Mayor Lori Lightfoot may have her first 100 days and her initial “State of the City” address under her belt, but former mayoral rival Toni Preckwinkle is still getting under her skin.
The bad blood between the mayor and the Cook County Board president boiled over yet again on Friday in Lightfoot’s meeting with the Chicago Sun-Times Editorial Board.
Lightfoot acknowledged she was “stepping into some hot water” when she spoke about a letter on bail reform she received from her former campaign rival in July.
She jumped in anyway.
“Let me be clear, I have said ‘Madame president, chief judge, sheriff, state’s attorney, let’s get together, let’s put our data out for the public to be able to see it and let’s work together towards solutions’ and what I got back was not a ‘yeah, that’s a great idea.’ I got back another nasty-gram from her,” Lightfoot said.
“So other people who are part of this ecosystem have reached out and said let’s have a conversation and I commend the chief judge and the presiding judge and Sheriff [Tom] Dart and State’s Attorney Kim Foxx because I think all of us can … make some progress. And we will make progress.”
What Lightfoot dubbed the “ongoing tussle in the media” over bail reform stems from a July letter Preckwinkle sent to Lightfoot, complaining that the mayor and her top cop were promoting a “false narrative” that portrays the county’s bail reform efforts as “the root cause for gun violence.”
The new mayor said Friday the issue isn’t about bail reform but about not “returning people to the streets who are wreaking havoc in neighborhoods.”
Lightfoot said she had no inkling that the July letter was coming, even though it would’ve been easy for Preckwinkle to give her a heads up. The two met the week before the letter was released and “outlined a number of ways in which I thought we could work together productively on things that are important to both the city and the county,” Lightfoot said.
“But some things are clearly more important to her than others,” the mayor said Friday.
Since then, Lightfoot has met with many of the county elected officials on the topic of bail reform though not with the board president. Lightfoot’s Friday comments come over a month after Preckwinkle sent her the letter taking issue with Chicago Police Department Supt. Eddie Johnson’s take on the county’s bail reform efforts’ connection to street violence.
A spokesman for Preckwinkle did not immediately return requests for comment.
“We have an opportunity to leverage our combined resources and expertise to develop strategic solutions to reduce gun violence,” part of Preckwinkle’s letter, which was obtained first by the Chicago Sun-Times, reads.
Of those who are arrested and who do enter the criminal court system, a recent report by the Office of the Chief Judge found that during an 18-month period that ended on March 31, only 0.6% of defendants who were released on bond were charged with a new violent offense — the number of “no bail” decisions county judges have entered has increased “nearly tenfold since we began instituting bail reform,” Preckwinkle wrote.
Lightfoot says violent offenders who “possess weapons of war” are cycling through the system in “24 and 48 and 72 hours.”
Lightfoot said sees a different dataset than the one presented by Evans, which shows that people who are out on bail are not committing violent crimes. Lightfoot said she doesn’t know why there’s a discrepancy in the data but “we have to analyze it and we will do that.”
She and Preckwinkle have had zero personal follow-up conversations about the letter or how to leverage their resources and work together. Lightfoot hasn’t reached out to Preckwinkle, and Preckwinkle hasn’t reached out to the new mayor though there have been conversations at the staff level, Lightfoot said.
Despite the two being estranged, Lightfoot doesn’t think it will impede the city’s ability to “get done what needs to get done” though “a good strong constructive relationship would absolutely be to the benefit of people in this county.”
But Lightfoot added “a lot of that is up to her.”
“If President Preckwinkle is interested in having a productive conversation on any topic my door is always open,” Lightfoot said.
