By the weekend, she was facing one of Chicago’s most intractable problems, when 31 people were shot, three fatally.
“If people don’t feel safe, they’re not going to stay,” Lightfoot said Monday of gun violence. “If people don’t feel safe, they’re not going to have hope. If people don’t feel safe, they’re not going to invest.”
Six weeks before her inauguration, we sat down with Lightfoot for a wide-ranging interview in her transition office along the Chicago River. She discussed her first post-victory meeting with the outgoing mayor, Rahm Emanuel; how Chicago compares to “The Wire;” and the city’s fabled political machine, which she says isn’t quite dead yet.
Here are highlights of her responses, edited for clarity.
— Gun violence is her biggest challenge.
“Fundamentally, if people don’t feel like their lives are valued and they don’t value their lives, they’re not going to value their neighbors’ lives. So we have to disrupt that mentality and the only way that I know how to do it is to do it with investment.”
— An open-air drug market in Chicago was appalling, but not shocking.
“I met with some West Side elected officials and part of the conversation they’re like ‘Yeah, there’s an open-air drug market at X location on Madison Street.’ And when you think about open-air drug markets, you think some abandoned house, something shady, right out of ‘The Wire,’ right? But no, this is a strip mall where commerce is being conducted. But in order to get into that strip mall, you’ve got to drive by the drug dealers who are standing out in the parking lot yelling ‘blow’ and having big fistfuls of money in their hands and it’s like somebody selling tamales, right? That’s not acceptable. And what message does that send to our children who walk by there every single day? That’s not tolerable to me.”
— Some on the City Council might be plotting against her. She’s ready.
“The machine was built to last. And no one in that kind of context gives up power easily or willingly, and I know that. But what I said before and I’ll repeat here is, we won in all 50 wards. We won with an almost 50-point spread. I am not going to allow a relic of the past to undermine the mandate of the people. And I would like to have a good, productive relationship with members of the City Council, but I’m not going to allow them to undermine what the people’s choice was and what the people want, which is change. And you know, I haven’t gotten to where I’ve gotten in life by letting people walk all over me. And I’m not about to start now. And I would, as I said, like people to recognize and respect the vote, and if they’re not willing to, I’m ready to fight.”
— Emanuel gave her a briefing book — and some advice for Lightfoot and her wife, Amy.
“He started it by talking about the importance of family and making sure that, you know, my Amy and I were doing everything we could to make sure that our daughter had a normal childhood and that he was interested in doing everything he could to share advice, both he and his wife, Amy, on how to make that happen and their experiences. Which I thought was very generous. But it was mostly business-related.”
— Being the first openly gay, African-American woman to run Chicago is a sign of progress.
“The fact that I won all 50 wards in such a convincing fashion — against somebody who’s been an elected official for decades as the head of the party, and who ran, I think unfortunately, a very race-based campaign, particularly in the last couple of weeks — says to me that we are in a place in our city where we’re going to reject hate, where we’re not going to divide ourselves up by what our demographics are. But I do think there’s a real desire to move beyond the categories and to be a city that says, ‘We’re Chicagoans.’”
— The national reputation of Chicago isn’t very positive. She wants to change that.
“I think the reality on the ground needs to change. It’s hard to brand when we are facing these challenges. The reputation nationally and to some extent globally unfortunately right now is that we’re a violent city. And that’s what people know. That’s what gets reported.”
— She didn’t realize how big her win would be.
“We had some sense that victory was happening. But the magnitude of it — you never know. You never know. And when somebody invests a lot of energy in trying to destroy you personally, you never know. And I take nothing for granted. You know, I can’t afford to take anything for granted. I mean, you probably know probably more than you care to know about my story, but coming where I come from, you have to always be on the lookout for the thing that might be coming that you don’t expect. But now we’re here. And having fun.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.