In President Trump’s retelling, a mysterious Chicago police officer’s plan to solve the city’s crime problem keeps getting better, the Chicago Tribune reports. On Wednesday, Trump told Fox News’s Sean Hannity that an unnamed Chicago motorcycle cop whom Trump claimed he met on the campaign trail said that “if they let us do our job we could stop [violent crime] immediately.” That’s a quicker turnaround than Trump has claimed was possible when he previously mentioned the mystery cop in references to Chicago crime, a favorite topic since he launched his run for office. Last year, he told former Fox host Bill O’Reilly that he believed the mystery cop when the officer told him he could solve Chicago’s crime problem “within a week” if he was in charge.
On Wednesday, Trump sliced the turnaround time to “immediately.” Telling Hannity “Chicago is out of control” and that “minorities want police protection… they need it more than everybody,” he added, “One of the things we are doing now very strongly is the inner cities” — a claim he did not expand on. The White House has ignored requests that it identify the cop Trump says could fix Chicago’s crime problem overnight. The president has said he passed the name of the officer to Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel’s spokesman Adam Collins said that that was not true. Collins added, “If the president has a name for this mystery person he continues to talk about, we’re all ears. In the meantime, we live in the real world and if the president wants to build on the reductions in violence our hard working officers are achieving, if he wants to have an immediate effect on gun violence, he could do something to stop the guns that flow into our city from Indiana and Wisconsin.”