On the Chicago Mayoral race and the crime wedge issue
The Chicago Mayor's Race, Crime and Defund the Police
Chicago, in the minds of many conservatives, is the nexus of all crime and political corruption. “Crooked” has become synonymous in the Republican mind with “Chicago.” An episode of the podcast “Hacks on Tap” does not go by without political strategist Mike Murphy chiding longtime resident David Axelrod about something involving the Chicago government’s legendary hyper-criminality. We will not entertain the possibility that the inability of the GOP to compete in Chicago has anything to do with their demonization of the windy city.
Crime has been used effectively as a wedge issue by Republicans since the COVID lockdowns. COVID accelerated police budget defunding in two ways. One: COVID caused budgetary shortfalls through the lockdowns, which had to be remedied with reductions to make up for revenue losses. From Politico's Rebecca Rainey and Maya King, in August 2020, in the thick of the lockdowns:
The squeeze is happening nationwide: Seattle’s City Council on Monday approved nearly $3 million in cuts from the Seattle Police Department that would reduce its force by up to 100 officers. Maryland recently reduced its state police department budget by two percent. New York City in June canceled the NYPD’s July class of over 1,100 recruits, partially in response to steep drops in city revenue.
And, two: The murder of George Floyd startled the nation — and the world — as homebound viewers saw police brutality at its worst and, in anger, protested in the streets, risking their lives in the process. The fact that thousands protested in the streets during a global pandemic speaks to the sense of outrage over the excesses of police departments. From Allan Smith of NBC News:
In cities like New York City and Los Angeles, where leaders had sought to keep police budget cuts to a minimum or even boost law enforcement spending amid the coronavirus, local officials are now proposing substantial reductions as a result of the Floyd protests and the activist push for redistributing police funds. Though New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said he's not in favor of such a steep cut, a City Council-backed plan to slash $1 billion of police funding is on the table in New York.
Similar police budget cuts are under consideration in more than a dozen major cities nationwide in light of the ongoing protest movement.
In Tacoma, Washington, local officials are facing a $40 million budget shortfall in its general fund as well as a push for defunding amid protests.
So these two issues — budgetary cuts to police departments and the George Floyd protest movement — fueled “Defund the Police” in the early part of the pandemic. But by the summer of 2022, deep into the pandemic, occurrences of mental health episodes had increased to such a degree that people felt deeply unsafe. The pendulum swings. And the GOP, of course, took advantage of that to make crime a cultural wedge issue to use against the Democrats like a bludgeon.
In the 2022 midterms, Republican Congressional candidates — from Washington 8 to Washington DC — targeted Democrats as being weak on crime or, worse, Defund the Policers. In Blue New York state, Long Island Congressman Lee Zeldin — buoyed by non-stop wall-to-wall crime coverage in tabloids like Rupert Murdoch’s scurrilous New York Post — came within a whisper of winning the governorship. And it was Blue Long Island that ultimately gave the Republican Party the House of Representatives.
Which brings us to the Chicago Mayor’s race on Tuesday. It is now April 2023, and Brandon Johnson, the victorious Democrat candidate, has had about a year to carefully craft an argument that is not as naïve as “Defund the Police” to solve the severe mental health crisis (and the perception of a calamitous crime problem) that our country at present faces. Chicago, historically, has had a higher crime — and violent crime rate — than the rest of the country, which made Brandon Johnson’s task significantly more complicated. "The city has experienced a 45 percent increase in crime compared with the same point last year in several categories, including sexual assault, robbery, burglary and car theft,” writes Jonathan Weisman in the Times. “Murders have fallen from the pandemic-era rise in 2021 and 2022, but the number of murders this year is still almost 50 percent higher than in 2019."
He continues:
“Mr. Johnson, 47, walked back some of his most progressive positions, including budget cuts to Chicago’s police force. But he never disavowed the position that, in a city where violence and crime are surging, those in power must take a fundamentally different approach to public safety. Instead of more police on the beat, he called for economic and community development, more social workers and mental health professionals — and more detectives to actually solve the crimes that are committed.
“… Representative Delia Ramirez, a newly elected progressive Democrat from Chicago’s Northwest Side, was ecstatic. “We’ve had a police department that had been attempting to do the jobs of social workers, counselors, mediators, you name it,” she said. “What we haven’t had is help.”
