Mayor Lori Lightfoot vowed to reimagine violence response and end sole reliance on police ...
Mayor Lori Lightfoot vowed to reimagine violence response and end sole reliance on police, but outreach groups at heart of plan still struggle for funding
Chicago Tribune
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More than 16 months into her term, however, Lightfoot’s plan to fundamentally change Chicago’s approach by relying on those groups has not developed. The administration’s spending on them is a vanishingly small part of this year’s budget, and anti-violence advocates have criticized her relatively modest funding of those initiatives during one of the bloodiest years in recent history.
The administration has touted its $11.5 million in spending this year on conflict intervention, counseling and employment help for people at risk, as well as services for victims and funding for the city’s public safety office.
City Hall officials have described those initiatives as focusing on the city’s most violent neighborhoods. And Lightfoot has said repeatedly she is turning away from the strategy of past mayors, which she has described as using only the police to stop violence.
But her attempt to shift to a different path has been incremental at best. The city’s spending for these alternate approaches to violence is less than 1% of the city’s share of the Police Department budget this year — which is about $1.7 billion. In June alone, the city spent more than four times as much on police overtime.
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