Amid ongoing contract talks with the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Friday again ripped union President John Catanzara while insisting that any deal must include enhanced police accountability measures.
“I don’t have a lot of good things to say about him in particular,” Lightfoot said. “But I care deeply about the men and women of the Chicago Police Department.”
The FOP’s last contract expired at the end of June 2017. Lightfoot has offered the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police a 10% raise for thousands of rank-and-file cops over a four-year period — along with changes to how the city handles disciplinary issues involving allegations of misconduct.
Catanzara rejected the deal earlier this week and said he’d be making a new proposal soon, which he may try to take directly to the City Council. Any attempt at working around the mayor is unlikely to be successful, however, as the City Council historically looks to the city for guidance on labor contracts.
Asked about the negotiations, Lightfoot said the city is committed to a fair deal but any agreement must include accountability and other department policy changes, she said, without getting into specifics.
“I’m not going to negotiate in the media,” Lightfoot said. “I think that that’s a mistake and it’s not what adults should be doing.”
When asked later Friday about the mayor’s comments, Catanzara reiterated his plans to appeal to the City Council and called on the public to pressure their aldermen about how they should take the police contract demands seriously. Catanzara also said that Lightfoot was in a way negotiating some portions of the contract in public, such as discipline and potential staffing levels.
“I’m not running in a personality contest here, so I really don’t care if she likes me or not. I’m here to represent the members of this Police Department and that’s what I’m going to continue to do,” Catanzara said. “She has an obligation to work with me just like I have an obligation to work with her, personality interests aside. And she doesn’t want to negotiate in the press but yet she certainly takes every opportunity she could over this summer to throw jabs at the Police Department, trying to talk about everything from discipline to obviously funding, now the possibility of not replacing officers as they retire, which is absolutely ridiculous.”
Lightfoot in July defended sending a series of insulting text messages to Catanzara in which she called him a “clown,” “fraud,” “cartoon character” and “liar.”
Lightfoot’s text messages to the FOP president mirrored a July 2019 controversy in which she was heard on a hot mic referring to the union’s then-vice president, Patrick Murray, as an “FOP clown.”
As Murray approached the microphone available for people to speak during public comment, Lightfoot was overheard on the dais saying, “Back again. This is this FOP clown.”
She later acknowledged it was inappropriate for her “to say that out loud,” but wouldn’t apologize for the substance of the remark.
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Lightfoot has had a rocky relationship with the FOP since becoming mayor in May 2019, particularly over police accountability measures. Before becoming mayor, Lightfoot was head of the Chicago Police Board, the panel that rules on police discipline, and chaired Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Police Accountability Task Force, which suggested sweeping changes to Chicago’s policing practices.
At the same time, she has been criticized by activists who say she has been too friendly with law enforcement.