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On today's episode I am going to give you my very initial thoughts on the Brandon Johnson victory in the Chicago mayoral runoff election as it pertains to police reform issues.
The majority of the mayoral field ran primarily on the issue of crime and violence being out of control in Chicago. If you are thinking that black "progressive" alderpeople who jumped in the race wouldn't do that you would be wrong. Instead it was a chorus signing the tride but true 1980s ear rhetoric about the need for more police officers and that each individual candidate was the only person who could bring crime under control. While these tactics seemed to be affective against Mayor Lightfoot those same types of critiques against a far more progressive in rhetoric candidate Johnson didn't seem to work as well.
There is little doubt in my mind that Paul Vallas tried the Bob Fioretti plan where he was going to try to be a candidate for every possible constituency in the city, and many that couldn't even vote in this election. Over the last several years he has certainly grown publicly closer to the MAGA and alt right both in Chicago and throughout Illinois. As Illinois grows more and more democratic this strategy has always seemed odd to me. Attempting a mayoral run in Chicago after doing this is puzzling for sure. Unfortunately for Vallas he continued to do this during the campaign. There is no doubt given the margin of about 17,000 votes his move right probably played a more important role then we will ever understand in his loss.
As for what we should expect from Johnson I am think reformers should not expect major changes in the first budget. There just isn't enough time. When Johnson starts to make changes I am hoping he roles our a crisis response system that removes officers from responding to 911 calls that don't require them to be there. This would allow the city to staff a response with mental health professionals, medical personnel, and social workers. This among all the reforms Johnson could bring in would probably do the most to help repair the relationship between the community and the police department.
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Hello everyone, welcome to the Chicago Justice Podcast. I'm your host, Tracy Siska. I'm also Executive Director of the Chicago Justice Project. Find out more about what we do at Chicagojustice.org. Can involve the cjpnation.org to donate and support. The Patreon link will be in the show notes. We'd really appreciate it. We do all kinds of transparency work beyond this, litigation, open data. You can find out all of that at Chicagojustice.org. First time listening to the podcast, please subscribe. If you're watching this on our YouTube channel, smash that subscribe button. Please hit the like button and hit that bell so you're alerted every time we post. Really appreciate it. So what are we covering today? Well, you got to talk politics, right? With the Chicago election. So we are going to talk about the Brandon Johnson victory. Um in the Merrill runoff election. Pretty amazing to me, to be honest with you. Okay, so let's get right into it. Johnson's surprising victory. I was surprised. I thought with all the things I'm about to tell you, he was up against that it was going to be curtains for Johnson. And I thought it would be an early victory. Like early, early. I was totally surprised by how things fell. But hey, it's um it's probably good for the city that Johnson won. I'm not a Vallas fan. Um, I think Paul Vallas is has some good ideas about how to fund things and financing and things like that, because he's wonky. Um, but he's in my opinion done some bad things with schools across the country and um definitely cozyd up to the alt-right. There's no doubt about that. So, what was Johnson up against in this election related to crime and violence and policing and justice issues? Well, everyone, including Vallis, but everyone, just about everyone in the election, was pounding crime and violence issues. Then you have the FOP that is has alt-right management, fraternal order of police, for those who don't know the lacronym there. They have an alt-right administration, and he just won it. So Johnson's gonna have to deal with that moving forward. And then there's just the alt-right in Chicago and throughout Illinois and throughout the country, just pounding crime and violence issues in Chicago, pounding it in the alt-right news. Then they need to deal with issues around the depleted CPD ranks, right? And this happened in a lot of major cities across the country with police leaving it, um, part of vaccine mandates and COVID and not being appreciated and crying and whining. Some of their concerns, I'm sure, are valid, but a lot of them were not. I'd love to see some of those people go out and get jobs paying what they're making, uh, being a police officer. But, or you know, some of them went out to the suburbs. But that is an issue in Chicago, right? And it's certainly an issue that the candidates pushed, many of them. Um, and the alt-right media and Chicago media, many well, I guess you call Fox News part of that, and you're definitely talking about Citywire and Second City Cop and Chicago contrarian, crime and regal blog or CWB, whatever the hell they call themselves. And then so that all was they were all pushing