Just like you, I went to sleep in Chicago on February 26, but the next morning I woke up someplace else … very else. In Chicago, Bill Daley, of course, won the mayoral election, but I woke up in alternate universe Chicago, where we had a runoff between two black women … and one a lesbian. We all woke up in that Chicago, but no one knows quite what to make of it. Except the Chamber of Commerce and the Fraternal Order of Police are completely off their nut, and progressives, after a delirious minute, are all mad at each other for backing the wrong black woman.

And we still need a name for this new different city. Alt-Chicago? Un
Chicago? My vote is for WTF Chicago.

I know I shouldn’t be laughing over this. There’s nothing funny about the Chamber of Commerce and the FOP. But the left not being able to unite, that’s the eternal return, the first time was tragedy but the nth time is farce. People you like and respect are demonizing each other’s candidate, even though Lori and Toni have such similar platforms, similar promises, and both have a mix of progressive and establishment biography.

Yes, establishment, both of them — two brilliant and talented black women, both making quite similar progressive promises, both of whom became successful by rising up against odds through the ruling elites. Preckwinkle, obviously, in the Democratic machine. But let’s get real about Lightfoot too — federal prosecutor, multimillionaire equity partner in a monster multinational law firm, and department head and troubleshooter for Mayors Daley and Emanuel — that’s not establishment insider too? Whether or not either of them is “progressive,” they inhabit different segments of our ruling elites — and if you think those elite groups are on our side, I have a condo to sell you in Lincoln Yards.

The split among the progressives, in one sense, is strategic — different ideas about how to transform Chicago. On one side, Lightfoot’s good government, anti-corruption supporters think defeating the machine and cleansing a corrupt political system is the way to bring about the big changes. On the other, Preckwinkle’s labor-oriented reformers and activists see change coming from her proven progressive record supporting a living wage, opposition to Daley’s budgets and privatizations like his two parking meter deals, expanding Medicaid in the county, as well as her votes on movement-inspired resolutions against the Patriot Act and the Iraq War. And then there’s the third idea about how to change Chicago — build a mass movement and hammer Chicago from the outside. Neither candidate is part of that movement, but it matters how they respond to it.

Both of them have come out with bold progressive platforms — ten years ago, could we have imagined such a leftward shift in our mainstream politics? Still, their campaigns inspired very few people — only 35% turnout of registered voters, with Lightfoot receiving only 17% and Preckwinkle 16%. Maybe Chicagoans just didn’t believe any of the candidates. They’ve heard promises every four years and seen more of the same after.

How do we choose? Do we really have to rely on campaign promises, or arguments about the meaning of endorsements and campaign donations from unsavory supporters? History and common sense tells us how little to trust such wobbly predictors of what politicians do once they win office. Instead of deciding which one is most trustworthy or has more integrity, I would rather put wishful thinking about “character” aside. In politics, after all, “character” is a fiction made up by political consultants and the media. I’d rather look instead at the candidates’ past actions, not just their pretty talk and negative campaigning.

Sadly, news reporting on the past record of the candidates has been spotty, reflecting the mass layoffs in newsrooms over the last 20 years. More details are coming to light in the last weeks of the campaign, but still missing are articles detailing Preckwinkle’s record in the City Council and County Board. About Lightfoot, there is almost no detail about her record as federal prosecutor, her corporate legal work or even her time in city government, other than her signature work leading the Police Accountability Task Force and a few suggestive notes about her mixed record in the Office of Professional Standards, the Office of Emergency Management and Communications, and the Police Board.

Still, there is a lot we can learn about their records in a few days of surfing the web and library databases, and at least in Lightfoot’s case, there are a few news stories with suggestive details about her career in city government. In this piece, I’ll go into Lightfoot’s record, and in my next, Preckwinkle’s.

Lightfoot in the Office of Professional Standards

Lightfoot was named to head the police department’s Office of Professional Standards (OPS) in June 2002 and led it until July 2004. As Curtis Black headlined his article criticizing the lack of nuance in the campaign attacks: “Lightfoot’s long, complicated record on policing easy to distort.” The Tribune’s Dan Hinkel and David Heinzmann also reveal “a complicated picture.”

March 2003: Officer Alvin Weems killed Michael Pleasance in a shooting caught on security video, much later made public. Pleasance was unarmed. Lightfoot says she called it at the time a “coldblooded murder” and recommended firing. She even reached out to federal prosecutors for a civil rights prosecution. The department suspended Weems for a month and later promoted him.

