Toni Preckwinkle (L) participates in the mayoral electoral run against Lori Lightfoot (R) in Chicago, Illinois, U.S. Photo courtesy of Telesur
CHICAGO, April 3 (NNN-TELESUR) – Lori Lightfoot, the former Chicago Police Board president, and Toni Preckwinkle, the current Cook County Board President, will face off against each other in a runoff election to become the next mayor of Chicago, the third most populous U.S. city.
The two candidates garnered the most votes during the February elections, where 14 candidates competed to replace Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat who has been serving as the 55 mayor of Chicago since 2011.
The city of Chicago is preparing to elect its first Black female mayor after Rahm Emanuel held the position since 2011.
The new mayor of Chicago will have to tackle some long-term public policy issues, among them, the fight against police abuse and racial discrimination in one of the most violent cities in the country. Although homicides have decreased in Chicago since 2016, when the death toll reached its peak at 769, only one in five murders was solved in the first half of 2018.
A prominent example of these discrimination-related problems, which Mayor Emanuel had to deal with unsucessfully, was the murder of Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old Black teenager who was shot to dead by Chicago Police, which prompted a massive wave of protests in Oct. 2014.
Regarding the city’s high crime rates, Lightfood said that the situation was unacceptable and that “our detectives have to get out of their offices and get into the community.”
In contrast, Preckwinkle vowed that Chicago City Hall will invest more in community policing and police training.
“The way crimes get solved is that officers get cooperation and collaboration from community members,” she said.
Chicago also faces a projected US$252 million budget deficit in 2020, a financial shortage affecting the local pension system, which will require at least US$2 billion in 2023. Neither candidate, however, has disclosed their plans for addressing the city’s main financial needs.
“[Both politicians] share positions on many issues, although Lightfoot has been widely viewed as the candidate of change,” ProPublica, a NGO rights defender said, and commented that “whoever wins, any celebration may be short-lived. The mayor will have to wrestle with Chicago’s many problems: economic inequality in one of the nation’s most segregated cities, stubborn gun violence and rising indebtedness.”
