Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot personally patrolled the city’s streets, Tuesday night, in an effort to encourage social distancing.

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Lightfoot spoke about the patrol during a press conference the following day, as reported by the Chicago Tribune: “I personally drove around yesterday, and I was up on the North Side, in the 50th Ward, and I’ll continue to do that,” Lightfoot said. “I told people that I saw gathering in clusters not abiding by the social distancing rules to break it up. Yes. And I’ll continue to do that. I mean what I say: We have to protect ourselves. We have to be smart about what we’re doing in the course of this pandemic. And if it means that I drive around and check whether people are in compliance, I’m happy to do it.”

“Most people do a double-take and are like, wait, is that the mayor? And then as we roll away, you’ll hear somebody saying, ‘Hey, that was the mayor. Hey, that was Lori Lightfoot,'” the mayor said regarding the public’s reaction to her patrol, during a Connected to Chicago interview.

The state of Illinois will be under a stay-at-home order until, at the earliest, April 30. In the United States, there have been over 500,000 confirmed cases and 20,000 deaths.

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The gun violence in Chicago has been a major issue in the city that politicians and community leaders have tried their hardest to curb over the years. Their efforts have led to another significant drop in homicides in 2019 for the third consecutive year, according to CNN. Chicago, which has the third-largest population in America, declined by 13% in comparison to 2018. 2019 recorded 490 murders and police documented 564 in 2018. In comparison to 2016, which recorded 756 — the highest documented number of homicides in two decades at the time — homicides have dropped by 35%.

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This marks another strong decline in homicides since 2016 which is when the city began to take major efforts to curb murders and gun violence in the city by hiring more police with an emphasis on community policing as well as providing further investments in social service resources and schools.

“I think that all of those things working together — being on the ground, supporting vulnerable victims, supporting vulnerable communities — led to the declines that we saw this year, and particularly over the course of the summer,” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said. 

In addition to homicides going down, the city also saw another significant decline in shootings in the city. Police recorded 2,139 shooting in 2019 which is a 9.6% decline from 2018 which counted 2,367 shooting. In addition, the Chicago Police Superintendent said that there’s also been a decline in robberies by 17%.