Both Mr. T And I Are Very Excited About Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson!

And we pity the fools who are not.

A very strange thing happened this week.

A person I voted for and actually liked was elected the Mayor of Chicago. Generally speaking, when I vote for someone who actually wins their election, I'm kind of holding my nose about it because I'd prefer someone more progressive. If this were a normal election, I probably would have been stuck voting for Paul Vallas against someone far worse than Paul Vallas. But it wasn't, and someone I actually liked, who wants to do things I think are good, won . Johnson won big in my neighborhood of West Town, along with the nearby neighborhoods of Humboldt Park and Logan Square — like 70 percent of the vote, big.

The Right's read of this is that we voted for Johnson because we love crime and want more of it. Or because we don't care about it. That is some bullshit. The truth is, we just don't think that abusing prisoners at black sites and coercing false confessions from innocent people or throwing 300 million COVID relief dollars (60 percent of all discretionary funds) at the police actually does much to actually keep us "safe." We also don't think that just acting real macho and talking about being "tough on crime" does anything either. We know what our neighborhoods need.

That is why the areas in Chicago hardest hit by crime voted for Johnson and not Vallas.

“Here's a map of violent crime in Chicago over the last five years (left) and a map of mayoral election results by precint (right). The areas hit hardest by violence voted for Brandon Johnson, who campaigned hard on alternatives to policing, instead of tough-on-crime Paul Vallas.”

— Jake Sheridan (@Jake Sheridan) 1680732678 

Johnson's vision is about preventing crime from happening in the first place — investing in mental health services, investing in the youth, investing in community safety programs, in public schools rather than charters that could close at any time and leave kids scrambling, investing in things that will actually make us safer, because being a police state will not. These are things we actually need. Vallas's anti-crime vision was for the weird yuppies who move into our neighborhoods because they want to be "hip" and then post crazy warnings on NextDoor about how they saw a Black person walking down the street minding their own business.

You know who else is super excited about Brandon Johnson winning? Noted Chicago native Mr. T! 

"Congratulations to @Brandon4Chicago … Oh, please excuse me, I’m sorry, I made a big mistake. Corrections are in order. Congratulations to Mayor Elect Brandon Johnson, and the Great City of Chicago!" Mr. T wrote on Twitter, adding, "Let’s make Chicago better, let’s make our Neighborhoods Safer, and All of our School Systems Smarter! Thank you Chicago, The People have Spoken, now let’s get Busy."

“Let’s make Chicago better, let’s make our Neighborhoods Safer, and All of our School Systems Smarter! Thank you Chicago, The People have Spoken, now let’s get Busy. #Brandon4Chicago”

— Mr. T (@Mr. T) 1680734828 

Conservatives in Mr. T's comments suggested, with cry-laughing emojii, that this will turn Chicago into a "war zone." This is what they want. This is their great hope. That Johnson will come in, implement the kind of reforms progressives have been talking about for ages, and all of the "criminals" will get super excited about how easy it's going to be for them to do crime now that a bunch of weaklings are in charge and just go bananas.

That makes sense in a comic book universe where all of the people doing crime are master criminals who do it for the sheer joy of it, or because they are two-dimensional characters whose only inclination is to "do crime" for crime's sake. But that's just not how real life works. It's more complicated than that, and that's why you can't stop crime just by giving people a good spanking or by threatening them with life in prison or doing a big scary show of force with a bunch of stone-faced cops. People who are committing the kind of street crime people are complaining about are by and large in a place of hopelessness — either financially or because they don't think they can do anything else. People who feel hopeless rarely respond to threats.

By improving the conditions of people's lives, by ensuring that they have the mental health care they need, the schools they need, the opportunities they need, the food and shelter they need, the community programs that help them find hope — that is what will reduce crime. It's not as flashy or as sexy or as immediately satisfying, but it will be more effective.

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