Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot joined a legal consulting firm as a senior consultant in March, according to the firm’s website.
“I am so pleased to share the good news that former Chicago Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot has joined our firm as a Senior Consultant to the Forensic Services Practice,” Kristofer Swanson, a vice-president of the Boston-headquartered firm, Charles River Associates, said in the email reviewed by the Daily Caller.
“Lori E. Lightfoot advises companies, boards, and the counsel who represent them in investigating, responding to, and emerging stronger from crises, serious allegations of fraud and misconduct, and high-stakes civil and criminal disputes,” Lightfoot’s page on the firm’s website read in part.
Lightfoot “leverages her unique and broad professional experience gained from” previous roles including “as the 56th Mayor of the City of Chicago who led Chicago through the COVID-19 pandemic and other crises with regional and national implications,” the page stated. (RELATED: Lori Lightfoot Gets Harvard Gig Teaching About COVID Response After Violating Her Own Lockdown Rules)
Lightfoot served as Chicago’s 56th mayor from 2019 to 2023. She later became a Fellow at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and currently is an Institute of Politics Pritzker Fellow at her alma mater, the University of Chicago.
Lightfoot, Chicago’s first black female and first openly gay mayor, became the first Chicago mayor to lose reelection in 40 years, since when the 50th and the city’s first female mayor, Jane Byrne, lost her primary in 1983, according to NBC News. Crime reportedly spiked during her term and appeared to have cost her the reelection.
Murders appeared to be subsiding before Lightfoot assumed mayoral office on May 20, 2019, according to Chicago Police Department (CPD) statistics. The city reportedly ended 2019 with less than 500 murders. By the end of 2020, however, the rate had soared by just over 55%, reaching 770. It spiked even further, reaching 800 in 2021—the highest in a quarter of a century, according to Newsweek. It then dipped slightly to 699 in 2022.
Lightfoot, in a bid to stem the tide of violent crime in Chicago, argued against defunding the police and criticized local authorities who released violent crime suspects awaiting trial, according to local outlet WTTW. Despite her rhetoric, in the wake of the George Floyd riots, Lightfoot moved to allocate funds away from the CPD. She relied on cutting around $59 million in funding from the CPD by not filling over 600 vacant department jobs, in the mayor’s $12.8 billion 2021 budget plan.
The record-high crime rate under her leadership traumatized many Chicagoans and endangered the city’s economic outlook, WTTW noted.