The Daily - A Showdown in Chicago

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

Chicago is in the midst of a crime wave — but there is also a question about whether police officers will show up for work.That’s because of a showdown between the mayor, Lori Lightfoot, and the police union over a coronavirus vaccine mandate.Some 30,000 city workers are subject to the mandate, but no group has expressed more discontent than the police.Guest: Julie Bosman, the Chicago bureau chief for The New York Times. Love listening to New York Times podcasts? Help us test a new audio product in beta and give us your thoughts to shape what it becomes. Visit nytimes.com/audio to join the beta.Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: The clash over coronavirus shots in Chicago intensified last week, when the city filed a complaint against the police union.Across the United States, there is friction between city governments and law enforcement unions over vaccinations. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, in for Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, all across the country, vaccine mandates are being met with resistance by one group especially, the police. I spoke to my colleague, Julie Bosman, on why that is and how it's playing out in one city in particular, Chicago. It's Thursday, October 21st. So Julie, tell me what's happening right now in Chicago. So right now in Chicago, we are in the midst of a showdown between the mayor, Lori Lightfoot, and the police union.

And it's a very public battle. The city and the police union have faced off in court. There's a question of whether police officers will show up to work. And this is all happening in the third largest city in the country, which is in the middle of a crime wave. And it's all over the question of vaccines. So back in August. Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you so much for being here. Mayor Lightfoot announced that city employees in Chicago.

Throughout the pandemic, we heard from workers really all across the city that they were nervous, that they were scared, that they wanted a safe workplace. All 30,000 of them in 35 different departments across the city, firefighters, police officers, people who work in the parks district, in the library system, who work in city hall, who work in water management. City employees are absolutely going to be required to be vaccinated. We're required to be vaccinated for the coronavirus by October 15th. But we absolutely have to have a vaccine mandate. It's for the safety of all involved. Which was last Friday.

And Julie, how did these employees react to that mandate announcement? So some of them, of course, were already vaccinated and didn't object. But there was some resistance from the fire department and from other city employees. But no one was more upset about this policy than the police department and the union that represents police officers. Why were the police pushing back so hard? Like, what was their argument? Their argument was that this was an order that would force them to do something that they shouldn't be required to do. The president of the largest police union in Chicago, John Cotton Zara, implied that this was a violation of privacy. We cannot let governments continue to erode our freedoms and dictate every

facet of our life. And that the city should have continued negotiating with the union before issuing this order. None of the unions have any clue why the mayor felt the need to get out over her skis and talk about a mandate or else come October 16th. And he made it really clear that he felt that this was a terrible, terrible thing to do to the police department. And at one point in an interview with a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, he compared the vaccine mandate to the Holocaust. Wow. And said, we're in America. We don't want to be forced to do anything, period. And then after he said that, he was forced to apologize. But his point was pretty clear that police officers were not going to be forced to do what they did not want to do.

So it sounds like it was delivered in this kind of maximally inflammatory way. But fundamentally, his message was that the city has no right to tell us what to do when it comes to our own bodies. Is that right? I think that's right. that's right. What he didn't say was that COVID is actually by far the most common cause of duty related deaths in 2020 and 2021. And yet he was saying, look, you cannot force us to do this. You've gone too far in telling us that we have to be vaccinated. This is not something that we are going to agree to. So what was Mayor Lightfoot's response? Her initial response was to condemn his comments and say they were offensive.

But now they're at an impasse. The city and the police union are now negotiating over this new policy. And here is where the mayor takes a big step back and says that they do not have to be vaccinated by October 15th. What she does say is that by October 15th, all city workers, including police officers, have to enter their vaccination status into an online portal. If they are not vaccinated, they have to be tested twice

a week until the end of the year. So it sounds like she caves, at least for now. I mean, she's holding off on the full vaccine mandate. So you think problem solved, right? You would think. So what then does the police union do in response to her concession? They escalated. All right, TGI Friday. It's October 8th.

I know everybody's concerned about the COVID vaccine. This is with only days to go before the deadline of October 15th. John Cotton Zara begins to release videos on YouTube. I am telling every member, do not, do not fill out the portal information on your vaccine right now. Instructing the police officers in his union not to reveal their vaccination status. But I do not believe the city has the authority to mandate that to anybody, let alone that information about your medical history, and change the terms of employment mandate that to anybody, let alone that information about your medical history and change the terms of employment, so to speak, on the fly and you have to comply.

