Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was forced to ask the Biden administration for help this week as the city continues to grapple with a rising crime wave.
Lightfoot has previously claimed that she and other city officials “have done absolutely everything possible” to combat crime, but “we need help from the federal government.”
“This is a national problem” she said this past summer. “Cities individually cannot tackle this problem. We just cannot.”
Lightfoot has asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to send additional Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearm agents to Chicago for six months to “increase the number of gun investigations and gun seizures” and more federal prosecutors to handle new crime cases generated by federal agents.
She also asked Garland to send federal marshals to Chicago to assist the Chicago Police Department and the Cook County Sheriff’s Office track down the thousands of individuals wanted on warrants.
Earlier this year, Lightfoot blamed the crime wave on firearms and suggested additional gun control measures could be a solution.
“When guns are so porous that they can come across our borders as we see every single day in Chicago, we know that we have to have a multi-jurisdictional, national solution to this horrible plague of gun violence,” she said.
Ironically, Lightfoot rejected the offer of federal assistance during the summer of 2020, when Chicago was experiencing violent riots and looting, because that offer came from former President Donald Trump.
“What we do not need, and what will certainly make our community less safe is secret, federal agents deployed to Chicago,” she said at the time. “Any other form of militarized assistance within our borders that would not be within our control or within the direct command of the Chicago Police Department would spell disaster.”
But now she is the one inviting the federal government into the city, despite her previous claims that it would make Chicago residents less safe.
There were more than 25 shootings and four murders in Chicago this past weekend.
Over the past year, more than 60 felons who were previously accused for murder and/or attempted murder or shootings and let out on bond were rearrested in the city, according to a local news report.
