He’ll be a perfect foil for Trump.
I f mayoral idiocy were justification for a National Guard deployment, the troops would be heading to Chicago right now.
At a press conference denouncing President Trump for considering Chicago as the next destination for the Guard, Brandon Johnson demonstrated, if there were any doubt, that he’s a walking woke cliché who is a clear and present danger to the safety of his city’s residents.
According to Johnson, “We cannot incarcerate our way out of violence.”
“We’ve already tried that,” he said, “and we’ve ended up with the largest prison population in the world without solving the problems of crime and violence.”
He declared of our “addiction” to jails and incarceration in this country, “It is racist, it is immoral, it is unholy, and it is not the way to drive violence down. We cannot return to the same failed strategies that got us here in the first place.”
As the mayor of the city that regularly leads the United States in murders, one would think that Johnson would demonstrate a little more humility on the question.
Chicago had nearly 600 murders in 2024 and the eighth-highest homicide rate in the nation. It had the highest homicide rate among the big cities. The Windy City has seen recent declines, but, as with Washington, D.C., a downward trajectory doesn’t make the intolerable any more acceptable.
Contra Johnson, as both common sense and the research suggest, incarceration is indeed an answer to violence. By definition, it prevents offenders from harming the general population while they are behind bars.
Charles Lehman of the Manhattan Institute points to studies showing this effect, including one finding that after Maryland reduced jail time for young adults, offenders committed on average 2.8 criminal acts and 1.5 serious crimes during the time they otherwise would have been behind bars.
And it’s not true that we drastically increased incarceration without effect. Imprisonments began to rise in response to a historic crime wave beginning about half a century ago, after which that wave finally receded. You can argue about how much prisons were responsible for the reduction in crime, but they clearly played a part.
There’s no exaggerating, by the way, the human cost of the country’s murder spree that spurred so-called mass incarceration.
“Homicide-victimization rates doubled between 1960 and 1980 and didn’t begin a consistent decline until the mid 1990s,” Barry Latzer has written in these pages. “From 1970 to 2005, a staggering 673,993 Americans were murdered, more than died in all our wars from World War II on.”
As for prisons being racist, rates of incarceration clearly track rates of criminal offending. And it is violent crime that drives prison time (drug offenders overwhelmingly are traffickers, not people caught for possession). If we are going to rely less on prison as a tool of the criminal-justice system, as Latzer notes, we need to decide whether we are going to be more lax in our treatment of rape, murder, burglary, and/or robbery.
With regard to Chicago, it’s manifestly absurd to believe that the city’s problem is that too many criminal offenders are being arrested and jailed.
According to an Illinois Policy Institute breakdown of Chicago crime in 2024, “Arrests were made in about 1-in-7 violent crimes. The arrest rate has been trending down for 20 years.”
You know what could help with this? More cops. As of last September, Chicago had about 1,600 fewer officers than it had in 2018. As a WGN report put it, “The number of police officers is at or near record lows.”
Pressed on Morning Joe the other day whether more police would make Chicago safer, Mayor Johnson refused to answer, insisting that social programs are what can move the needle.
In this, he was showing his BLM roots. As a Cook County commissioner, he sponsored a “Justice for Black Lives” resolution that passed in 2020. It declared that the county “should engage in efforts to redirect funds from policing and incarceration to public services not administered by law enforcement that promote community health and safety equitably across the County, but especially in Black and Brown communities most impacted by violence and incarceration.”
Johnson is not any more enamored of the police now than he was in those days, even if he eventually walked back his support for defunding the police. (At one point, he’d said that defunding the police was a “real political goal.” Then, during his mayoral campaign, he amusingly elaborated: “I said it was a political goal. I never said it was mine.”)
The problem with social programs as crime-fighting tools is that they are hit or miss, and don’t address the most serious problem. Lehman writes, “Research consistently finds that interventions meant to alleviate economic privation reduce property crime but have no effect on violent crime.”
He notes an evaluation of a services program for gang members in Boston that found that, compared with control groups, it resulted in “no detectable effect on violence among the gangs that it served.”
None of this makes any difference to Johnson, whose ignorance on these questions is invincible and represents a profound emotional and ideological commitment.
“All the world’s a stage,” the Bard wrote. “And one man in his time plays many parts.”
The part, apparently, that Brandon Johnson is fated to play if Trump sends the National Guard to Chicago is the woke foil, visibly and loudly representing all that is wrong about the left’s attitudes toward crime and policing.