Brandon Johnson’s victory was a surprise, to say the least. And it is a lesson in how to beat back copaganda talking points. Incumbent Mayor Johnson’s opponent, moderate Democrat Paul Vallas, was a centrist former budget and public schools chief who made crime his bread-and-butter issue. The only way to the Mayoralty was for Johnson to barrel through crime and policing, which is a particularly sensitive issue for Progressive Democrats because of perceptions as being vulnerable to a tough on crime argument from the right. Christian Paz of Vox explains why it was such a surprise:
The progressive victory happened a bit over a month since voters soundly rejected their incumbent mayor, Lori Lightfoot, in the first round of voting in the mayoral election, largely over dissatisfaction with her promises for reform of schools and city policing. With Johnson’s victory, the third-largest city in the country has made an ideological pronouncement about a core tension within the Democratic Party nationally about how to respond to concerns about crime.
Vallas had been the frontrunner for the last few months against Johnson, who got his political start as an organizer with the city’s teachers union. The election pitted two powerful Chicago constituencies against each other: Vallas was backed by the city’s vocal and controversial police union, and Johnson was backed by the teachers union.
Vallas also outspent Johnson. But the articulation of reform of the police appears, in the case of Chicago at least, to be an effective counterprogramming measure against law-and-order messaging. Most intelligent people know that there is something wrong with modern day policing — or, should we say, “overpolicing”? — but there is confusion over what exactly to do about it. Reform? Defund? What?
Johnson faced it head on. He reversed his earlier calls to defund the police, which was a good idea considering the rising crime statistics in Chicago. From ABCNews:
Johnson later tried walking back his call to defund the police and pledged he would increase the number of detectives by 200 and not reduce the current number of officers on the approximately 12,000-member force. However, he also said he would not fill the department’s widening gap of beat cops and he would redirect funds to wraparound services like social workers and youth programs.
Chicago logged nearly 700 homicides in 2022, which is lower than those in 2021 — the worst year for shooting deaths since the 1990s — and robberies are up nearly 20%. Like elsewhere in big cities since the COVID-19 pandemic, Chicago crime in the form of carjackings, looting, and muggings became more visible, spreading from concentrated parts of the city to everywhere else, including sleepier neighborhoods that, until recently, were immune from violence.
An expansion of the role of social workers and mediators in conflict resolution is a good start. Democrats need to go deeper. That social workers have been paid so little says quite a bit about how our society thinks about those that are already slipping through the social safety net. I have never, quite frankly, been a fan of “Defund the Police,” although I am all for expanding the role of social workers and conflict mediators and mental health professionals and homeless advocates in policing. “Defund the Police” sounds, rhetorically, highly punitive. “Take away,” it seems to be saying. The movement arose out of the horror of George Floyd’s murder. An enraged nation, a captive audience to a global pandemic, rallied emotionally behind "the “Defund” movement, which was entirely understandable for 2020.
But the times have changed. The aftermath of COVID is an enormous mental health crisis, which has made everyone feel unsafe on public transportation or walking home late at night. “An overwhelming majority of the public (90%) think there is a mental health crisis in the U.S. today, with most people saying the opioid epidemic, mental health issues in children and teenagers, and severe mental illness are at crisis level in the country,” a CNN/Kaiser Family Foundation poll found. What is the answer? I honestly don’t know. But I do know that the answer has to be more complex than just increasing police budgets. Voters in Chicago, when faced with an alternative to classic copaganda chose to at least try the public health option. Seth W. Stoughton, Jeffrey J. Noble, and Geoffrey P. Alpert argue in The Atlantic:
For too long, the hammer of criminal law has been used against a wide array of social ills. The result is police over-involvement in matters that would be far better left to other government institutions and social-service providers, including school discipline, poverty, homelessness, and substance abuse. The opioid crisis remains a stark reminder that the United States cannot arrest its way out of addiction. The troubling discrepancies between how police have been cast as soldiers in the War on Drugs—a war that, despite almost identical drug-use rates between white and black Americans, is fought mostly in poor and minority communities—and how police have been seen as an adjunct to the public-health authorities addressing opioid abuse in suburban middle- or upper-class neighborhoods should be a stark warning for state legislators to rethink the scope of criminal law.
School discipline, inequality, poverty, homelessness, and substance abuse are not problems that can be solved by dense manpower and military tech. These social problems will not be solved by testosterone. And that is why I think Brandon Johnson won his mayoral race. And that is why I think Democrats around the country should refine Johnson’s argument to the voters, using data as it becomes available, on how to expand the role of public health in policing.
What we learned from the Chicago Mayoral race results. (Brookings)
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