving than are coming in.
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The public exchange between Lightfoot and O’Shea marks another negative milestone in their relationship. O’Shea endorsed Lightfoot in 2019 and she selected him to head the City Council Aviation committee. O’Shea remained a supporter for much of 2020, but their relationship soured in the years since in part due to concerns over crime, policing and communication.
In September 2021, O’Shea cowrote an article with Lightfoot’s former deputy mayor for public safety, Susan Lee, in which they declared Chicago a “city in crisis.”
Days later, O’Shea sent an email to state officials about “the dangerous gun violence on the Chicago expressway system” and stalled plans to add license plate readers to help catch shooters.
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“I have made a number of inquiries on the status of this project over the last several weeks. It has come to my attention that IDOT and CDOT are having difficulty settling on an installation plan of providing power to the system,” O’Shea wrote on the email, which included Lightfoot. “Now is not the time for bureaucratic finger pointing. This is an urgent matter of public safety that must immediately be resolved.”
The mayor wrote a scathing response that indirectly alluded to the recent op-ed.
“In the City of Chicago, when we work with our partners in other governments like the state, we have found that the best way to move things forward is to collaborate and approach these opportunities with good faith. Sending poison pen missives, especially with an audience, which you seem to favor, is not the best way to move things forward,” Lightfoot wrote. “Obviously, you have a method and history of dealing and you will carry on as you see fit, but we value our relationships with other governmental actors and nastygrams are not the best strategy. But of course carry on as you like.”
O’Shea isn’t the first alderman to break with Lightfoot after supporting her campaign. Earlier this year, Ald. Susan Sadlowski Garza gave an interview to Chicago Reader journalist Ben Joravsky where she said she wouldn’t support Lightfoot.
“I have never met anybody who has managed to piss off every single person they come in contact with — police, fire, teachers, aldermen, businesses, manufacturing, and that’s it,” Garza said in the interview.
For his part, O’Shea acknowledged Lightfoot’s budget will likely pass.
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“I would guess she probably will have the votes but I can’t in good conscience, representing my community, support a budget that doesn’t address public safety,” O’Shea said.
