Meet Brandon Johnson, the ‘Defund the Police’ Progressive Who Shut Out Lori Lightfoot in Chicago

“A few months ago, they said they didn’t know who I was,” began Brandon Johnson in a speech celebrating his advancement to the Chicago mayoral runoff. “Well, if you didn’t know, now you know.”

Johnson is an unabashed progressive candidate who has promised to fund social programs by taxing the rich and wants to pursue a therapeutic approach to crime, moving away from “failed approaches that have brought trauma to communities across the city.” His critics argue that his approach to crime in a city wracked with it would be disastrous, highlighting his desire to defund the police, which he expressed bluntly in a 2020 radio interview.

“I don’t look at it as a slogan. It’s an actual, real political goal,” he said of activist calls to “defund the police.”

Johnson was able to advance to the runoff by building a coalition of progressive whites and Hispanics more effectively than incumbent Illinois representative Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, and he was able to peel off enough black voters from incumbent mayor Lori Lightfoot to boot her out of office. He will face moderate Democrat Paul Vallas on April 4.

The leading issue among Chicagoans during the first round of voting was crime and public safety, and it is expected to dominate the runoff as well. Chicago is facing an epidemic of rising crime: More than 70 people have been slain in 2023, and total serious crime rose by more than 33 percent from 2019, when Lightfoot first took office, to 2022.

The Chicago Police Department (CPD) is facing declining numbers as well as a suicide crisis.

Johnson’s brand of defund-the-police progressivism was enough to squeeze out Lightfoot, who proposed police budget cuts in 2020 only to later pivot, but he’s now in a head-to-head matchup with an explicitly pro-cop candidate. Vallas, who won a plurality of the vote earlier this week, is running as the tough-on-crime favorite of the Fraternal Order of the Police. The political journeyman has promised to hire hundreds of new police officers, and told supporters in his victory speech: “We will have a safe Chicago. We will make Chicago the safest city in America.”

Johnson hasn’t moderated much since his 2020 remarks about the viability of defunding the police: He was alone among the nine candidates running in the primary not to pledge to fill the police department’s growing number of vacant positions.

But Johnson has defended his approach on the grounds that spending more on the police isn’t a cure-all.

According to spokesperson Bill Neidhardt, “Brandon Johnson’s priority is training and promoting 200 new detectives. We will also take mental health crisis response off the plate of police officers. That’s the fastest way to make CPD more efficient, not empty pledges from candidates to recruit 1,600 new officers overnight when police departments all over the country are struggling to hire.”

“Spending more on policing per capita . . . has been a failure,” explained Johnson in a news conference, as quoted by Fox 32 Chicago.

He said he would specifically cut $150 million in supervisory positions. A spokesman later clarified that money would be reallocated within the police department.

For Johnson, more cops on the street isn’t the answer. Instead, it’s about getting at the root causes of crime: good schools, good jobs, housing, and mental health, a position he defended in a Thursday appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

Johnson explained that a lack of investment in certain communities has led to “unprecedented levels of violence,” arguing that changing the way police respond to emergency calls and focusing on mental health can help the city be more equitable.

The son of a pastor, Johnson grew up in Chicago’s suburbs, beginning his career teaching in Chicago Public Schools.

He later joined the Chicago Teachers Union and helped reshape them into a militant force that famously fought against Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s so-called “privatizing agenda” in the 2012 teachers strike. Johnson would later campaign for school-board members to be elected instead of appointed by the mayor. An elected school board became a reality in 2021 despite Lightfoot’s objections, who called the move “deeply flawed.”

The Chicago Teachers Union endorsed Johnson in the mayoral election.

Johnson has explained that he is against school choice. He does not support extending the state’s tax-credit scholarship, created by the Illinois legislature in 2017 and scheduled to sunset in 2025.

“Until every Chicago public school and big-city public school has the baseline of resources provided in suburban districts with high property tax bases, the idea of “choice” is a fallacy,” Johnson explained in an interview with Chalkbeat Chicago.

Asked about the learning loss students faced during the pandemic, Johnson explained that “students and families must have trauma support, such as weekly cognitive behavioral therapy.”

“First, we must address the trauma that existed pre-pandemic, and acknowledge that COVID-19 exposed and exacerbated conditions around cleanliness, bilingual education, access to technology, special education services and more, that city leaders left unaddressed for decades. Asking a student to catch up on math when they are still recovering from the death of a loved one, or a classmate, is inhumane,” Johnson added.

After his time at the teachers’ union, Johnson won a seat on the Cook County Board of Commissioners in 2018. His most noteworthy legislative accomplishment was the Just Housing Amendment to the Cook County Human Rights Ordinance. Johnson sponsored that amendment, which protects people with arrest records from being denied housing solely based on their past. Landlords are required to dig deeper into the applicant’s record and weigh other factors.

The process by which landlords can’t even run a criminal background check until applicants have qualified in some other way, such as through a credit check, has been lambasted by some.

According to the Chicagoland Apartment Association, which includes about 1,200 apartment communities and 190 companies that own and manage residential rental properties, the bifurcated process confuses landlords and discourages some from even running criminal background checks.

The transformative investment Johnson has called for during the campaign has seen him promise $1 billion in new spending.

To that end, Johnson has promised to be tough on corporations and multimillionaires.

While he has pledged not to raise property taxes, the commissioner would institute a real-estate tax transfer on the sale of luxury multimillion dollar homes.

The Johnson economic plan would also raise $98 million by “making the big airlines pay for polluting the air” in Chicago neighborhoods and hike a Chicago hotel tax that’s already the nation’s highest to generate $30 million more, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

Additionally, he will look to tax the suburbs.

“The suburban tax base utilizes Chicago’s infrastructure to earn their disproportionately higher income, yet their taxes fund already wealthy towns. A Metra ‘city surcharge’ will raise $40 million from the suburbs,” says his plan.

Asked by CBS whether his economic goals will drive people and businesses out of Chicago, Johnson responded simply: “No.”

Johnson did not respond to request for comment by press time.