CHICAGO — Days into a dispute between Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Chicago Teachers Union, labor leaders outlined what they described as a grand compromise. Students, who had been receiving no instruction after teachers voted to stop reporting to classrooms amid a coronavirus surge, would attend a few days of online school, followed by a full, in-person return.
Ms. Lightfoot was having none of it.
Within minutes, she and the head of the school district released a statement that accused union leadership of not listening. “We will not relent,” they said, calling instead for a swift return to in-person classes. Days later, it was the union that largely relented: Students returned to school buildings earlier than teachers had wanted, with some additional Covid safeguards in place.
The highly public, acerbic dispute with the teachers this month was characteristic of Ms. Lightfoot’s stewardship of Chicago. In nearly three years marked by a pandemic, soaring rates of violence and frequent labor battles, Ms. Lightfoot has shown herself to be a blunt orator and an unflinching negotiator. But her lofty campaign promises to “bring in the light,” reduce violence and overhaul governance in America’s third-largest city have repeatedly run up against an overwhelming news cycle, decades of inertia and her uncanny ability to make political enemies.
“Her style is a top-bottom approach, very different from what she campaigned on,” said Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez, whom Ms. Lightfoot once referred to as a “jackass” in hundreds of pages of her frank text messages that were obtained by The Chicago Tribune.
Those texts revealed a mayor with a hands-on management style who repeatedly snapped at critics, colleagues and even political allies. She said one alderman was “full of crap,” told another he was “bush league” and told Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a fellow Democrat, that his administration was being “petty.”
As a gay, Black woman who grew up in Ohio and had never before held elective office, Ms. Lightfoot stood apart from previous mayors, and her inauguration in 2019 was seen by some as a potential moment of change for the city. She won all 50 City Council wards in the runoff election while decrying corruption and the infamous Chicago political machine. She also vowed to address the racial and economic disparities that have long defined Chicago, where the downtown and North Side have often prospered while disinvestment and violence have plagued many neighborhoods on the South and West Sides.
But Ms. Lightfoot’s tenure has been shaped by a series of crises, some within her control, others not. About 800 people were murdered in the city last year, the most in a generation. Downtown has struggled to bounce back from the pandemic. And clashes with the unions representing police officers and teachers have proved destabilizing.
Ms. Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor who worked in the administration of Mayor Richard M. Daley, and who led a police disciplinary board under Mayor Rahm Emanuel, has defended her record. At the time of her election, she said this month, “Nobody had in their mind’s eye that we would be shortly thereafter laboring under a massive global pandemic and all of the consequences.”
She added: “Nobody thought that we would be suffering from one of the biggest economic meltdowns that we’ve seen since the Great Depression. Nobody thought that we would see this massive uptick nationwide in violence.”
She also noted that her outspoken demeanor was not a new trait at City Hall.
“I personally get asked this question of, ‘Well, Mayor, you know your relationships with City Council, shouldn’t you be nicer?’ Which I have to laugh at,” Ms. Lightfoot said. “When I think about who my predecessors were — I worked for Rich Daley and I was around Rahm a lot, it’s not like they won contests for Mr. Congeniality.”
Ms. Lightfoot is expected to seek another term next year, and it is unclear how voters will respond. Though some high-profile critics have been rumored as potential opponents, the field of challengers remains largely unformed and there is no reliable public polling on the mayor’s job approval.
But the chief criticism her eventual opponents will deploy — of a mayor who makes enemies instead of allies, who stokes ill will instead of brokering compromise — already seems clear.
“She does not know how to play well with others” and “she’s never mastered the idea of a group project,” said Stacy Davis Gates, the vice president of the teachers’ union. “And that is the issue because she’s the common denominator in every single scenario that has discord.”
But if Ms. Lightfoot seemed like a figure whose ability to upend the status quo was an asset, she was also battling an old image of a Chicago mayor, said Elizabeth Taylor, a co-writer of “American Pharaoh,” a biography of former Mayor Richard J. Daley — once the city’s longest-serving mayor until his son Richard M. Daley came along.