They've been told that they have to enter their vaccination status into the city portal and Catanzaro is saying... It's the city's clear attempt to force officers to chicken little the sky is falling into compliance. Do not fall for it. Hold the line. Do not do it. Hold the line. This is not information that the city is entitled to. All I can tell you is if we suspect the numbers are true and we get a large number of our members to stand firm on their beliefs that this is an overreach

and they're not going to supply the information in the portal or submit the testing, then it's safe to say the city of Chicago will have a police force at 50% or less for this weekend coming up. And if the city doesn't budge, then Catanzaro suggests that the city will have to do without a large portion of its police force. So that is a huge public safety threat in a city that's struggling with violent crime. So whatever happens because of that manpower issue, that falls at the mayor's doorstep. This could have all been avoided, but it literally has been like everything else. Wow, that feels like a pretty big escalation. I mean, he's essentially encouraging his members to defy the orders of the mayor directly, to refuse to reveal their vaccination status, let alone get vaccinated. He is, and Lightfoot hits back.

Number one cause of death in 2020 of law enforcement was COVID-19, nothing else. It's foolish, foolish. But unfortunately, that's in keeping with the leadership of this fraternal order of police. They will be vaccinated. She did not back down. In fact, she challenged Cotton Zara. So he's going to say all kinds of things. You know, he's threatening litigation.

I say, bring it. And said, bring it on. This is a city order, and every city employee is required to do it. We believe that the FOP leadership is trying to foment an illegal work stoppage to strike, pure and simple. And part of the reason that she's so incensed by what he is saying is that she's arguing, look, this is an illegal work stoppage that you are encouraging. Members of public safety unions cannot strike. We are not allowing them to jeopardize the public safety of our city, our residents,

by making it seem as if he is in charge of the Chicago Police Department and he alone can determine staffing and whether or not officers come to work. And so the city filed a lawsuit asking for the courts to intervene. And the union sued right back. The lawsuits are still pending in court. But basically, you have this extremely public battle that is getting more and more heated in the days surrounding the deadline. is getting more and more heated in the days surrounding the deadline. What we've seen from the Fraternal Order of Police, and particularly the leadership,

is a lot of misinformation, a lot of half-truths, and frankly, flat-out lies, in order to induce an insurrection. And we're not having that. So what happened once that deadline actually came, the one for officers to submit their vaccination status? I mean, did they do it? So by Monday afternoon, the city released data showing which city employees had responded to the request for their vaccination status and which had not. You saw of these dozens of city departments, some of them were 100% in compliance. Many of them were 99, 98%, 85%. And then you had the Chicago Police Department, and that was 65% in compliance. And of those people who submitted their status, the vast majority were vaccinated. But it still meant that about one-third of the Chicago Police Department had not submitted their vaccination status by the Friday deadline.

So the members of the police department who refused to submit their vaccination status are therefore violating the policy, right? So what happens to them? So the mayor is now confronted with a really difficult prospect. One-third of her police department has not complied with this order. So that means that 4,500 members of the police department could possibly be off the job if she immediately followed through with her threat to suspend them. That's a lot of the police force. It seems kind of crazy. To people who live in Chicago, it's an unthinkable notion to have one third of the police department suddenly not working. So for the mayor, she now has to consider what does she do next? We'll be right back.

Okay, so Julie, this public battle, I mean, all these lawsuits, threats, it kind of seems hard to understand because it's not really about hard vaccine mandate anymore. I mean, the mayor conceded on allowing a testing option, right? It feels like there's something else going on, something bigger. What's behind it? I mean, is there a backstory? So I think to understand this battle that is ostensibly about vaccination. You have to understand why Lori Lightfoot was elected the mayor of Chicago. We can and we will build trust between our people and our brave police officers so that the communities and police trust each other, not fear each other. She came into office in 2019, and she promised when she was running for mayor that she was going to be a reformer and that she was going to fix the Chicago Police Department. Anytime that the FLP wants to do anything other than obstruct and object to reform, I'd be more than willing to meet with you. She had worked in police oversight. She was the head of the police accountability task force under Mayor Rahm Emanuel, her predecessor.

