With 21 candidates vying to be the next mayor of Chicago, hearings on challenges to their nominating petition signatures and other paperwork began this week at the Chicago Board of Elections. The agency will issue its decisions on the challenges by Christmas. Many of the candidates will likely not be able to prove that they have the 12,500 valid signatures from registered Chicago voters necessary for making the ballot.

“As a young girl in eighth grade I used to get teased and called a raccoon because I had dark rings around my eyes,” she went on to say. “And I know black people have been called ‘coons’ for a long time as well. So in my prayer time God gave me that name and He said ‘Yeah you’re indeed a ‘coon but you’re a tycoon.’”

“I got arrested and fought for my life almost three years,” she says, and it made her reevaluate how she saw the neighborhood youth who’d long told her of unfair treatment by CPD.

Brown D’Tycoon adds that she’d push to reform the onerous rules governing who can get on the ballot to run for local office, so it wouldn’t just be rich people who have a chance to compete. She thinks the mayor should be a person familiar to regular people, who spends time in the neighborhoods and takes everyone into consideration, even criminals and drug addicts, “to learn what it is that people need.”

Clark says her priority in office would be to deal with the drug problem in the city. “It’s a hurting thing in my neighborhood,” she says. “You watch the news, you know about the killing and stuff that’s going on.” She doesn’t begrudge Rahm Emanuel or other current city or police leaders for not doing enough about the problem, though. “I think they’re doing all they can, all they know to do,” she says.

Like Brown D’Tycoon, Washington is also a pastor and has run for alderman before. He made the ballot in the 24th Ward in the 2015 election but lost to Michael Scott Jr. He’s also concerned with crime in Chicago, though as a police officer he views CPD as integral to combating the gun violence in the city. “I promise you 90 percent of crime would stop,” he boldly asserts without getting into specifics when asked what he’d accomplish as mayor. He says that, because he knows the streets well and understands police-community relations, he’d be able to rebuild confidence in law enforcement and unity throughout the city.