Like most big cities, Chicago has a crime problem. The city is not unique in that respect, nor is it unique in residents charging the police with racism, brutality, and the targeting of minorities.
But Chicago is afflicted with a deadly combination: a police department that walks on eggshells for fear of being accused of brutality, thus making far fewer arrests, and a local prosecutor who believes it’s more important to impose her idea of “restorative justice” than enforce the law.
The city’s police department is under a Department of Justice consent decree that does little to address the real, systemic problems on the Chicago police force but adds reams of useless paperwork to the job. Police morale is at rock bottom with more than 2,600 police officers leaving the department from 2020 to August 2022. As for the schools, more than 90,000 students have left the public schools in the last two years, leaving a huge hole in the budget.
On Tuesday, Chicagoans will vote for the next mayor. Paul Vallas is a former CEO of the city’s public schools while Brandon Johnson is the current Cook County Commissioner and a former lobbyist for the teacher’s union. By far and away, the top issue voters say concerns them is crime and public safety.
“There are 1,700 fewer officers than there were in 2019 and on any given day, half the priority 911 calls are not responded to because there simply is not a police car available to respond. So instead of getting a response in minutes, you get a response in hours,” Vallas said during the CBS-2 debate.
Mr. Johnson’s plans involve getting to the “root cause” of crime.
As a resident of the Austin neighborhood, which has long been impacted by drugs and violence, Johnson said his public safety plan is simple: “We have to invest in people.” Aside from promoting 200 detectives and prioritizing the consent decree, he promised a “holistic approach” that includes investments in jobs programs and mental health services.
“Which would you prefer, to have your crime solved or your crime prevented?” he said. “As the mayor of the city of Chicago, I’m working to make sure that we are preventing crime.”
In the past, Johnson has called for defunding the police. He’s denied that he ever actually called for cutting the police budget but in 2020, he was quoted as saying “I don’t look at it as a slogan, it’s an actual, real political goal.” And “there is no number big enough” for cutting the budget of the Cook County Sheriff’s Office.
Now Johnson says he won’t cut “a single dime” from the police budget. And he claims to want to add detectives to the department in order to raise the conviction rate.
But in the last two decades, arrests have dropped an astonishing 81%. As a result, while murders are down, every other category of crime is through the roof. And even if the cops arrest someone, the chances of them actually going to trial and spending time in prison aren’t good. Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx has destroyed the rule of law in Chicago.
Progressive policies — e.g., Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx in 2016 essentially decriminalizing shoplifting of less than $1,000 — have demoralized the police force, which experienced a net loss of 2,641 officers between 2020 and August 2022. This year, car thefts are up 151 percent, sexual assaults and robberies up 23 percent each, and major crime reports are up 104 percent above this point in 2021.
The schools are a whole other issue.
Although in 2022, only 11 percent of Chicago’s Black pupils in grades three through eight scored at proficiency, and less than 6 percent did in math, what has troubled Johnson are measurable standards — tests, grades, homework. He has worried about selective-enrollment schools because Black students “who don’t meet those same standards” get “shamed.” When he taught at such a school, he assigned little homework as a “way of rebelling against the structure.”
Vallas is a very strong school choice advocate, which makes him public enemy number one with the teacher’s unions. But despite the city’s immense problems, there’s a better-than-even chance that Brandon Johnson will win on Tuesday. The radical left is energized and committed, and with the latest polls showing Vallas and Johnson in a dead heat, it will come down to which campaign can turn out their supporters in greater numbers.
I’d like to say that one or the other candidate actually has the common sense to begin to address the city’s immense problems. But no matter how many police Chicago puts on the streets or how many charter schools are opened, Chicago is a city that teeters on the precipice of failure, and it wouldn’t take much to push it over the cliff.
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