Six members of the Chicago City Council will have to defend their seats during the April 4 runoff, including 29th Ward Ald. Chris Taliaferro, who fell 25 votes short of winning a majority of votes in his West Side ward.
Chris Taliaferro
In Chicago, the ability to access police scanner traffic in real time is going away as Mayor Lightfoot moves forward with a plan to encrypt all police communications and delay them for 30 minutes, citing officer and victim safety.
A building explosion on Sept. 20 left one person dead and several injured in the Austin community on Chicago’s West Side. With help from neighbors, residents are slowly starting to rebuild.
Four City Council members share their thoughts on the mayor’s budget proposal, the embattled park district, and more.
The special meeting set for Friday is the second time this year that aldermen have called an emergency meeting of the Chicago City Council over Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s objections. Our Spotlight Politics team weighs in.
Chicago and other major cities are experiencing a “pandemic-spurred surge” in violence that officials are having success in fighting despite a rising number of shootings and homicides, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said during a one-on-one interview Tuesday on “Chicago Tonight.”
A long-stalled plan to put an elected board of Chicago residents in charge of the Chicago Police Department remains mired in limbo after a razor-thin vote Friday.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s proposal would keep the power to run the embattled police department concentrated in the mayor’s office even after decades of scandals, misconduct and brutality.
A joint session of the City Council’s Public Safety and Finance committees declined to advance the measure backed by Mayor Lori Lightfoot and blasted by Inspector General Joseph Ferguson and other transparency advocates as nothing more than “smoke and mirrors.”
It’s crunch time for Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who first promised to introduce her own plan for an elected board to oversee the police department eight months ago.
Independent journalist Jamie Kalven called the revised plan for the database “nothing more an exercise in smoke and mirrors.” The city's watchdog hammered the plan as “significantly smaller step, in scope and scale” than the one presented to aldermen in April.
Aldermen and Mayor Lori Lightfoot have agreed to create a database of police misconduct files dating back to 2000, an effort championed by Inspector General Joseph Ferguson as a way to start restoring Chicagoans’ trust in officers, Ald. Scott Waguespack has told WTTW News.
Four aldermen say the guilty verdicts will likely avert large protests and civil unrest in Chicago — while acknowledging they have much more work to do to reform the Chicago Police Department, particularly in the wake of the police shooting death of 13-year-old Adam Toledo.
As Chicago reeled — again — from the police killing of a teenager recorded on video, Inspector General Joseph Ferguson offered aldermen a way to reverse what he called the city’s “long history” of covering up police misconduct. “We are out of runway with respect to the public’s patience and beliefs that we care to reform,” he said.
The Chicago City Council and Mayor Lori Lightfoot are set to face off over an effort to create an elected police oversight body.
The Chicago City Council is poised to pay a Chicago family $175,000 after officers mistakenly raided their apartment in March 2017 while looking for their neighbor.
