Bad news, Chicagoans: Help is not on the way. And if your mayor has anything to say about it, help will be nonexistent.
The good news:. Snake Plissken may have even more employment opportunities soon in the Windy City.
With crime and violence ramping up in Chicago and Donald Trump offering assistance from the National Guard, Mayor Brandon Johnson told reporters yesterday that he will protect Chicago from Trump. In fact, Johnson plans to protect the criminals from law enforcement because Johnson claims, “they look like me.” The mayor then declared that law enforcement and jails are a “sickness,” one which he intends to “eradicate.”
No, really:
Mayor Brandon Johnson just called jails, incarceration, and law enforcement a sickness that we need to eradicate while talking about ending violence.
Arresting criminals and keeping them in prison is the #1 way to reduce violence in the short term.pic.twitter.com/kXdBGyaJ95
— Tim (@Dragonboy155) September 18, 2025
“Jails and incarceration and law enforcement is a sickness that has not led to safe communities,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson declared during a fiery press conference Tuesday, adding that he intends to “eradicate” that sickness.
Johnson made the remarks after a reporter asked him about his administration’s public safety plan. During his diatribe, the mayor cited four years of Chicago murder data, beginning with the city’s record-setting 970 killings in 1974. He noted there were 828 murders in 1995, 778 in 2016, and 805 in 2021.
“This has been a problem in this city for a very long time,” Johnson said, claiming the city is seeing improvement due to his initiatives. Now, the mayor claimed, President Donald Trump “wants to put his name on our paper” and take credit for the latest downtrend.
But Johnson chose outlier years to bolster his point, including the city’s worst year on record, while overlooking the longer trend of steady decline. Between 2004 and 2013, Chicago never recorded more than 513 killings in a year, and most years stayed under 450, according to official records. In 2015, the city had 493 murders, well below the 778 he cited for 2016. And the 2021 total occurred during the pandemic crime surge.
The spike in violent crime correlates to the imposition of progressive policies on non-prosecution and cashless bail, especially after the George Floyd riots in 2020. Illinois Policy charted spikes for other crimes between 2013-2023, the last year for which they had full data for their analysis in 2024. Most importantly, they noted that crime escalated while arrest rates dropped, a correlation with a strong argument for causation:
The number of violent crimes grew to its highest level in a decade last year, but the arrest rate dropped, according to a new analysis from the Illinois Policy Institute.
In 2023, violent crime was 11.5% higher than in 2022. Two of the largest factors contributing to the rise in crime came from a decade-high 30,501 instances of vehicle thefts and carjackings, and 22,569 cases of assault in 2023.
Homicides were down 14% compared with 2022 levels, but with 625 homicides the city still experienced 45% more murders than a decade earlier. …
The institute analysis showed a 18% increase in violent crimes since 2013, with a 33% decline in the number of arrests. Arrest rates hit their lowest levels in a decade in 2023, with just 10.8% of violent crimes resulting in an arrest, nearly half the rate of arrests from 2013.
Do we know that the fall in arrests produced a causative impact on crime rates in Chicago? Perhaps not beyond a reasonable doubt, but that conclusion looks at least plausible. Putting that aside, though, the data clearly shows that reducing law enforcement interventions and incarcerations doesn’t produce a downward impact on crime, as Johnson predicts. It is strongly correlated to the opposite.
Unfortunately for Chicago, they elected Johnson and now they’re stuck with him. It’s not as if they didn’t have other options, and it’s also not as if they couldn’t see where radical-Leftist policies were taking the city during Lori Lightfoot’s disastrous turn as mayor. Unless and until they eject Johnson from his perch at City Hall, Johnson will continue to defend criminals that “look like me” rather than protect law-abiding citizens from their depredations.
What about the state government in Illinois? The governor could intervene to take over law-enforcement policies in the city. Unfortunately, J.B. Pritzker is having too good a time posing with violent felons to notice:
Less than a week before a crash-and-grab burglary crew killed an innocent man on the Magnificent Mile last Thursday, one of the men now charged with that murder donned a “peacekeeper” uniform and posed for a one-on-one picture with Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker.
While that’s troubling, some law enforcement experts are more concerned that the accused man was able to stand directly next to the state’s most powerful executive despite having outstanding warrants in four states.
CWBChicago first reported on 35-year-old Kellen McMiller’s role as a “peacekeeper” last weekend. Now, we have more detail, including a picture of McMiller posing with Pritzker—a photo that has apparently been scrubbed from the state’s online press release about the West Side event.
As noted, McMiller wasn’t exactly Mr. Clean at the time of the Pritzker pose. Pritzker’s team apparently didn’t bother to vet the people invited as “peacekeepers” to this event, as McMiller had outstanding warrants in four different states: Illinois, Florida, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Had Pritzker’s team done a basic check on the people he was hailing as significant partners for crime reduction, they might have arrested McMiller on the spot — and that could have prevented the crime and chase that killed Mark Arceta, who was about to go on paternity leave from Northwestern University.
“It’s folks like these that we need more of doing the hard work of community violence prevention,” Pritzker said on Facebook, “not troops on the ground to undermine efforts fighting crime.”
That is how much Pritzer cares about public safety in Chicago. And this is the kind of program that Johnson wants to use to “eradicate” law enforcement. They both literally want criminals running the city of Chicago rather than funding and supporting proper law enforcement.
Chicagoans and Illinois voters are getting the kind of leadership they chose, good and hard. If they want protection from the predators in their midst, Johnson and Pritzker are not the people to call. There may only be one man who can answer the call … assuming he’s not surfing into Los Angeles with Peter Fonda while Steve Buscemi drives a T-bird along the road. If you know, you know.
Editor’s Note: Help us continue to report the truth about radical and corrupt politicians like Brandon Johnson, J.B. Pritzker, Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Jasmine Crockett, Adam Schiff, et al.
Join Hot Air VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership!
