Pritzker Violence Executive Order Smells Like A Campaign Promise

CHICAGO — Just in time for a new batch of re-election campaign commercials, Gov. J.B. Pritzker issued an executive order Monday declaring gun violence to be a public health crisis.

Almost everybody in Chicago said, "Duh."

Mayor Lori Lightfoot was among them.

"We've been treating violence like a public health crisis since before I was sworn in during my transition," she said. "So, for us that declaration is not new."

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Pritzker, on the other hand, has been all talk and no action on the topic of urban violence for years. Sure, the governor has a few anti-violence catchphrases that he sometimes spits at reporters. He once tweeted on the topic of a violence epidemic in response to a social media post by Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton by bragging about restoring $1.9 million for violence interruption funding — which did exactly nothing to slow shootings and murders in Chicago.

That was more than a year ago. And the tweet landed like a slap in the face to Black activists and state lawmakers, pleading for the billionaire governor to actually do something about the root cause of violence.

MORE ON PATCH: Gov. Pritzker All Tweet No Action On Violence In Black Community

Since last September, about 760 people have been shot and killed in Chicago alone. Thousands more have been shot and wounded over a long, bloody summer. Carjackings — including one in front of his Gold Coast mansion — have spiked.

Still, Pritzker shrugged, leaving local leaders to fend for themselves against spiking violence.

Since announcing his re-election campaign, the governor has focused on touting his pandemic policies, clean-energy dreams and touring the state to announce construction projects and taxpayer-funded investments in laboratories, of all things.

Until, that is, fellow billionaire Ken Griffin called out the governor for ignoring the city's shooting problem. A potential foe with the cash to fund an election challenge got Pritzker's attention.

For a few weeks, the governor started dishing the sort of phony political propaganda you'd expect from former President Donald Trump, telling reporters that he would be willing to call in the National Guard to address urban violence — if Mayor Lightfoot would just ask him for that help.

Nobody bought it. Experts know a military occupation of neighborhoods and business districts isn't an effective way to curb shootings. And Lightfoot would never make that request.

More On Patch: Call In National Guard? Pandering Pritzker Plays Trump-Like Card

That's how we got to Monday's violence-crisis pony show, where Pritzker announced his executive order in a room packed with any public official and anti-violence advocacy group willing to show up.

Pritzker promised $250 million in funding for violence prevention over three years. He called it "an unprecedented statewide investment in the pursuit of violence reduction." The political peanut gallery cheered.

If only he wasn't overselling what is actually happening — which is that only $50 million is guaranteed, an amount already earmarked by state lawmakers who were pushed by activists to pass the "Reimagine Public Safety Act."

And the only way to get the last of that "pledged" cash is if Pritzker remains in office and former House Speaker Michael Madigan's Democratic supermajority in the General Assembly remains intact to approve $100 million in funding for the next two years.

Even folks who advocated for an executive order to fight violence as if it's a pandemic say that the governor's announcement Monday has the potential to be another empty campaign-season promise aimed at winning Black votes.

Pastor Anthony Williams is one of them. He launched a grassroots campaign for violence to be declared a public health crisis after his son, Nehemiah Williams, was shot dead in 2018.

When I talked to Williams on Monday, he said Pritzker's executive order reminds him of political sleight of hand ripped from former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's playbook.

In July, Cuomo tried to distract the news media from sexual abuse allegations against him with a "first-in-the-nation" disaster declaration, calling gun violence a public health emergency.

Cuomo said his administration would use data to target gun violence, provide cash for positive engagement of at-risk youth, fund community-based violence interrupters and create a state commission to push a pandemic-like response.

Pritzker's order does all of those things — and it's just as unsustainable as the promises of Cuomo, who resigned weeks after making them, Williams said.

Pritzker "is missing a critical point. He's talking symptoms. I'm talking about addressing the structural systems that cause violence," Williams said.

"He's just throwing money in a hole. Violence is big business … and, unfortunately, there are charlatans who are going to make a lot of money out of this. It won't solve the problem."

Lightfoot was slightly less cynical. When I asked about the state's decision to announce an effort to join municipalities that have been on the front lines of the battle against gun violence, she said any help is welcome.

As for her take on what the governor's $250 million promise would mean for fighting the plague of gun violence, "We don't know the answer to that yet. … The jury's out," she said.

Nobody knows. Because at its best, Pritzker's anti-violence executive order is selling a vision of a hopeful future, much like Cuomo.

We know what happened in New York. After garnering international acclaim, the Cuomo executive order didn't deliver. As of October, less than a third of the $159 million Cuomo promised for violence reduction funding had been spent.

Last month, New York state Sen. Zellnor Myrie, who backed his former governor's emergency declaration, expressed regret "for our community being played yet again."

Pastor Williams fears that Pritzker is pulling a similar gubernatorial con job to bolster his re-election campaign.

"The executive order doesn't have sustainability," he said.

Williams has advocated for laws that teach citizens about the root causes of street violence, in the same way government pushed campaigns to educate residents about the coronavirus. He's called for a series of funding initiatives that target generations of government disinvestment in Black neighborhoods.

"The key thing is to put all that it into law. Of course, when they did, they gutted it of those things, but gave grassroots citizens credit for its existence," Williams said.

"That's not good enough. However they want to continue to play with this [in Springfield], until the instruments are put in place to address this issue properly, we're going to continue to have the kind of violence in this state."

Just like New York.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docuseries on CNN and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary "16 Shots."

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