In another OPS ruling, decided before Lightfoot took over, Chief Administrator Callie Baird recommended firing Officer Phyllis Clinkscales for the “unjustified” shooting of Robert Washington as he was trying to steal her car, and for lying about how it happened. But then Superintendent Terry Hillard downgraded the discipline from firing to a suspension. Why did Lightfoot go farther and rule the shooting justified? Forensic evidence showed Clinkscales had lied in her account and had put a gun right against the unarmed 17-year old’s head. Lightfoot wouldn’t comment to Tribune reporters when questioned about her decision, or her failure to recommend discipline for Clinkscales’ lying (although she has often said she would recommend firing for any officer who lied in testimony).

She told Tribune reporters she couldn’t explain her ruling without reviewing records that were no longer available. But that was on February 20; by March 18, after attacks by activists, she said that she overturned the ruling because Hillard had rejected it and she wanted to “salvage a 30-day suspension” of Clinkscales.

Diane Bond and the “skullcap crew”

Here’s a notorious case that so far has not been brought up during the campaign, although it reached federal court and led to landmark rulings forcing disclosure of police misconduct records. Police outrages against public housing residents were routine in the years Lightfoot led OPS — a routine the city ended only by tearing down public housing. Diane Bond, a school janitor living in the since-demolished Stateway Garden public housing development, made a complaint to Lightfoot’s OPS in April 2003. She said that the “skullcap crew,” a police tactical unit who had been preying on Stateway Gardens residents for years, forced her into her apartment and subjected her and her 19-year old son to horrific assaults — beatings, sexual and racial abuse, threats to plant false evidence. She told her story to investigative reporter Jamie Kalven, who was working as community organizer with building tenants, and the next day she lodged a complaint with OPS. After one year of OPS inaction, in April 2004, with help from law professor Craig Futterman, Bond filed suit in federal court against the police officers and the City of Chicago, amending it a year later to add as defendants Lightfoot as OPS chief administrator and Police Superintendent Philip Cline. This was the fifth federal civil rights suit Prof. Futterman and his University of Chicago law students brought against the Chicago Police Dept.

According to the lawsuit, Cline and Lightfoot “turn[ed] a blind eye” to “repeated and systematic abuses” and failed “to develop and implement an effective early warning system to identify police offers and groups who systematically violate the constitutional rights of citizens.” Kari Lydersen, in her article on the case, wrote, “In 2003, the year the lawsuit says Diane Bond was abused, Chicago police fatally shot 17 citizens, compared to only 13 people shot dead by police in much-larger New York City.” Bond later suffered retaliation in the years after her OPS complaint, leading to an emergency motion for a restraining order against police abusers. The case was finally settled with a $150,000 payment to Bond — imagine the amount she would receive if this happened today.

In the Bond case, Futterman argued there was a pattern of misconduct, and in discovery he called for records of misconduct complaints to prove it. Futterman got the records, but a protective order — to protect the privacy of accused police (!) — prevented him from sharing or publicizing them. Then Jamie Kalven sued the city demanding disclosure of police disciplinary records, and after 10 years he finally got them in July 2014. You can see the results in a mass of other data in Kalven’s website, at The Citizen’s Police Data Project.

How many more such cases are there which were buried after reaching OPS? There hasn’t really been a deep dive into Lightfoot’s two years there in the campaign reporting. But there was “a pattern of officials rushing to clear officers who shoot civilians,” according to an eight-month Tribune investigation in 2007 of over 200 shootings, including Lightfoot’s time as head of OPS. The Tribune reporters found that “these cursory police investigations create a separate standard of justice and fuel the fear among some citizens that officers can shoot people with impunity.”

Futterman offers some context in defense of Lightfoot. He told the Tribune, she “inherited a staff and culture where there were serious challenges, and she attempted to make some progress.” Flint Taylor of the People’s Law Office is a Lightfoot critic who also concedes she “had the temerity of trying to reform [OPS] to some degree to deal with repeater cops, and she got shot down by the union and by the big boys, the brass.” (Podcast interview on “Hitting Left with the Klonsky Brothers,” March 22, 2019, at 4:00)

But for all Lightfoot’s championing of transparency, she not only accepted the police department’s refusal to disclose records of misconduct while in office, she even refused to talk about her reform efforts later on, “stonewalling” when Taylor deposed her for seven hours to find out about it. “She didn’t want to take credit for anything good about that program,” Taylor said, and “wouldn’t even admit that her name was on some of the documents that she authored.” She made efforts toward reform, but that apparently didn’t include a commitment to the transparency she stands for in her campaign.

