Former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas is running to the right of Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
Erin Hooley/AP Photo

Ever since his son was killed in a 1995 drug-related shooting, Willie Wilson, a perennial candidate who has run for president, Senate and another three times for mayor, has taken a strong anti-crime, police-friendly stance. But during a January debate, arguing that Lightfoot wasn’t doing enough to curb Chicago’s violence, he said she needs to “take the handcuffs off the police” and allow officers to “chase [somebody] down and hunt them down like a rabbit.”

The line instantly attracted jeers and is perhaps his most attention-getting moment of the race (even at his rallies).

Lightfoot said Wilson was unfairly targeting Black and brown men. Community activist Ja’Mal Green said it was “disgusting” to have an older man “who was a sharecropper from down South who would get on TV and constantly double down on hunting people down like rabbits.”

“I don’t respond to kids,” Wilson responded.

Wilson has a policing plan that includes bolstering police presence on city transit and installing more cameras throughout Chicago, but his main philosophy goes beyond that. “I don’t care what color you are. … I’m gon’ lock ’em up. And they get out again, we’ll lock ’em back up. Because crime has no color,” Wilson told The TRiiBE in January.

Tricky Twitter fingers

The weekend before the election, the Chicago Tribune reported that Vallas’ official Twitter account had liked several inflammatory posts that bashed Lightfoot or had racist connotations. Some referred to the city’s first openly gay mayor as “Larry” rather than “Lori” and others made fun of her appearance and height, while another called her “beyond human.”

Still other tweets promoted “stop-and-frisk” policies as potential policing solutions — things that did not help dispel the idea that Vallas might be a Republican.

First, Vallas said he had nothing to do with those likes, as he doesn’t personally manage the account, and that his team was trying to identify who was responsible. Some of the liked tweets predate his campaign announcement, the Tribune reported.

The candidate told CBS News on Saturday that his account had been hacked altogether: “Even though we shut down our system; changed our password, they’re still trying to hack us.”

But he denied the tweets in question were “the R word” — or racist.

Civil service campaign fodder

A letter from Lori Lightfoot’s campaign team to Chicago Public Schools and City Colleges of Chicago employees in January sought to recruit student volunteers.