Editorial: Chicago's gunmen did not get Pritzker and Johnson's memo

For Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, Labor Day weekend spewed out an inconvenient truth: Nine people killed and 52 wounded in the most violent weekend of the Chicago summer.

Too many gunmen did not get the message that Chicago had crime under control. That might not constitute a “killing field,” to use the frequent Trumpian parlance about our city, but it sure was a long way from a peaceful urban meadow for a holiday picnic.

We’ve said from the start that the nothing-to-see-here, murder-rate-is-down, crime-is-under-control, we-know-best argument from local politicians was a loser.

A total loser.

A tempting loser, for sure, given that impurity of the presidential motivations in sending federal forces to Chicago, an act that all rational beings know is motivated far more by Donald Trump’s thirst for an ego-boosting victory than genuine concern for the well-being of the nation’s third-largest city. If the latter were the case, he’d be arguing not for a hostile takeover but for a cooperative plan. But that would require the man to have some genuine empathy and depart from his usual zero-sum game. Not gonna happen, at least without some bowing and scraping before his imagined throne.

But the plan was a loser nonetheless. And it resulted in a trap sprung shut over the weekend by the city’s young gunmen, with both Pritzker and Johnson now yoked together in its steel teeth, surely to the chagrin of the governor’s political advisers. Not to mention the rest of us, huddled here, wondering what we should do now.

Taking a cue from the Pritzker-Johnson news conference last week designed to showcase the city’s spectacular downtown, social media filled over the weekend with lots of folks posting pictures of great Chicago weekends at neighborhood festivals or astride the lake, all part of a big progressive campaign to argue that we inhabit an urban paradise, not a dystopian landscape for the Trump administration to invade and fix. The posts hardly were disingenuous: most of us did have an enjoyable weekend in a beautiful, sun-kissed city filled with residents and visitors and with cultural and sporting activities that were second to none. You just couldn’t be in the sights of, or even traumatically adjacent to, a killer or killers in Little Village or Bronzeville or Englewood or Humboldt Park or Riverdale or South Shore. One body was even pulled from the very same water wherein swimmers bathed and boaters cruised.

In an op-ed published Tuesday morning by Crain’s Chicago Business and no doubt submitted before the weekend, Pritzker wrote “our residents and our economy are reaping the benefits of a vibrant, booming city and a welcoming community for visitors to enjoy and explore all that Chicago and the great state of Illinois have to offer. No one wants to visit a Trump-inspired war zone, let alone work or live in one.”

Once the Labor Day crime figures were compiled, though, rational thinkers came to the conclusion that the Chicago war zone actually did not require either inspiration or ignition from the president of the United States.

Some of us are living in one already.

Not everyone had jumped on the all-is-well bandwagon and by Tuesday more cracks were showing. Some of the regular contributors to this newspaper’s Opinion section were noting that, while crime may be down from its highs, it hardly had landed anywhere near tolerable levels. Aldermen such as Raymond Lopez,15th, took to Fox News to observe: “How many victims are we comfortable with? Because that’s ultimately the subtext of what the mayor and the governor are saying is that we are comfortable with the amount of victims we have right now.”

That’s an overstatement; we don’t question for a moment the deep concern both the mayor and the governor have for the victims of crime in Chicago this weekend, but the backlash is nonetheless a consequence of that joint strategy of minimization. At the news conference last week, only Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul offered any kind of nuanced argument, calling for meaningful federal cooperation beyond just “resources,” not repelling the potential invaders like the last barbarian at the gate holding off the Roman hordes from the “best freakin’ city in the world.”

Alas, you cannot do that if you are poking the president of the United States as if he were a pinata, as did Pritzker when he tried to outdo the effective trolling of the rising governor of California with his jabs at Trump’s weight and health, stooping down to Trump’s level, or when he wrote on X, “Why don’t you send everyone proof of life first?,” stooping down again to a Trumpian use of conspiracy theory. Or when he wrote, “We will not stand idly by if (Trump) decides to send the National Guard to intimidate Chicagoans. Action will be met with a response.”

What does that threat actually mean exactly, Governor? How about instead a conversation before the action or the response? Both strike us as potentially harmful to our collective health.

To reiterate our positions: We do not wish to see the National Guard wandering performatively around the streets of Chicago, a job for which they are not trained. Moreover, based on the examples of both Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, we see no point in troops wandering around relatively low-crime areas, scaring tourists and residents alike. We believe that stemming what happened this weekend takes local police and prosecutorial expertise, as aided by data and intervention experts at the University of Chicago and elsewhere and by community support and, yes, resources, especially for prosecutors and victims. If it were easy, this problem would not persist. We lament that no one in Trump’s administration has the guts to see this and say it out loud. Violence intervention gets results.

We want to see more cooperation between local, state and federal forces when it comes to stopping violent weekends in this city and in prosecuting the perpetrators of violent crimes. We restate: We have confidence that many of the right people now are finally in place to achieve real progress.

But the federal government can and should pull many helpful levers. Time to call a temporary political truce, gentlemen, and call off the insults without waiting for the other side to go first. Time to find a new back channel to one of the few reasonable heads in this administration. As Chicago police Superintendent Larry Snelling has noted, we need to know as much as possible in advance about any plans for federal intervention in matters of public safety, not so a “response” can be crafted but so a new level of cooperation can save lives.

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