Perhaps the question for Lightfoot is not whether she mishandled any individual case, but whether serving as head of such a body serves justice or serves its obstruction. Her career offers an example of the how would-be reformers get trapped in bureaucratic process and bury their own reform efforts and criticisms out of loyalty to the institution they serve.

Lightfoot on the Police Board

Rahm Emanuel appointed Lightfoot president of the Police Board in June 2015, while she continued as partner at Mayer Brown. Lightfoot proudly points to the increase in the firings of officers under her leadership of the board. In the four years before she joined the board, it fired 37% of officers, with 15% resigning rather than face the board. Under Lightfoot, these percentages increased to 72% and 30%, respectively.

However, Politifact points out that this percentage increase was deceptive; so few discharge cases, only 47, came before the board that a small increase appears as a large percentage. “The hard count of officers fired increased incrementally from 19 during the comparable period before Lightfoot to 21 during her time as president.” (Politifact Illinois) But it nevertheless seems significant that in 2016, while Lightfoot was president, not one police officer was cleared by the board, as Black pointed out, citing the Sun-Times: “All 15 officers who went before the Police Board last year were found guilty of misconduct and were either fired, suspended or quit the force rather than face a hearing.” (Note that the total who fired or quit was only one more than in 2015.)

Lori meets Black Lives Matter — insider reformist vs. rebels against the system

It was on the police board that Lightfoot faced, for the first time, the Movement for Black Lives, whose protests made police reform the dramatic flashpoint of Chicago politics after the release of the police videotape of Officer Jason Van Dyke’s murder of Laquan McDonald. These bold activists deserve credit for launching the movement that brought down Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, States Attorney Anita Alvarez, and, finally, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, forced by mass voter revulsion to sit out the mayoral campaign. The movement’s disruptions of the Police Board dramatize the age-old conflict between reformers working within the system and rebels attacking it and demanding change from the outside.

Protesters disrupted the Police Board hearing on August 21, 2015, just two months after Lightfoot took charge, and continued to disrupt both the board and the Police Accountability Task Force, which Lightfoot also led. Assata’s Daughters, Black Youth Project 100 and other activists accused both the board and the task force of failure to discipline Officer Dante Servin, who shot and killed Rekia Boyd in 2012 in what Lightfoot later, and often, called a murder. They demanded the firing of Servin and of police complicit in the cover-up of the Laquan McDonald murder and other police shootings. Their claim Lightfoot was disrespectful to Boyd’s family and to activists has resonated into the mayoral campaign, where she has again been confronted with protesters.

As early as August 2015 the Police Board scheduled the hearing for Servin for May 19. It’s not clear from reporting whether the board could have scheduled the hearing earlier without changing its process — but its long and complex process is itself an issue. For one thing, the Police Board can only consider cases referred to it by the police superintendent. Lightfoot said the Servin case came to the board in late November and was scheduled for a hearing, after going through investigative steps, in May. The Board’s policy calls for it to wait until other agencies conclude their investigations, then wait for those agencies’ recommendation to the Superintendent, and then wait for the Superintendent’s recommendation to the Police Board. Delay and stalling are built into each step — what you would expect from a system designed to appear objective but in reality biased to delay and deny justice.

Lightfoot didn’t create the process. In her view justice is served by fair-minded people with her background in positions of authority, taking roles that require them to avoid the appearance of support for one side or another. But to the activists who come to the board to shut it down, justice demands taking sides, and the institution itself is illegitimate. Again, the question for Lightfoot is whether a commitment to justice allows for participation in such bodies. This is the perennial question about how reformers can work inside and outside corrupt institutions to bring about change, but you can’t ask that question seriously without recognizing that some institutions are beyond reform and should just be shut down.

Lightfoot may have finally arrived at this realization in the Police Accountability Task Force report, which upended police disciplinary boards and procedures, including abolishing the Independent Police Review Authority.

