In May 2020, thousands of people took to the streets of Chicago to protest police violence following the murder of George Floyd.
A year later, the Chicago City Council passed Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s budget, which included a $189 million hike in police funding, with the support of several progressive activists.
What had happened?
The short answer, argue Aziz Z. Huq, Robert Vargas, and Caitlin Loftus in a forthcoming article in the Harvard Law Review, is that Lightfoot relied on discourse about guns —a discourse that has historically magnified the role of police.
“Through increased rhetoric about illegal guns and heightened enforcement of gun possession laws, Chicago’s mayor and police chief have managed to legitimize an increase in policing that widened racial inequalities at a time of unprecedented pressure from activists,” the authors—all from the University of Chicago—write.
While paying particular attention to Lightfoot, the authors argue that Chicago politicians have historically used “gun-talk” to diffuse the energy of social movements. Mayor Richard M. Daley, for example, consistently attributed crime in Chicago to the high proportion of guns in the city, an argument he used to pass an “‘anti-loitering law’ targeting ‘gang’ members.”
According to the authors, the Daley administration’s gun rhetoric would come to typify Chicago mayors’ approach to crime: while “regulatory measures targeting firearms supply tended to fall by the wayside,” “coercive measures designed to expand the scope of policing discretion and the punitive… endured.”
Lightfoot has likewise blamed crime on illegal guns, and in the process, eroded activist movements by increasing police power.
In September 2020, Lightfoot issued her “Comprehensive Plan to Reduce Violence in Chicago,” a plan that identified the “‘higher presence of guns and gun violence’” as the cause of Chicago’s higher murder rate.
The plan called for the allocation of resources in 15 Chicago neighborhoods impacted by gun violence, from implementing “trauma-informed victims services” and “youth-designed programs” to “‘holistic re-entry support services.”
A year later, many of the neighborhoods identified in the plan had not received any government money, and the plan’s drafter was replaced by a law enforcement professional.
Additionally, Lightfoot’s rhetoric about gun possession coincided with the confirmation of Chicago Police Department superintendent David Brown, who began reorganizing the police to increase the number of gun seizures and illegal gun possession arrests. A related initiative that Brown created was a citywide unit to respond to “crime hot spots.”
Intended to reduce the department’s reliance on stop-and-frisk policing, this unit has nonetheless been involved in the death of at least one person, when “members of that new Community Safety Team drove up to a corner in the South Side Englewood neighborhood, and shot a 20-year-old man,” the authors write.
Taken together, Lightfoot and Brown’s rhetoric and policies concerning firearms have “legitimized the increase investment in policing,” the authors write. Not only that, but such gun talk has “deepened racial inequities in police-citizen contact” while eroding the energy of social movements.
“Chicago’s increased focus on enforcing gun possession crimes led to a greater concentration of costs on minority citizens, even at a time when the overall volume of police coercion had declined due the pandemic,” the authors write.
“Simultaneously, the Black and Latino neighborhoods identified for more investment and security in the Mayor’s Comprehensive Plan experienced sharp rises in crime.”
Ultimately, the authors conclude, “Chicago police used gun control rhetoric to simultaneously weather unprecedented protest and increase its disparate impact on Black and Latino communities.”
The article, “ Governing Through Gun Crime: How Chicago Funded Police After the 2020 BLM Protests,” can be downloaded here.
Eva Herscowitz is a contributing writer for The Crime Report
