Violent crime is up in Chicago, and it is killing Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s approval rating.
About 45.9 percent of Chicago residents disapprove of Lightfoot’s job performance as mayor, according to a new WGN-TV/Emerson College poll. More people disapprove than approve of the job she is doing, with just 42.5 percent who report being satisfied with her performance. Nearly 11 percent of residents were unsure or had no opinion.
“These numbers represent a shift from the start of the summer. On June 1, Lightfoot’s approval rating among Chicago voters was 48%,” WGN9 reported.
Even though Lightfoot has attempted to deny that violent crime is increasing in the Windy City, Chicagoans are not buying the lie. Forty-two percent of residents polled overwhelmingly chose crime as their top concern — “that’s more than three times for any other issues,” the station reported. The Chinese coronavirus pandemic came in second at 12 percent, followed by education at 7.8 percent, healthcare at 7.3 percent, and police reform at 7.2 percent.
When asked what type of crime concerned them most, 87.1 percent said violent crime, 7.9 percent said property crime and 5 percent said other.
Just this past weekend, 45 people were shot and five were killed in Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago. Breitbart News noted at least 72 people were shot, 11 of them fatally, the previous weekend. One of the fatalities was 29-year-old Chicago police officer Ella French. She was shot shortly after 9:00 p.m. on August 7, while working a traffic stop.
One week after French was killed, “70 percent of residents who were polled [said] they have at least a somewhat positive opinion of CPD (Chicago Police Department). That’s an uptick of 10 points since June 1,” the report states.
According to the National Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), shootings are up 18 percent this year in Democrat-run Chicago. Murders are also projected to surpass last year’s number.
“Police say that 445 homicides have been recorded so far in 2021, compared to 446 during the first seven months of 2020,” NBC5 Chicago reported. “Once again, both numbers are significantly higher than those recorded in 2019, when 290 people were killed in the first seven months of the year, representing a 53.4% increase.”
Instead of confronting crime head on, Lightfoot denied a rise in shootings, blamed the coronavirus pandemic for crime and declared racism a public health emergency. She even once compared federal law enforcement officials to terrorists before accepting help from former President Donald Trump to fight a wave of violent crime in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests.