Lightfoot and Trump met privately shortly after the mayor’s election. The mayor’s team tried to contact Trump, but had not received a response, Lightfoot said. “We reached out once we knew and saw that tweet to say, ‘What are you doing? Why didn’t you reach out ahead of time?' "

In 2017, President Donald Trump pledged to “send in the feds” to respond to Chicago’s “carnage.”

Both Lightfoot and Johnson today said they’d gladly accept any extra help.

“U.S. Attorney (John) Lausch has been a great partner,” Johnson said. “At the end of the day, we can always use more federal dollars, more agents, whether its FBI, ATF or DEA, and of course, more U.S. attorneys. . . .There’s no police executive anywhere that won’t gladly take additional resources.”

The larger problem is “too many illegal guns in this state and too many people willing to use them,” Johnson said. The mayor, the police department, prosecutors and the judicial system all can do better, he said. Lightfoot and police brass have argued there are few consequences in court for those charged with gun possession with lengthy arrest records.

While Pat Milhizer, a spokesman for Cook County Circuit Court Chief Judge Timothy Evans, abstained from commenting on those arrested over the weekend, he defended Evan’s bond reforms. Since they were launched in the fall of 2017, Milhizer says more felony defendants have been deemed a danger to the community and held in jail.

"Judges issued eight times the number of no-bail orders in felony cases since Chief Judge Evans' bail order took effect. There were 267 no-bail orders entered in the 15 months prior to the order (July 2016 through September 2017), and 2,192 no-bail orders issued in the 15 months after the order (October 2017 through December 2018),” Milhizer said in an email.

“For felony defendants released on bail, 99.8 percent do not receive charges of new gun-related violent crime while their cases are pending. In the 18 months from October 2017 through March 2019, 37,233 felony defendants came through bond court, and 30,466 were released into the community. Of the 30,466 defendants, 0.2% (or 70 of them), were charged with committing a new violent offense that involved the use of a gun,” he said.

Snapshot data from the chief judge's office for the end of March showed there were roughly 400 individuals charged with violent crimes and 650 charged with weapons crimes in "pretrial community corrections" rather than in jail; 2,723 individuals charged with violent crimes, and 683 charged with weapons crimes were in jail at the same time.

Bond reform has become a key plank of Evans’ tenure, alongside broader criminal justice reforms from Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and State’s Attorney Kim Foxx.

While Lightfoot says she agrees with county officials that the jail should not serve as a “debtors prison, where we’re holding people simply because they can’t afford to pay . . . somebody whose got a long criminal history of violence and who possesses firepower like this has forfeited their right to be out on the street. It is a danger.”

She held up a picture of guns and ammunition seized after this weekend’s shootings. Some of the ammunition could pierce armor, she said.

“The individuals that were arrested and found to be in possession of these materials got a $10,000 bond, which means that you have to pay $1,000 to be able to get out. So I need to understand from the judges who think that these people are not dangers to the community: How do I explain that to people on the West Side and on the South Side, who in many instances, are living in a war zone, how do I explain to them that this is a justified use of bail? It’s hard to fathom the circumstances.”