that, and then you have the you know the fact that Chicago as a hellscape made it into the governor's and attorney general's race in November of last year, right? It was a Chicago's a hellscape, all of that into this mix that I thought for sure would take down any progressive candidate in Chicago. Also, in this race, were just the I have a hard time calling them progressive, but progressive candidates um still current aldermen, but are about to be out of a job in a few weeks. Sophia King, fourth ward alderperson, Sophia King, and sixth ward alderperson Roderick Sawyer, both pounded crime and violence. Sophia King was head of the Progressive Caucus. Roderick Sawyer, I don't think he is anymore, but at one point he was head of the Black Caucus in the city council under Rom and thought he was going to be this big um power wielder. That never happened, right? And honestly, I don't think 85% of Chicago knew who the hell either one of them were and still didn't after the the general election. They got almost no votes. Um, they both backed Vallis and both talked about crime and violence using Brandon Johnson's um defund the police comments from a couple years ago against him, and we need someone who's gonna unleash the cops. So King and Sawyer went with Vallis. Their voters did not. Let's talk about that really quick. They just didn't go with him right now. You look at 17,000 vote difference. When I looked at the numbers in the Merrill election, I thought at that point it would be hard for Vallis to win because you looked at what votes Johnson got, then you add on a huge percentage of Lightfoot voters. Hopefully, but not automatically, a huge percentage of West Side Latino voters from Chewy. That was by no means with the race involved in that and issues a guarantee. And then you look and add in like Sophia King and Sawyer's voters. Just on the numbers, not all of them by any of that stretch are going to go one way or the other, but enough of them that there was gonna be a high enough percentage of, especially Lightfoot and Chewy voters, most likely. Chewy is a little bit there, but Brandon Johnson and Lightfoot votes, and then you add in a good percentage of Sawyer and Sophia King votes. It was really going to be whether Latinos turned out for Sawyer. That's my 20,000 view at this point. We haven't gotten really detailed analysis, but if you look at just they did a ward analysis, I haven't gone into precincts or anything, but if you look at the ward analysis from the general to the runoff, it basically looks like Johnson took everywhere Lightfoot took, where he took originally, everything Lightfoot took, everything that Chewy took, all the areas that Chewy won the majority of votes, and the sprinkling of where Sawyer, Sawyer, and King votes came from, and probably Jamal Green, and you start going down, but I mean you're talking about Kansas and almost got no votes, those probably almost all went for Johnson. And yes, Vallis peeled off a percentage of them, but not enough. I would bet that um Paul, in my opinion, Paul Vallis screwed up in that he over the last few years, maybe because he was thinking of running for governor or senate or some other more uh larger state race, he did a lot of like um cozying up with the alt-right in Illinois, awake Illinois, the FOP here in Chicago, Cass, the Dan Prophet, uh what is the morning answer or something, whatever the hell that stupid radio show is. He cozy upped all of them. And maybe that runs on a statewide thing, although I don't really think it does. As you can see, Pritzker easily won. I don't think it's gonna win in Illinois anymore. They're just insane. What Vallis should have done was been just right of whoever his opponents were, just right, just barely fiscally conservative, but just barely right of them. The alt-right has no one to vote for. They're not gonna vote for Johnson, they're not gonna vote for Lightfoot or Chewy, they're gonna vote for him. So closing up to him was stupid, in my opinion. Him closing up to them was stupid. And you see in this election, last I looked, and I haven't looked another day or so. Uh, recording this on Thursday, April 6th, around two o'clock Eastern, it was like 17,000 the difference. Could Vallas have lost 17,000 votes because of the closing up to the right? Yeah, or could Vallis's closing up to the right have motivated 17,000 people who may not have voted to vote against him, maybe not even for Johnson, but against him. Yeah, it could have. It really, really could have. And I think that may have done him in. So one last thing that we get to the um list of what he what Johnson was up against. And I'll I'll talk about this in further pod episodes too, is you're looking at the David Brown, what I call the David Brown and Laurie Lightfoot exhaustion. If you take candidate lightfoot's rhetoric, if you take that rhetoric and use it against her, not what she did as mayor necessarily on policing and crime and violence. But if you do it, but if you take her rhetoric and use it against her, plus, in my view, and in many people's struggles, Brown, David Brown, the superintendent, she picked, basically incompetent. Certainly a dinosaur in the way he wanted to police the city. Did they, as I I talked about it in a retrospective on Brown and on the um Lifefoot losing in previous episodes recently, there are COVID issues around both of