Lightfoot lets loose on Vallas, Garcia at spirited forum of mayoral front-runners

Mayor Lori Lightfoot unloaded Thursday on her top-tier rivals, branding Jesus “Chuy” Garcia “the original defunder” of police and Paul Vallas a resume inflater who takes his public-safety marching orders from the “repugnant” president of the Fraternal Order of Police.

Sparks were flying during the first half of a forum/debate hosted by radio station WCPT-AM (820) featuring the mayoral challengers widely expected to be the top five finishers in the field of nine: Lightfoot, former Chicago Public Schools CEO Vallas, Congressman Garcia, Cook County Board Commissioner Brandon Johnson and millionaire businessman Willie Wilson.

The four other candidates on the ballot were in a later forum.

Lightfoot’s own poll shows her at 25%, clinging to a narrow lead over a surging Vallas, followed by Garcia. Most other recent polls show the incumbent trailing either Vallas or Garcia.

Either way, Lightfoot clearly is fighting for her political life. If she is denied a second term, she’s obviously determined to go down swinging.

That’s why Lightfoot was the aggressor Thursday, with Vallas bearing the brunt for the FOP endorsement he accepted and the role he played as an unpaid adviser to that union. Vallas helped deliver the police contract that broke the longest labor stalemate in Chicago history.

Lightfoot noted Vallas “understandably” didn’t answer when the moderator asked about his relationship with the outspoken John Catanzara, president of the Chicago FOP.

Catanzara is “one of the most repugnant people that we’ve seen in our city for a long time,” Lightfoot said.

“The FOP invited all of us to seek their endorsement. You and Mr. Wilson, I believe, are the only ones that said, ‘yes.’ And the fact of the matter is, you’re taking your advice on public safety from John Catanzara.”

With $1.5 million raised since Jan. 1, Vallas is running rapid-fire television commercials hammering away at the 40% surge in violent crime since Lightfoot took office. He’s touting his own crime reduction record from when he was budget director under former Mayor Richard M. Daley.

Lightfoot said that’s all a crock. The “truth” is, she said, that during the 1990s, when Vallas claims to have controlled the police budget, homicides ranged from 851 in a single year to as high as 957, she said.

“This man has no plan to keep Chicago safe. And he’s embellishing all of the other parts of his so-called public safety bonafides,” the mayor said.

Vallas acknowledged there were, in fact, 947 homicides in 1992, the year he became budget director. But, he said: “After the community policing initiatives, you saw the largest decrease in crime in the city’s history down to, I think, the low 400s.”

For weeks, Lightfoot has been blanketing the airwaves with ads trying to tie Garcia to two indicted political powerhouses: former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan and former cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried.

On Thursday, she laid off that line of attack with the exception of a gratuitous one-liner that had nothing to do with the question.

Instead, she went after Garcia for proposing a crime reduction plan that calls for filling 1,700 police vacancies and fully funding the $1.9 billion Chicago Police Department budget after years of suggesting the opposite.

“In 2011, he started his time as Cook County commissioner by slashing the sheriff’s budget. He slashed the amount of resources for adult probation. ... This man is the original defunder…Don’t let him fool ya’,” Lightfoot said.

Garcia denied taking a “sharp turn” from the defund the police movement that swept the nation after George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis.

“I have not supported any such movement. On the contrary. I know about gun violence. Forty years ago, my best friend, my political mentor, Rudy Lozano, was assassinated in the kitchen of his home in front of his 2-year-old son, my godson. Four years ago, a young man was killed in front of my house while I was on my way home. My wife called desperately. That murder — never solved. One of the many in Chicago,” he said.

Garcia then changed the subject to embattled Chicago Police Supt. David Brown, the retired Dallas police chief whom Lightfoot went around the Police Board to hire. All eight mayoral challengers have promised to fire him.

“Supt. Brown will go. It’s been a failure,” Garcia said. “Everyone in Chicago knows that. People around him know that. That’s why they don’t follow him. Some people want to keep him around. I don’t.”

Ever since the civil unrest that devolved into two devastating rounds of looting in Chicago after Floyd’s 2020 murder, Johnson has been an unabashed supporter of diverting police funds to “people programs.”

He has accused Garcia of “abandoning the progressive movement” and unveiled a tax-the-rich plan to bankroll $1 billion in new spending on public schools, transportation, new housing, health care and job creation.

“The people of Chicago believe in investing in people. It’s the surest way to actually reduce violence. If we want a safer, better, stronger Chicago, it’s not enough just to love the city. You have to love people,” Johnson said.

“I can tell you what the budgets look like from the politics of old. It means the defunding of public schools, the defunding of mental health clinics, the defunding of public housing.”

Wilson talked again about the unimaginable pain he and his wife endured after losing their 20-year-old son to gun violence. Then, he doubled down on the controversial remark he made at a televised debate last week: that violent criminals should be “hunted down like rabbits.”

“When I said ‘hunt them down like a rabbit,’ I should have said more than that. … I am tired of people making excuses out here for these people committing crimes. All you ever hear is excuses, excuses. In major corporations, if you don’t do your job, you fire them jokers,” Wilson said.

“When ... people are scared to go out [of] their homes, carjacks, kids can’t play in the community, you need to hunt everybody down that commit these crimes without them just walking around to commit a crime to someone else.”

Asked how he plans to attract new business, Wilson talked about cutting taxes, eliminating red-light cameras and consulting business leaders. Then, he circled back to violent crime.

“If you keep raising taxes, if you don’t deal with crime, people are not gonna have a place called Chicago that they want to live in,” Wilson said.

“Everything [hinges] on crime. Everything.”