So as soon as she came into office, it was clear that she had an agenda for the police department. The mayor has spent her entire career complaining about the police. So there was immediately resistance from the police department. police. So there was immediately resistance from the police department. You know, that is a very sad state of affairs when she looks at the police department that way. And then, of course, COVID hits. So she's faced with a number of huge problems. She's trying to figure out how to lead the city through the pandemic. She has a police department whose officers are immediately under great stress. They are out in the public. They have to keep doing their jobs despite the threat to public health. Many of them are getting sick

from COVID. And that adds to the stress on that relationship. And then of course the mayor is hit with another crisis. Protesters filling downtown. When George Floyd is murdered in Minneapolis. And these crowds kept growing, the tensions eventually boiling over. And throughout the summer in Chicago and across the country, there's unrest. In Chicago, there's looting, there's destruction. Chicago police telling me multiple people were arrested. And you can see these confrontations between police and protesters did get violent.

There was some shoving. So police officers are now faced with an even more difficult job day to day. And how did the police force see the mayor in this time? We gladly will accept her resignation immediately, effective immediately. I think the police department and many officers within the police department frequently said that they felt that the mayor didn't have their backs, that she wasn't supportive enough of them, that their job conditions were incredibly dangerous and difficult. It has been an extremely long nine days for many of them without a day off, 12-hour days. They were forced to work overtime.

Their vacation days were canceled with little notice. And there was just a sense of very low morale in the Chicago Police Department. When you're getting screamed at every day, hour after hour after hour, in this heat, you have to take that into consideration. And during this time, Cotton Zara and Lightfoot are fighting in public quite frequently. I think that you should take up the president on his offer, especially with a pending march or whatever you want to call it. You know, during the protest last year, he supported President Trump sending federal troops into the city. The mayor also texted the police union president.

Apparently, you are now officially a clown. Class act, mayor, he responded. Which prompted the mayor to text you are now officially a clown. Class act, mayor, he responded. Which prompted the mayor to text him saying he's a clown. Cuttanzar also made some comments early this year that were supportive of the riot at the Capitol. I didn't see anybody literally throwing frozen bottles, bricks, or shooting fireworks at the police. They were simply trying to push past the police to get access to the building. He spoke his truth that day. And Lightfoot blasted him for it.

And that truth is something that is reprehensible and repulsive and unacceptable in any form, but coming from a leader of a police union. So you can imagine how this would add to the tensions between the mayor and the police department. For two and a half years that she's been the tensions between the mayor and the police department. For two and a half years that she's been mayor, she has vilified the police.

And you could see this tension on display one day this summer when two police officers were shot on the south side and when the mayor went to the hospital to visit them. The officer's father gave her a piece of his mind and the officers up there all turned their back on the mayor, and rightly so. Those officers turned their back on her, according to a report in the Chicago Tribune. The men and women of this police department have no respect for this mayor, and it was as palpable as you could possibly imagine outside that hospital at the University of Chicago two nights ago. Wow, that sounds like it's a pretty bad relationship. Yeah, it's a terrible relationship. And we've seen this around the country. There's so much pre-existing tension between police departments and Democratic city mayors that whenever there's any issue that becomes politicized, we've seen

these fights happen. This is my final sign off after 22 years of serving the citizens of the state of Washington. So of course, when the vaccine mandate issue came up, we saw these tensions break out once again. State 1034, this is the last time you'll hear me in a state patrol car. And Jay Inslee can kiss my ass. And it's happening across the country. In Washington state, just in recent days, troopers laid their hats on Capitol steps to honor those who left because of the mandate there. 74 trooper hats, pairs of boots or shoes, one for each state patrol trooper fired under the vaccine mandate.

We saw in San Jose, in Seattle, in Baltimore, when those cities have tried to implement similar orders or mandates around vaccination, police officers have resisted. And now we are potentially gearing up for another big battle in New York now that the city has announced plans to implement a mandate for its own police force. And the president of New York's largest police union has already vowed to take legal action to fight it. So do you feel like this is just another way in which our political divides are playing out right now? That this is really in part about politics? Because, you know, we're talking about vaccines, but it doesn't seem like that's what it's really about.