their terms. There is no doubt about it. So I'm not gonna um I'm not gonna not I'm not going to not include that context. Remember, ladies and gentlemen, all this happened in in the midst of a worldwide pandemic that probably really, really, really hurt light, besides the fact she can't make a friend save her life or keep one for sure. So there was this exhaustion with her, and Brown. And then you mix into that all the COVID disinformation, the FOP resisting, the FOP alt-right leadership resisting the um the vaccine, the depleted candidate, the depleted um ranks of the CPD, officers retiring, officers going to work at suburban or rural or out of state. All of that is mixed up. Now take all of that and try to understand and think about Chicago's history and predict that a progressive wins that election. That begs the question: did Johnson win or did Vallas lose? It's a good question. I don't really have an answer now, but I am starting to lean towards the fact that Vallas lost this race. He should have, um, in my opinion, he probably shouldn't be able to win. His closing up to the alt-right in Illinois the last couple of years really, really hurt him. And he kept doing it, and he kept doing it, and he kept doing it, which was stupid. Now, I'm gonna talk a little bit about here for a few minutes about what we should expect from Johnson's term. First year, first year budget and first year in general is a push, in my opinion. There just isn't gonna be enough time between him getting in and I think in May and having to produce a budget for the city in a few months. I don't think you're gonna see massive change in the first budget. And if I was him, I don't know if I would propose it. I might start doing things like having, you know, these sessions around the city for listening sessions and including people and talking about ideas, but I don't know if I would force stuff through right now that wasn't well thought thought out. But that's my prediction. We'll see. Brandon Johnson doesn't have a lot of experience, and he has no experience running an organization or a business or anything this size. So when I tell you that I I have serious concerns about his ability to do all of that, I do very serious ones. I don't care if he's progressive or not. Nothing in his history shows me he's got the experience to handle the bureaucracy that is the city, uh, turn the police department, any of that. But we'll see. Will he really reduce the budget in the CPD? Well, in my opinion, he can do something really quick, which is uh Mayor Lightfoot, when she created the Office of Public Safety in her office, according to an interview we did six, eight shows ago, maybe in the first one of the season, on how much the CPD costs really cost. In that report, I'm forgetting his name right now, so I'm not gonna uh try to guess, but in that report that the um gentleman issued, he's he's a public employee in Evanston, works for the city government in Evanston. When he looked at it, he said, Hey, LIFA created this office of public safety inside the mayor's office, but it took like 100 and some million dollars, 120 million is what I want member, but it's something like 100 to 120 million dollars worth of responsibilities out of the CPD and put it in the office of public safety. Woo-hoo! Well, that's 120 million that was left in the CPD budget. She never reduced the CPD budget. So when she increased the city, but the CPD budget, Chicago Police Department's budget, for to build the police academy, she did it entirely. She didn't take, oh, well, you know, we're moving this 120 million dollars or whatever it is over to my office, to this new office in my office that we created. Let's take 120 million from the CPD's budget and put it in this office, in the mayor's office, where it should go. No, no, no, no. She left it in the CPD budget. Well, to me, there's 100, whatever that is, 100, 120 million dollars that can be immediately cut from the CPD's budget. Now, in doing that, if the money is actually there, great. Then you got 120 million dollars, 100 million dollars, whatever it is, to build up your crisis response and other things that you want to do without necessarily reducing any money for actual hiring of officers, which reducing that would be highly controversial. It probably needs to happen. Um, but I would also say you know what a five million dollars of that money could go to? Producing a transparent and publicly viewable um staffing analysis. So we know how many officers each of these districts actually needs. Wouldn't that be nice? Sending out a priority about how we're going to police this city and then doing the staffing analysis around that, and then producing those numbers so we could see what we actually need. The number is around 13,000 now. It was 13,700 and something back in the early 2000s. I talked before on the podcast about how that number gets generated. Not going to do it, how that number got generated. But I think that number right now is around 13,000 in the budget. You wouldn't have to touch any of that to move the 100, 120 million away. You wouldn't. Then once the analysis is done, then we know do we need 8,000, 12,000, 11,000, 14,000, 15,000, whatever we need, that's the target right there. Um my pick, and I'll get to why I think he won't do that in a little bit, because he's not going to do the staffing analysis