Lori Lightfoot: The President Is ‘Making up His Own Facts’ About Chicago’s Crime Rate

HUNT: “Before I let you go, madam mayor, I know we‘ve obviously taken up quite a bit of your time as we watched that press conference together, but I think I would just ask you — I take your point that for the president, you believe he has many other reasons, you know, here for doing what he‘s doing. The crime rate in Chicago remains what it is. The crime rate here in Washington, D.C. remained what it is. And what is the answer to getting that — why can‘t local officials get that crime rate down? I mean, do you need more cops on the streets?”
LIGHTFOOT: “Listen, the crime rate has gone down. You heard the numbers of decreases in homicides and shootings and other violent crimes that have gone down and have been going down for the last four years. We can‘t ignore that because the president is making up his own facts. And we also know there are red cities in red states that have higher per capita rates of gun violence and other violent crime that we‘re not hearing coming out of the president‘s mouth as a places where he really wants to go. So I just don‘t — we will not play this game that this is about violent crime. What do communities need? We need to stop the flow of illegal guns. Mayor Johnson was 100% right about that. You don‘t gut the ATF, which is, by the way, really small to begin with. You should increase and expand the numbers — “
HUNT: “But wouldn’t more cops not help the situation, more cops on the street?”
LIGHTFOOT: “Well, if they‘re well-trained and engaged in constitutional policing. But what the president has done is brought in the military who are not trained to do local policing. If he wants to fund more police officers in Chicago, yeah, absolutely. But you put them under local control. You don‘t have the federal government from a distance, who knows nothing about the nuances of local policing, coming into our city and telling us how to police our neighborhoods. If you want to send more resources, great. Send more money so we can hire more cops, do more to shore up the federal law enforcement efforts to interdict guns and gun trafficking. Absolutely, we’d welcome that. But that‘s not what he‘s talking about.”