In the weeks that followed, the argument hardened into identity. Supporters of the mayor spoke of communities tired of being treated like crime scenes instead of neighborhoods, of federal help that too often arrived as occupation, not aid. They wanted safety that didn’t feel like surrender, justice that didn’t wear someone else’s badge. On the other side, families who slept to the sound of gunfire asked why ideology mattered more than their children’s walk to school. They didn’t care who owned the solution, only that someone would finally claim it.
Beneath the speeches and statistics, the city sat with a quieter question: who is brave enough to stop using the dead as evidence? Change, Chicago realized, would not come from louder blame or sharper rhetoric, but from the first leader willing to treat every name on every candlelit corner as the beginning of policy, not the end of a sentence.
