Just after Garry McCarthy said he had been encouraged to run for mayor in Chicago, the outspoken former top cop said he might soon get political.
McCarthy had said in a local radio interview Wednesday that “a lot of people are encouraging” him to run for mayor, but claimed at the time “politics is not in my DNA.”
But on Friday morning, McCarthy told "The Big John and Ray Show" that getting into politics may be his next move.
"I just don’t know," he said in the interview. "I’m not planning what’s going to happen in the next few months. I’m just trying to have an impact in some fashion by talking about what’s going on, and if that means getting involved in politics then maybe I’m going to do it. I can tell you this, the first person I have to convince is [my wife] Kristin. She would much rather I have a low profile and people leave us alone.”
McCarthy, who was serving as Chicago’s police superintendent during the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald, was fired by Mayor Rahm Emanuel soon after dashcam video of the incident was released.
When asked Wednesday if he was thinking of running against the man who fired him, McCarthy said “I’m not very good at [politics].”
“As you guys know, I’m very straight forward but I can tell you this, I would support anybody who would start thinking about performance-based government rather than politics,” he said in the interview. “There is nobody holding anybody accountable. It’s all about politics and communication strategy and, I’m sorry, that just doesn’t work to get things done, in a big city.”
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When asked about McCarthy’s statements at a morning news conference Wednesday, Emanuel said he had no comment on the matter.
Since his firing, McCarthy has been outspoken about Chicago’s spiking violence and police department. In an earlier interview, he blamed “noncompliance” with police for a majority of police-involved shootings, saying “almost without exception any one of these bad incidents that you see, it starts with noncompliance.”
“Less than half of 1 percent of all the shootings in this city involve police officers shooting civilians,” McCarthy said in the interview. “But one shooting, and granted it’s a bad shooting and the officer needs to be held accountable, whether it’s outside of policy or whether it’s criminal and he deserves a trial, just like any other citizen in this country, and the officer has to answer for his actions, but the solutions that are being applied as a result of that particular incident, have it that people are dying in record numbers here. Does that make any sense?”
In the Wednesday interview, McCarthy also applauded the Trump administration’s announcement in which Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordered a review of all Justice Department "consent decrees" that force police departments to overhaul their practices. Sessions said, "it is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies."
McCarthy claimed the Justice Department’s report on the Chicago Police Department was “completely, politically motivated.”
“I’m on record with this, the credibility of that report is seriously in question,” he said.
McCarthy was never interviewed in the DOJ’s report on CPD. At the time, Attorney General Loretta Lynch told reporters they had tried to reach McCarthy but “he was not available.”
McCarthy has argued that was a lie.
“With all the investigative resources of the federal government, they can’t find me here in River North?” McCarthy told NBC 5.