An apt comparison to Ms. Lightfoot, Ms. Taylor said, is Jane Byrne, the only other woman to serve as Chicago’s mayor, who challenged the city’s stereotypical vision of a leader when she swept into office in 1979.
“They both came in on a wave of reform,” Ms. Taylor said, “and then quickly were on the defensive.”
Ms. Lightfoot’s distinctly brusque leadership style has been embraced at moments. When the pandemic hit, her unsmiling face was turned into a meme, Photoshopped into famous Chicago scenes — the lakefront, Millennium Park, a Seurat painting on display at the Art Institute — silently warning residents to stay in their homes. And even as crises have piled up, some have noted the scale of the challenges she inherited and the uncertainty wrought by the pandemic.
“The compassion part of it speaks to me — you can see that it’s genuine,” said Joseph Gilmore, whose 33-year-old son, Travell, was among the hundreds killed in Chicago last year.
Mr. Gilmore said he and his son, a bartender with an outgoing personality who doted on his young daughter, talked regularly about the city’s seemingly inescapable violence. But despite the tragedy in his own family, Mr. Gilmore said that he remained an enthusiastic supporter of Ms. Lightfoot, and that it was not fair to expect her to single-handedly fix the violence.
“The stuff she is saying to you, it doesn’t sound like a whole bunch of smoke,” Mr. Gilmore said. “She comes off like the authority she is.”
Ms. Lightfoot inherited a city that has held steady in population — growing nearly 2 percent from 2010 to 2020, to about 2.75 million residents — while several other Midwestern cities had steep declines. Since taking office in 2019, she has won praise for pouring resources into affordable housing in Chicago and her work on Invest South/West, an initiative to develop pockets of the South and West Sides that have languished for decades. Last summer, the minimum wage in Chicago was raised to $15 for most workers, an effort Ms. Lightfoot championed.
But she has faced criticism for her handling of the Chicago Police Department, an issue that also vexed her predecessors.
Ms. Lightfoot apologized after police officers raided the wrong home in February 2019, forcing Anjanette Young to stand naked and handcuffed while her apartment was searched. Chicago’s inspector general said this month that officials in Ms. Lightfoot’s office had made false or unfounded statements about the incident, which occurred not long before her administration took office, and that city agencies had “prioritized communications and public relations concerns over the higher mission of city government.”
The fatal shooting of a 13-year-old boy, Adam Toledo, by a Chicago police officer last year generated nationwide outrage. Miles from the scene of the shooting, protesters marched in Ms. Lightfoot’s neighborhood on the Northwest Side.
Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, a Chicago alderman, described Ms. Lightfoot’s tenure as “chaotic.”
“One of the hallmarks of her approach has been to take things very personal,” he said, “and to engage in combat when, in fact, there is a path toward collaboration.”
She has seen high turnover among key advisers at City Hall, and aides have grumbled about a difficult work environment and a testy mayor who is known to berate subordinates. Despite the city’s mounting problems, Ms. Lightfoot has left crucial administrative positions vacant, including her deputy mayor of public safety, a job that was left unfilled for months until last May.
And last fall, the head of Chicago’s largest police union openly defied Ms. Lightfoot on her order that all city employees report their vaccination status — a conflict that laid bare the tensions between the mayor and rank-and-file officers.
Violence in Chicago is a pressing concern, as carjackings, shootings and homicides all spiked in 2020 and 2021.
On Wednesday night, a police officer on patrol downtown shot a man. The authorities said that the man was inside a vehicle taken in a carjacking, and that someone in the car had fired at the police. Days earlier, an 8-year-old girl was shot and killed while crossing a street with her mother in the Little Village neighborhood; a 16-year-old was later charged with murder.
Donovan Price, a pastor who goes to shooting scenes to assist victims’ families, said his work felt particularly bleak in the past year.
“The amount of children shot in general, the amount of mass shootings, just the feel that things were out of control,” said Mr. Price, who lives on the South Side.
Mr. Price said that trust between the police and residents had not improved, and that Ms. Lightfoot had not placed enough of a priority on reducing violence and restoring order.
“It’s a wild scene,” he said. “And when it’s this wild and people are getting shot at this frequency, of all ages, then you have to look and say, ‘Well, what is being done about it?’”