Lightfoot on the Police Accountability Task Force

The report was more than an indictment, it was a detailed blueprint for an extreme transformation of policing, with over a hundred detailed practical recommendations. This report is not just routine reformist spin. It’s truly something more and deserves to be read and discussed as serious policy by anyone who wants real change in the criminal justice system. News articles pick out a few recommendations, but the reporting is misleading, because the breadth of policy thinking can’t easily be summarized in a news story. If you only look at the 24 pages of recommendations — you can learn a lot about police just in that part of the report. You will find every proposal you have read about, from transparency, accountability to a community review board and inspector general, to community participation rather than top-down implementation, to eliminating those clauses in the police contracts that protect misconduct and criminality. My surprisingly subversive favorite is this one: “Creating a CPS policy and City Ordinance requiring that students receive instruction on how to exercise 4th, 5th and 6th Amendment rights.”

Many activists and police critics label Lightfoot a “cop” for her roles on police bodies and, earlier, as a federal prosecutor. But the PATF report is remarkably penetrating and deep in its critique, calling out the CPD for its history of racism and its lack of “regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color.” The many investigations and studies of Chicago police abuse in the last decade are reflected in the report’s detailed indictment of systematic police racism.

Rahm Emanuel was not happy with the report, and Lightfoot went public with criticism of his treacherous efforts to negotiate a deal with Jeff Sessions’ Department of Justice. Finally, the path set out by the Movement for Black Lives and its supporters, joined by establishment reformers like Lightfoot and Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, led to a Consent Decree that both mayoral candidates — and all of the losers in the first round — had to at least pretend to accept.

Would either Lori or Toni bring about real change? Could even a sincere and determined mayor get this get past the city council, could she overcome entrenched bureaucracies and funding obstacles to make even half of it happen? Odds against, I’m afraid. But to be fair to Lightfoot, this report and her platform is plausible, even strong evidence that Lightfoot the prosecutor and corporate lawyer has evolved. (Just don’t expect her — or any politician — to apologize for the sins of her younger selves.)

Lightfoot the corporate lawyer

A challenge for Lightfoot’s supporters is that only her work on the PATF is unambiguously progressive. We can believe that she tried to introduce some reforms in her time at the Office of Professional Standards and did better than her predecessors in the Police Board. But she only emerged as a serious reformer quite recently, after social movement activism and the resistance to Trump and Rahm shifted politics dramatically to the left.

How do we evaluate her work as federal prosecutor and corporate lawyer, now that she has moved so far on? Reporters have offered little about either, and her years of work there are not easy to uncover. But we know what prosecutors do, then and now, in our era of mass incarceration, and that is enough for many activists. None of the prosecutors who have rebranded as progressive candidates apologize for their past, perhaps afraid to draw more attention to it.

But what about her work for Mayer Brown? “Corporate lawyer” is a label some use to demonize her. Liberal thinking has no problem with our adversarial legal system, nor with the idea that a lawyer can defend killer cops or killer tobacco without shame. Especially if, like Lightfoot, they use their earned status to serve on the board of the Better Government Association or the Center on Wrongful Convictions and receive awards from good liberal organizations like Common Cause and the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Let’s remember that even when Lightfoot was coming up, a law school grad could choose between becoming a prosecutor, as a step toward becoming a high-paid corporate lawyer, or founding the People’s Law Office and going after police murderers and torturers. Or just taking care of poor people as an integral part of their practice, not just sprinkling in the occasional pro bono work required by the Bar Association.

But after all, what can we expect of political candidates for high office — with few exceptions, they could not have come this far without being socialized to accept the norms and values of the institutions they inhabit. When we look at periods of transformational change in our history, we see mixes of idealism and political realism, insider reformists in conversation and confrontation with the unruly and disruptive movements hammering them from the outside. From the look of the candidates and the movements, does it look like we are close to entering another such period of transformation? or is the specter haunting Chicago just the ghost of Paddy Bauler?

—Paul Elitzik

Part II, looking at Toni Preckwinkle’s record in the city council and on the county board, will come in a few days.

Note about Lightfoot at OEMC: The Sun-Times reported on an incident when she was chief of staff and general counsel for the Office of Emergency Management and Communications, which runs the 911 center. In 2004, the home of Rev. Dwayne and Emily Funches caught fire and their three children died in the blaze. Calls to the center were ignored or dropped by dispatchers, delaying firefighters. When the Funches sued the city, Judge Lynn Egan said the record supported “a reasonable argument that the city is deliberately withholding evidence in this case.” Judge Egan said “that the conduct described to Ms LIghtfoot … is shockingly lax” and her response to the restraining order forbidding destruction of records was “so cavalier and inadequate that it comes close to violating her duties as an officer of a court.”