A top mayoral aide said Thursday frustration over city budgets that favored police spending at the expense of long-neglected Chicago neighborhoods fueled her desire to “defund the police,” but her “world view” has evolved since then.
Three members of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s City Council leadership team had demanded in September that Johnson fire Chief External Affairs Officer Kennedy Bartley for calling police “f—ing pigs” and talking openly about defunding and even “abolition” of police in a series of podcast interviews in recent years and months.
Bartley managed to weather the storm — and get a $192,000-a-year promotion in the middle of a hiring freeze — after publicly apologizing for those incendiary remarks.
On Thursday, Bartley talked about the controversy that might have cost her the City Hall job she now holds if not for “the grace we give each other when we’re in tense moments,” she said. She’s “learned a ton,” she said, since making the transition from a community organizer demanding change to a City Hall insider with power to make things happen.
“I was analyzing budget after budget, seeing the gutting or underfunding or all-the-way decimation of affordable and public housing, mental health services, community safety, … [and] of good schools. I thought it was important to turn peoples’ attention to how underfunded these key services that bring community safety were,” Bartley said.
“When I was working outside of City Hall, that allowed me to talk to certain communities in a particular way to learn from those communities to bring those learnings into my work. That constituency … of people that I’ve learned from has significantly grown and, frankly, in ways I didn’t expect. So my world view is growing and developing alongside that.”
Her comments about defunding police came in February, less than three months before joining the Johnson administration.
Police reform advocates now accuse the mayor of defunding the Chicago Police Department for the second straight year — this time by cutting 456 police vacancies in a way that would decimate spending and staff within the office leading the Chicago Police Department’s court-ordered reform push.
Johnson’s proposed $17.3 billion budget includes a 45% cut — from $6.7 million to $3.7 million — in the budget for CPD’s Office of Constitutional Policing, charged with implementing the reforms, which have been mandated under a federal consent decree.
Staffing in the Office of Constitutional Policing would be cut more than in half — from 65 budgeted employees to 28. Equally controversial is a proposed 28% cut in the budget of CPD’s Training and Support Group. That section would lose 90 jobs.
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul has warned Chicago risks being held in contempt of court.
With talks continuing between the Law Department and the Attorney General’s office, Bartley wouldn’t say if cuts in police reform would be reversed. All she would say is that every city department was asked to cut its budget by at least 3%, and CPD was no exception.
“We all have to dig a little deeper … in this moment. … Department heads had the discretion to identify where cuts could be strategically made … that allowed them to still fulfill their missions,” she said.
CPD has been under federal court oversight since a U.S. Justice Department investigation triggered by the police shooting of Laquan McDonald.
Three years into that process, the city was granted a three-year extension — until 2027. The latest report issued by the team monitoring the department’s progress found it had fully complied with only 7% of consent decree provisions by the end of 2023.
To reach full compliance, CPD first must create policy, then train officers on the policy and implement the changes.
“We recognize the importance of the consent decree. Many of us fought for it. Many of us fought for the implementation of it,” Bartley said.
Johnson would not be digging out of nearly as big a budget hole if Chicago voters had approved the binding referendum known as “Bring Chicago Home.”
It would have authorized the City Council to raise the real estate transfer tax on high-end property transactions to generate as much as $100 million in annual revenue to combat homelessness.
Bartley said she would like to see the mayor try again to win support from Chicago voters, perhaps with a more clearly-worded referendum that’s less confusing to voters.
“You’re never going to catch me say that we shouldn’t try for progressive revenue. I believe in it. The mayor believes in it and we are steadfast in making it happen,” she said.
“As organizers, we aren’t used to winning a lot — especially on the first time. But we’re used to rolling up our sleeves and getting back out there and trying again.”