With Chicago's municipal election just weeks away, voters are trying to gauge where mayoral candidates stand on hot-button issues including crime and public safety.
A recent poll of Chicagoans found public safety is a top issue for half of city residents overall and 30% of African Americans.
During a mayoral forum Monday night, hosted by NBC 5 in partnership with the Business Leadership Council, WVON, the Chicago Urban League and NABJ Chicago, each of the nine candidates were asked what they would to make Chicagoans feel safer.
Their responses are listed below:
Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson
"...The safest cities in America all have one thing in common, they invest in people. My public safety plan is the most comprehensive plan where we promote within the police department for additional detectives. We're going to spend and make sure the consent decree is executed with expediency. We're also going to double the amount of young people that we're going to hire all over the city of Chicago because there is a direct correlation between hiring young people and violence reduction. We're also going to pass Treatment Not Trauma. Over 40% of the violence that happens in the city of Chicago happens in 6% of the entire city of Chicago. We know what the proclivities are, so we're going to do what works. We're going to take it serious, we're going to be smart about it."
Paul Vallas
Local
"First of all, I'm going to replace Brown and his leadership team, and I'm going to push the police officers down to community-based policing. At the end of the day, beat integrity is critical. You need to have police officers who know the community.. I'm going to de-privatize the police and CTA. You can use that money and hire another hundred officers.
So the bottom line is, there's no substitution for making sure that you don't have 400,000 high priority 911 calls not responded to in a timely manner because you don't have cars available. That said and done, I'm also going to do what I did when I ran the Chicago Public Schools. I'm going to open the campuses for the dinner hour, over the weekend, over the holidays, bring community-based organizations on to the campuses so we can offer activities for the kids, literally year-round work study opportunities. I'm going to focus on reentry, returning populations, Returning to Crusader, returning citizens, because there are no programs to bring them back in your life."
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Mayor Lori Lightfoot
"How we have been able to make progress, because we've listened to the community, and specifically in Black and Brown Chicago, we focused on those 15 communities that have historically driven 50% of the violence, and we've seen an enormous reduction - 25 to 50% down in violent by being at the table with the community and ask them what they need and making sure that we provide the resources."
Ald. Roderick Sawyer
"Yes, in order to make residents feel safer, we have to make sure that they're engaged and empowered. One of the things that I'm proud of is that working with the community commissions, which will be voting on February 28. I was author of that ordinance, and I've spent over two administrations working with it, and we're very proud of its upcoming implementation. But we're going to have to do more. We are also going to have to do more on the front end. We want to make sure that we provide opportunities or alternatives before people decide to make that life of crime a career. We have to give them more services. I agree with my colleague, Mr. Vallas, as stated earlier about using the school's resources and resources not just for children - resources for adults as well, because they're going to need the additional training and job placement skills that we all are going to need."
Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García
"To make people safer in Chicago, I would first of all appoint a new superintendent who understands the urgency of building trust with community residents and Chicago police officers. That means officers walking the beat, getting to know people and exchanging ideas and learning what people think about them and vice versa. Two, I would invest heavily in violence prevention programs. Why? I've done that work, I know that it produces results. Chicago has some of the best organizations that do that type of prevention, that would lower crime citywide. Three, I would invest in mental health and crisis response teams so that officers aren't responding to every mental health situation, every domestic violence or other disputes that can be settled by people who are trained in this area. Finally, implementation of the consent decree is the key to modernizing the police department."
Ja'Mal Green
"We are actually dealing with this each and every day. My friends are constantly being killed in our neighborhoods. I'm constantly seeing high rates of poverty in these neighborhoods. This is what my experiences are each and every day, and I'm the only one on this stage who has actually experienced dealing with at-risk youth who are going through these problems. We got to make sure we are investing into these young people and investing into these neighborhoods. We got 50,000 manufacturing jobs right now in the city of Chicago that are open, and we don't got a pipeline. We should have trade and tech hubs all throughout our schools so that we have a pipeline to great middle class jobs. We have to invest in young people, invest in the neighborhoods, create homeowners, reopen up the mental health facilities, have social workers respond to 40% of mental health calls and on and on."
Ald. Sophia King
"So I've been keeping it 100 and doing this for the last couple of years, where I've got two police districts - one downtown, one on the South Side. You see the disparities...so we don't need to defund the police or demoralize the police. We can uplift them and hold them accountable. We can put them in all of our communities so that they're there during the good times. We can also put money into violence intervention. This administration missed that $85 million we could have had on the streets. Less than 5 million that we know made it to the streets. We could also have alternative responses to police for mental health insecurities for homeless insecurities, which make over 50% of our calls. These are lived experiences. This defund law and order is not working, we can get safety by doing both."
State Rep. Kam Buckner
"The question asked about what did we need to do to make people feel safer. I'm going to push back on that, we've got to make people actually be safer in this city, and I put forth a plan to do that. Listen, we have to close the gap on our clearance rate, we have to make sure we reduce the number of violent crimes in this city. We have to wrap our arms around our young people because the truth of the matter is that the folks that are getting caught up in the cycle of violence are getting younger and younger, 11, 12 or 13 years old. We have had no plan for them. We have to also do things we can from a policy standpoint like treatment not trauma, like the peacebook ordinance, this is how we create true public safety. True public safety isn't CPD, it's CPS, it's housing, it's mental health."
Willie Wilson
"We got to do something different. I'm going to roll out my safety plan tomorrow... We have to back up our police officers. Those police officer men and women are from our community regardless of what color you might be, they are from our community. We got to make sure the neighborhood feels comfortable. I've talked to hundreds, if not thousands of police officers in the last four or five months, and I will tell you something - I will not defund the police. I will stand behind them..."