Public safety is the key issue that ruined Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s chance for reelection.
To hear mayoral runoff contenders Brandon Johnson and Paul Vallas tell how they would fix the city’s policing problem is to understand just how complex the answers can be. Yet in their focus on violent crime, the candidates so far are overlooking another public safety problem that could readily be fixed: the scourge of fatal fires in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
Vallas would seek to reduce violent crime by filling more than 1,000 vacant Chicago Police Department positions. He wants “proactive policing” that would put beat cops on street corners and increase arrests. He would dig into surplus funds from special taxing districts to increase police spending.
Johnson wants 200 more detectives in order to crack more cases. He would find cost cuts rather than spending more. He wants to channel CPD resources toward mental health and social services and use neighborhood investment to address the root causes of crime.
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The stakes are high. Chicago saw 695 homicides and 2,874 nonfatal shootings last year, according to city data, the harrowing recent tallies in a three-year spike in violent crime. But the candidates’ remedies are unproven, and no major city so far has found a way to meaningfully address a nationwide surge in violent crime.
But let’s not forget — residential fires are killers, too. They disproportionately victimize people of color. And unlike with violent crime, in the fight to prevent fatal fires, clear answers are readily at hand: Mandate and even install tamper-proof smoke detectors, inspect buildings and focus on problem landlords who put their tenants’ lives at risk.
Those are a few of the fixes that the baiduhai and my organization, the Better Government Association, presented two years ago in a series of stories about needless fire deaths in the city of Chicago — and what could be done to address the hazards.
Our reporting showed that 61 people died in 42 fires over five years in which the city’s Buildings Department failed to address known fire dangers. We detailed nine effective fire-remediation measures taken by other cities, from Los Angeles and Minneapolis to Detroit and Washington. The “Failures Before the Fires” series won a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting.
Lightfoot dismissed the findings. “It’s an interesting historical piece, but I have to deal with the here and now,” she said at an April 2021 news conference. She claimed an updated “scofflaw landlord” list and stricter enforcement of smoke-detector regulations would address the danger of killer fires. The City Council made noise for a while but failed to act, too.
And because the city chose inaction over action, people are still dying — by the dozens. New reporting published this week by the Tribune and the BGA’s Illinois Answers Project found that smoke detectors were missing or not working in 57 of 87 fatal residential fires from 2020 through 2022. Five people died in buildings where the city did not address known safety issues, and 21 deaths occurred in buildings that hadn’t been inspected for at least a decade, mostly on the South and West sides.
In an infuriating irony, the Chicago Fire Department actually helped prevent a city response to killer fires. When Ald. Gilbert Villegas, 36th, in 2019 sought to pass an ordinance requiring tamper-proof smoke detectors, either hard-wired or with batteries that last a decade, Fire Department leaders lobbied to kill the proposal.
The Fire Department did so, Tribune and Illinois Answers reporting showed, in order to protect a long-standing program of giving away low-cost, battery-operated smoke detectors to city residents. Villegas told reporters that the Fire Department giveaways sometimes are found unused, lying on tables or in drawers, in fire-damaged homes.
It does not need to be this way. The lives of city residents need not be at risk. Other cities have shown the way — as the Tribune and Illinois Answers again found.
Philadelphia’s fire department since 2017 has installed sealed-battery smoke detectors in homes — placing 27,000 units in 2022 alone. Seattle keeps a registry of the city’s roughly 19,000 landlords and conducts randomized inspections of every dwelling at least once a decade. Denver licenses its roughly 25,000 rental properties, but only after they pass an inspection with a 25-point habitability checklist.
A cohort of midsize cities including Syracuse, New York; Grand Rapids, Michigan; and Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, have replaced complaint-based systems — the approach used in Chicago — with comprehensive inspection regimes that rely on apartment registries, not resident complaints.
Studies show, and the reporting by the Tribune and Illinois Answers has demonstrated, that systems that rely on residents’ complaints don’t work. Inspectors are overworked and underfunded; follow-through even on hazard citations is rare, and residents are unaware that they’re living in fire traps or are lulled into inaction over time.
Violent crime is a pressing, urgent problem in Chicago, an obvious top issue in the mayoral election. But fires are killers, too. Like violent crime, fires prey on people in poor neighborhoods and are disproportionately a danger to people of color. The death toll may not be as high as the one from violent crime, but every life counts, and mayoral candidates should address fire safety, too.
Lightfoot missed her chance. The current City Council, too. And they did so, despite the fact that the answers are available, field-tested by cities nationwide.
But the irresponsible inaction on this life-or-death issue need not continue. Come inauguration day in May, all it would take is for the new mayor — whether Johnson or Vallas — and the new City Council to take action and save lives.
David Greising is president and CEO of the Better Government Association.
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