Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson touts sending social workers to 911 calls as crime solution
Rachel Schilke
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Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson said he isn’t going to defund the police, but he wants to spend more money on youth job programs and social workers to address rampant crime in Chicago.
In an interview with CBS Mornings on Thursday, Johnson said that improvements in mental health response and youth employment can help bring down crime over traditional methods. Johnson said he believes there is a direct correlation between reducing crime and investing in programs to help youth stay in school, become employed, and ultimately prevent violence.
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“Unfortunately, for too long, the people of Chicago and, quite frankly, people all over the country have been given a false choice on how we actually deal with public safety,” Johnson said. “What our campaign proved is that you can actually demonstrate, in a real way, how critical investments are the necessary dynamics in order to prevent crime.”
Johnson defeated Vallas in the April 4 runoff election, the end to a long mayoral race focused on the city’s rising crime rates and declining education. Johnson, the more liberal candidate of the two, ran a platform on comprehensive criminal justice reform, rather than specifically investing in a stronger and larger police force, like Vallas.
On Thursday, Johnson talked about the “direct correlation” between increasing youth employment and mental health services with decreased crime rates while criticizing the notion that to prevent crime, communities have to be “tough.”
Johnson came under scrutiny throughout the campaign from critics and his fellow mayoral candidates for previous comments he made supporting the “defund the police” movement, a contentious topic that far-left Democrats support and divides the Democratic Party across several U.S. cities.
When he was pressed again on his pulling back from the movement, Johnson said it wasn’t a “retreat” but was a “better understand of the impetus behind that hashtag,” highlighting what he said were the failure of other strategies that law enforcement has put in place to provide more accountability, such as dashboard and body cameras.
The mayor-elect’s plans are to double the number of year-round job opportunities for youth.
While he said in his campaign that he plans to promote detectives to fight crime, he also believes in having social workers serve as first responders to 911 calls that require their expertise instead of police officers, which can often lead to an escalation of the situation.
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“In Chicago, almost 40% of the 911 calls are mental health crises,” Johnson said. “We’re asking police officers to do their job and someone else’s. That’s not strategic.”
Johnson will be inaugurated as the 57th mayor of Chicago on May 15, making him the fourth black mayor in the city’s history. He will succeed Lori Lightfoot, who was the first black woman and openly gay mayor to hold the position.