Yeah, I think it goes way beyond vaccines. Since the murder of George Floyd a year and a half ago, we've had this renewed conversation about policing in this country, not just for certain segments of the population, but across the country. So in the last year and a half especially, to be a police officer doesn't just mean to be a police officer. Police officers themselves are now symbols of the political argument

that Americans are having with each other. You know, Blue Lives Matter is a hallmark of the conservative movement in America, but so is a deep resistance to public health mandates. So when police officers are faced with this decision on vaccine policy, it comes along with all of this other baggage. Okay, so given that this is so deep-seated, what happens now? Like, how does the Chicago mayor, for example, resolve this? Don't they have her backed into a corner? I think that she has made it really clear what her position is.

And she has also made it really clear what the consequence is. And it's a very severe consequence to lose your job as a Chicago police officer. I don't want him to lead these young officers astray and have them destroy their careers like he's destroyed his. And I think that the mayor is betting that there are very few officers who will actually be willing to risk their job for this. If you ignore a directive of your supervisor, or worse, a direct order that's lawfully given, you're going to destroy your career. That is going to follow you forever. Over what? Going to a website, clicking yes or no, and if no, saying that you're going to sign up for testing? Really? That's worth it? I don't think it is. And I don't think people are going to follow him over that cliff.

I think that what we can expect is that the mayor is almost certainly not going to create a situation that will create a public safety crisis in Chicago. I think that what she will do is draw a distinction here. She is pointing specifically at the president of the police union and saying that he's a clown, that he's foolish. And she's trying to appeal to the rank and file and say, look, you're not going to throw away your career because of what this guy is telling you to do. So that's the line that she's trying to walk right now. And I think she's betting that police officers will come around.

So we've had vaccine mandates for a couple of months now, all around the country. And it feels like up until now, what we've seen is the mandate's kind of working. I mean, faced with a deadline, a lot of holdouts actually get vaccinated. So I'm thinking of airline workers, healthcare workers, teachers in New York. I mean, these are all important categories of workers, and they have a lot of leverage too. But most of those people ended up complying and getting the vaccine. But this seems really different. Yeah, I think what's really different is that those earlier groups, the people who were subjected to vaccine mandates earlier, airline workers, teachers, those were groups who were

already much more likely to be vaccinated. So they just needed a little push. I think what Mayor Lightfoot and other mayors are finding is that police officers are extremely resistant to being vaccinated for all kinds of complicated reasons, many of which have nothing to do with the vaccine itself. And they are going to need much more than a push. So we've gotten the low-hanging fruit, right? And now comes the really hard part. That's right. And I think that it still remains to be seen to what extent police officers will eventually be vaccinated, will eventually get on board with what their mayors are asking them to do. But I do think it's striking that we've gotten to a point now where we are fighting in this country over pretty ordinary public health measures. We're fighting over masks. We're fighting over getting vaccines. These things have become completely wrapped up in politics.

And when we look at what's happening with police departments across the country, it's especially striking that the people who seem to be resisting these measures the most are also the people who are tasked with keeping the public safe. also the people who are tasked with keeping the public safe. We are still bogged down in so much of our old politics, so many of the problems that came before the pandemic, the old tensions, the old fights, are all now attaching themselves to issues of masks, issues of vaccines. I mean, I guess it was sort of naive to think that we'd just get through this without the conflict that's really animated everything in our country,

which is, you know, our political divide. Well, and now that we're getting to the point where some of the groups that are the most resistant to being vaccinated are really being given some tough choices. Over the next few months, we will see how strongly held their beliefs are as they're coming up against some very difficult ultimatums. Julie, thank you very much. Thank you, Sabrina. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Thank you. The case now heads to a penalty phase to determine whether Cruz, who is 23, should be sentenced to life in prison or to death. Jury selection begins on January 4th.

And... Together, we're completing the operational planning to ensure vaccinations for kids ages 5 through 11 are available, easy, and convenient. ages 5 through 11 are available, easy, and convenient. The Biden administration announced plans to vaccinate 28 million American children as soon as authorities give formal approval of a low dose of the Pfizer vaccine for 5 to 11-year-olds. And should the FDA and CDC authorize the vaccine, we will be ready to get shots in arms. They expect to get approval and begin vaccinating kids the first week of November. Finally, as expected, the FDA formally authorized booster shots for Americans who got the Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccines. The agency also allowed the mixing and matching of all three of the approved vaccines when giving booster shots.

Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko, Eric Krupke, and Robert Jimison. It was edited by Paige Cowett. Original music by Marion Lozano and Alicia Baitube, and engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brumberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.