for political reasons. So I also predict the first year we're going to see problems with manpower in the CPD persist. Now, they're not short, they're down from their budgeted number, but the budgeted number is bullshit. But I don't think they're going to have the easiest time hiring officers, regardless of what number we're trying to hit. I think that's going to continue. You're going to have a highly combative, alt-right FOP leadership. They're still there from the last time. John Cottonzauer got re-elected before the mayoral election, I think, in the fall. So he's still going to be there. The alt-right in the FOP is alive and strong. So whatever you're doing to reform the CPD, they're going to fight like anything. Anything and everything. No matter how good it is for the police, they're going to fight it. The city council, let's get over, ladies and gentlemen. They are not liberal. There are the socialists are liberal. Most other city council members are not liberal in Chicago. They're not. They're fiscally conservative, socially liberal to a degree, but fiscally conservative. Period. That's what they are. They are the most useless bunch of people ever, which is why the hypocrisy that was on display in this election cycle of people like Sophia King, Roderick Sawyer, Ray Lopez, Brendan Riley. I can get more and more. Umitano. All this complaining about crime and violence, they're the ones that control the city. They have the power to make changes to affect people's lives. They don't do it. They don't want to do it. Why do we have tax increment financing alive and well in the city? Because the city council feeds off that for politics to get re-elected. They like the stuff it builds in their wards. They like not having to go in front of the city council to get things. They like the mayor handing them out stuff that they can run on. It's rank hypocrisy, but the city council's pretty worthless. Now they are, and they took back theoretically, although they could change it when the next city council is sworn in in a few weeks. They have power, they just voted to get the committees themselves to vote on the who runs their committees or something like that. And I guess they can vote on committee assignments. What? Everyone says, Well, that's great. Theoretically, theoretically, theoretically. And why do I say that? The reality is a strong mayor who can push things through, if you have a, regardless of whether you have a progressive, a liberal, a progressive, a conservative Democrat, conservative conservative, just a regular conservative or an alt-right, an empowered city council, unless the city council agrees with the mayor 100%, will not make the mayor's job easier. It'll make it harder. So this city council, being incredibly conservative as they are, and they are, they are going to fight Johnson on everything. I don't think Johnson, if this power is not restored to the mayor's position, which in a democracy it really shouldn't be. But if it's not, there's no way. No way, ladies and gentlemen, Johnson's agenda gets through. It doesn't. No. No, Riley, Lopez, Napolitano, excuse me, Spisado. We can go down the line. It's um Hali Afaro's head of the public safety right now. The public safety committees, most of it is alt-right. Most of it's right or alt-right. They don't care. I hope I'm wrong. But the all the new city council is not putting Maria Haddon in charge of things. They're not. Alderman Michael Rodriguez. No. Alderman Rosanna Rodriguez Sanchez, nope. No, you're going to get the most conservative of the city council in charge of committees. So we're back to probably some kind of city council war-ish thing. Where instead of the mayor controlling the city council chairs, the alt-right or the conservative base of the city council, which is most of them, are going to control the council chairs, the committee chairs, and they're not going to do anything. So you're going to introduce, ordinance, and ordinance. You keep introducing the stuff, Johnson's keep introducing stuff, nothing's going to get done. I hope I'm wrong. I hope I'm wrong in that gridlock, but I don't think so. Sorry for the grim prediction. I hope I am wrong. I would love to see reforms get done, but I just don't know. It'll be really interesting because Johnson gets to pick theoretically the new police superintendent, the community commission is the one selecting the candidates this time rather than the um city council. I may do an upcoming show on that because there's real reasons to be concerned. And the last couple, I think life would add a chance to change that and put Chicago and put a functional police superintendent in place. It thinks like she had one in the um in the queue, but she didn't get along with the guy. So she picked Brown. So I will probably do a show coming up on the superintendent selection process and uh why I think it's a grim prospect. Okay, thanks everyone. I really appreciate you for tuning in. Once again, really quickly, chicagojustice.org. If you want to find out more about what we do, cjpnation.org, or if you want to get involved, you want to support our work, Patreon link below. If you're on the podcast, please hit subscribe. If you're on YouTube, subscribe, like this video, and hit the bell so you can be alerted every time we publish. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it, ladies and gentlemen.
