Rahm Emanuel, considering White House bid, urges Dems to move center on crime

Rahm Emanuel believes Americans are being presented a “binary choice” between “defund the police” and President Donald Trump’s National Guard push.

So he’s offering an alternative.

As Democrats grapple with how to cut into one of Republicans’ core issues in the midterm elections next year, the former Chicago mayor plans to lay out his own approach to public safety at an event with police leaders in Washington on Wednesday. He plans to call for pairing community policing methods with tough-on-major-crime tactics and youth interventions. He said his strategy can be a model for cities and for fellow Democrats to combat the electoral narrative that they are weak on crime.

“Democrats a) should not be scared of it and b) should be proactive about what their agenda is,” Emanuel said in an interview Monday previewing his remarks.

A political operative who’s served three presidents and across levels of government, Emanuel is attempting to position himself at the forefront of his party’s conversation on how to tackle public safety as he weighs a White House bid in 2028. He told POLITICO he doesn’t have a “hard timeline” for that decision.

Emanuel will present his strategy at the University of Chicago Crime Lab’s Policing Leadership Academy event honoring graduates on Wednesday.

His approach includes combining more training in community policing with “tough action against hardened criminals and gang members,” as well as with youth programs like the mentoring initiatives he undertook as mayor. He also wants more enforcement of gun laws and efforts to intensify them.

He distilled his public-safety pitch into a slogan that harkens back to his time leading Chicago: “More cops on the beat, and getting kids, guns and gangs off the street.”

As mayor, Emanuel grappled with a surge in homicides and shootings, with the city reporting its deadliest year in two decades in 2016. Crime rates across major categories — murders, shootings, robberies and burglaries — declined over the next two years, which the city’s police department attributed to strengthened community partnerships and technological investments. And Emanuel poured millions in expanding youth mentoring and summer job programs to keep kids off the streets, initiatives that remain a point of pride.

He was also besieged by backlash to his handling of the 2014 murder of a Black teenager by a white cop — criticism that continued as he embarked on reforming Chicago’s police department and has persisted in his political career.

Emanuel drew national headlines for tangling with Trump over crime and immigration during the president’s first term. He would face stiff competition in that lane if he ran for the White House in 2028 — Democratic governors like Illinois’ JB Pritzker are fighting Trump’s National Guard incursions into their major cities.

Emanuel expressed opposition to Trump’s efforts to flood blue bastions with Guard troops and federal immigration officers, part of a two-pronged crackdown the president is pushing to boost Republicans in the midterms. Trump claims it has reduced crime. Several states and cities have sued over his Guard deployments to some success, with Illinois and Chicago currently battling the Trump administration before the Supreme Court.

Asked if there was anything effective about Trump’s strategy, Emanuel pointed to a “thread of positive” — that concentrating troops in one area of a city could give local law enforcement the ability to focus elsewhere.

But he stressed he was “not endorsing” that use of the Guard. “It’s a horrible idea to parachute in 100 to 200 people for a short duration of time who have no sense of a community or no sense of what policing is,” he said. “All the money you’re spending on the National Guard could be used to train 500 [local] officers.”

As Trump works to exploit public safety concerns in the midterms, Emanuel said Democrats have to get “comfortable” talking about crime. Democrats are broadly urging their party to go on the offense on the issue, bolstered by private polling that shows a mix of attacks on Republicans and showing steps Democrats are taking to reduce crime can swing voters in their direction.

Emanuel said Democrats should stop crouching behind falling crime statistics that don’t match voters’ perceptions. “Nobody can be complacent or comforted by a statistic,” he added.

He also repeatedly derided the “defund” slogan that criminal justice reformers and progressives popularized in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd but that Democrats have since abandoned. The rallying cry for police reform quickly became an anchor for the party as the GOP successfully argued against its absolutism. Since then, Democrats have worked to distance themselves from it, with Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed scrubbing his social media of mentions of it and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani backing away from his past embrace of it.

Republicans are nevertheless seizing on it as they work to make Mamdani their midterms foil and hammer Democrats as soft on crime. But Emanuel argued they won’t be able to make the association stick to candidates broadly after Mamdani moved away from the mantra.

Emanuel will have to contend with his own past on public safety as he contemplates a political comeback, a record that includes helping pass Clinton’s controversial 1994 crime bill and his bungled handling of Laquan McDonald’s murder in 2014.

Emanuel said he bears “responsibility” for how he handled McDonald’s case. He has forged a “very strong relationship” with McDonald’s great uncle, Chicago pastor Marvin Hunter, who supported Emanuel as ambassador to Japan during the Biden administration. The two keep in regular contact.

He also pointed to his 2021 Senate confirmation hearing, when he acknowledged he had underestimated the “distrust” of law enforcement among Black Chicagoans and failed to do enough to address it.

“The problems were deeper, farther and more ingrained than I fully appreciated. That’s on me,” Emanuel said Monday. “But I was determined to make the changes.”