Chicago Justice Podcast

Chicago Justice Podcast


15th Ward Alderperson Lopez on Crime and Violence

January 19, 2022

Alderperson Raymond Lopez, 15th ward, is a frequent critic of Mayor Lightfoot’s policies and certainly her appointment of David Brown to the position of Superintendent of the Chicago Police Department. Alderperson Lopez is regularly on Twitter unleashing board side attacks against almost every policy that Superintendent Brown has announced since arriving. Unfortunately for everyone Alderperson Lopez unleashes his criticisms on Fox News shows like Tucker Carlson Tonight and The Sean Hannity Show frequently. One can only wonder why a local Chicago Democractic politician would be drawn to the news channel a much as Alderperson Lopez is giving the channel’s history of racism, homophobia, and their diehard support of the big election lie.


Superintendent David Brown is not without his own problems. Given his history of lying during an internal misconduct investigation during his time in Dallas he certainly was a questionable pick for the job.

On today’s show we chat with Alderperson Lopez about his topic of crime and violence in Chicago. Alderperson Lopez frequently takes to Twitter to push claims of Chicago Police Department being short officers and that many districts are then also short of officers. These claims are not uncommon in Chicago despite the fact that those lobbing to criticisms cannot say how many officers the CPD should have or how they should arrive at that number.


We also touch on the subject of the CPD switching in 2014 from pursuing cases where an individual fired a gun in the commission of a crime to pursuing gun possession arrests. This switch was revealed by a webinar put on by the Kim Foxx’s Office. Alderperson Lopez discusses his feelings about that switch and the inability of an agency the size and budget of the CPD to counter Foxx’s narrative while at the same time the Mayor and Superintendent Brown challenged Foxx’s narrative by bringing zero evidence to back up their claims.


Also on the show today we take look at Mayor Lightfoot’s Public Safety speech she delivered on Dec 20th. A speech full of flowery rhetoric that paints her administration in great terms but in no way matches the actions and policies of her time in office. In her speech she takes in great detail about the problem with the use of electronic monitoring for pre-trial release. Her claims have now been completely discredited by a recent article that takes a close look at the data and compares it to numbers used repeatedly by the Mayor.