Community leaders have been pressuring Chicago mayors for more than a decade to create a stand-alone city department focusing exclusively on reducing and preventing gun violence, but they now have a champion in Mayor Brandon Johnson.
Johnson on Tuesday embraced the call after a Juneteenth weekend that, as he put it, “should have been a celebration,” and was instead “disrupted by heartbreaking acts of gun violence” that left eight people dead and 40 others wounded.
That included a mass shooting in the Princeton Park section of Roseland that injured fourteen people between the age of 17 and 47. The weekend violence prompted President Donald Trump to post on social media political potshots at Chicago.
Earlier this week, a coalition of city, county and faith leaders renewed their longstanding call for a city Department of Gun Violence Reduction with an annual budget of $100 million to coordinate the disparate efforts of several city departments.
Former Mayors Rahm Emanuel and Lori Lightfoot resisted similar demands. But Johnson is all for the idea.
During his weekly City Hall news conference, Johnson said 13 states already have an office dedicated to reducing gun violence, and that former President Joe Biden did the same at the federal level.
Even though Chicago faces a $1.3 billion budget shortfall and a $36 billion pension crisis, the mayor vowed to “work in conjunction with what this group is calling for,” and end a political “fight that has been going on for multiple administrations.”
“Finding stronger ways to reduce gun violence in the city of Chicago — of course I’m gonna explore any of those opportunities. But I also want to be very clear: The real effort is gonna be centered around generating the revenue from big corporations and those with means to put more skin in the game so that we can fund all of the programs and services that have proven to be effective,” the mayor said.
Chicago already spends tens of millions of dollars on social programs aimed at reducing gun violence as well as on community violence interrupters who seek to mediate and mitigate gang-related disputes before they occur.
That’s in addition to the $2.1 billion budget for the Chicago Police Department.
The city stands to benefit from bringing those fragmented efforts under one roof in a department whose dedicated budget would be more insulated from budget battles, the mayor said.
“There are multiple departments that do work — whether it’s in community safety or senior services — that are distributed throughout the entire enterprise. Same thing with the Department of Environment and why we restored it. There could be opportunities for us to find ways in which we can better streamline activity. There could be better ways in which we coordinate stronger with county and state,” he said.
“I bring answers to help drive solutions. There are others [who] have them as well. And it’s incumbent upon me as the mayor of this city to hear what these advocates are calling for and finding ways in which the work that we’re doing cannot just be aligned, but strengthened so that we can ultimately build safe and affordable communities.”
For months — and again on Tuesday — Johnson refused to definitively declare his intention to seek a second term.
If he does enter the crowded field, the mayor’s full embrace of a Department of Gun Violence Reduction could shore up his base in the African-American community and endear him to religious and community leaders.
On Tuesday, Johnson was asked whether his endorsement of yet another city department was an attempt to “lock in anti-violence efforts that might not stick” if he ends up being a one-term mayor.
“If you’re asking me if my decisions are politically motivated — they’re not,” he said. “I understand why people would believe that a politician would speak of their own interests. My interest is in building the safest, most affordable big city in America… The answers that I have can only be strengthened when other people are invited into the process to actually come up with solutions from a more collective response.”
Johnson said he is pained, but neither surprised nor discouraged by, the outbreak of weekend violence.
He argued that “decades of disinvestment don’t go away in one year” and that “pockets” of the West Side where unemployment is highest and more schools were closed need more “support and resources.”
“I don’t want people to think that… gun violence is up across the board. There are some very specific, hyper-concentrated communities where it’s taken place. And trust and believe I’m laser-focused in those particular areas,” he said.