Since taking office, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has made a sport of denigrating law enforcement, dismissing police and prisons as a “sickness,” mocking the presence of “badges and guns” in Black and Brown neighborhoods, and insisting Chicago must “stop relying on police” to keep order. These are not slips of the tongue. They are the creed of a radical soft-on-crime philosophy that imperils every honest citizen in the city.
When Johnson sneers that the only thing offered to poor communities is “jails and police officers,” he betrays both ignorance and contempt. No serious person believes the cop on the beat is a substitute for jobs, schools, or housing. But the hard truth is this: without police, there are no jobs, schools, or housing worth protecting. Ask the shop owner whose store has been looted three times in a year if a social worker would have stopped the thieves. Ask the family of a murder victim if a housing voucher would have kept the triggerman from firing the gun. Ask the victims of violent crimes committed by illegal aliens if they would have preferred those criminals been removed first by ICE.
Worse still was Johnson’s declaration that “law enforcement is a sickness.” Tell that to the family of Officer Ella French, gunned down in 2021 during a traffic stop. Tell it to the thousands of officers who kiss their children goodbye each morning, not knowing if they’ll come home. Smearing their sacrifice signals to the criminal element that the political class sees criminals as people who should never be held accountable. Hence, any anger they have toward law enforcement is justifiable.
What Johnson proposes is not balance, it is substitution: replacing handcuffs with therapy sessions, and patrol cars with free needles. This is not justice. It is abdication.
Chicago does not suffer from an excess of policing. It suffers from an excess of leniency. Violent offenders are cycled through the revolving door of the courts, only to return to the streets more emboldened than before. The victims of this leniency are the very people Johnson claims to champion: the working poor, the immigrant shopkeepers, the elderly who cannot afford to flee to safer suburbs. They do not ask for fewer police. They ask for safety.
Mayor Johnson has cast his lot with the leftists who despise the thin blue line. In doing so, he abandons the ordinary citizen, who understands an eternal truth: civilization survives because men with badges and guns stand against the predators. Strip that away, and what remains is not justice, social or otherwise.
