The Revolutionary Column is a radical space for liberatory politics.
On May 8, I stepped off the elevator onto Chicago City Hall’s 5th floor feeling prepared, poised and powerful. Under former Mayor Rahm Emanuel, I had participated in sit-in protests against police violence outside his office on this floor. I interviewed Mayor Lori Lightfoot in a conference room on this floor. But this was my first time being invited into the inner sanctum of the mayor’s office.
I deserved it. My organizing and advocacy over the last 10 years helped push Emanuel and Lightfoot out of office. This work set the stage for the election of Mayor Brandon Johnson, a leader with ties to the Movement for Black Lives instead of the old Daley Machine. I had every reason to be proud when I sat down with Johnson for this midterm conversation inside his office.
But I had no reason to be complacent. I know freedom is a constant struggle. Johnson ran on a campaign to deprioritize policing, but halfway through his term, I can’t say the city has seen much progress on that front. Honestly, I fear we may even be backtracking.
It’s been four years since my first abolitionist midterm conversation with Lightfoot. The Revolutionary Column was only 5 months old then. President Joe Biden just surpassed his first 100 days in office. Everyone still had to wear masks while indoors.
It was a different time.
A week before the sit-down, Johnson’s press secretary, Cassio Mendoza, invited me to a convening organized by the Mayor’s Office of Reentry. Various organizations would discuss how to better support Chicago residents returning to their communities after incarceration. Mendoza said the mayor had read my interview with Lightfoot and thought my attending “would be important context to understand the mayor’s priorities and vision for the city.”
I didn’t go.
I didn’t even want to entertain their team’s thinking that this interview would be anything like the one with Lightfoot, interrogating her politics in helping the ever-growing population of Black Chicagoans facing post-conviction struggles. Now President Donald J. Trump is threatening to kidnap Chicagoans and disappear us to foreign penal colonies. I have different questions.
With no time for small talk, I had a job to do and only 30 minutes to do it. I wanted answers about Johnson’s flimsy position on policing and state violence.
Because Johnson is known for meandering answers and inserting random biblical facts, I wanted to set the tone and establish my expectations for quick, direct and concise answers with a few rapid-fire questions:
Q: Harold’s Chicken or Uncle Remus?
A: Uncle Remus.
Q: Helicopter parent or laid-back parent?
A: I’m a chill parent.
Q: Liberalism or progressivism?
A: Progressivism.
Q: Turn the other cheek or an eye for an eye?
A: Turn halfway and then blast. I’m not going to turn the whole cheek.
Q: Reform or revolution?
A: Revolution.
Now it was time to get into the smoke. First, I wanted to know about the mayor’s relationship with the City Council and how it affects or impedes his capacity to lead Chicago into a truly progressive new era.
Chicago’s white machine mayors historically benefitted from having “rubber stamp” legislative bodies that loyally supported the sitting mayor’s agenda in exchange for opportunities to exploit the city’s patronage system. Chicago’s Black elected mayors have notably never exploited such a system. There were the infamous Council Wars under Mayor Harold Washington. Under Lightfoot, the City Council voted to give themselves greater independence and autonomy from mayoral control. Johnson said he embraces the City Council’s transformation into a place of debate and struggle.
”For me, the relationship with City Council has been one of more space to have dissent and to express some level of independence. That doesn’t intimidate me because I’m confident in the position that I hold, first of all, but also confident in the vision that I have for the people of Chicago as essentially the first mayor in modern history with no political ties to the Daley Machine,” Johnson said. As a state representative, Washington was part of the machine before working to distance himself and launching an independent mayoral campaign.
Unlike the mayors before him, Johnson appointed alders to leadership positions who hadn’t even supported him in the 2023 runoff against opponent Paul Vallas. In the passing of his historic Unity Council Organization Plan just days after inauguration, Johnson’s appointments of the first Black woman as finance committee chair, the first Latina to lead a committee, and a record-breaking seven Latine alders as chairs were touted as progressive victories.
I wasn’t immediately sold on these appointments.
“I did that because, again, I wanted to make sure that the people of Chicago understood my approach to collaboration,” Johnson said.
Johnson seems to think elevating some political adversaries to positions of power was a solid and laudable political strategy. To me it seems counterproductive and self-sabotaging. The Council hasn’t been united since.
An example of the ideological fractures within City Council is playing out right now. Alders on the finance committee are split on a settlement agreement for Dexter Reed, 26, who was shot by police 13 times when a traffic stop turned into a firing squad in 2024. In a rejection of a $1.25 million settlement in April, two of those history-making Black council chairs appointed by Johnson voted against it: namely Pat Dowell (3rd Ward), the finance committee chair, and Chris Taliaferro (29th Ward), chair of the new committee on police and fire. Then you had Progressive Caucus members Matt Martin (47th Ward) and Andre Vasquez (40th Ward), who abstained altogether.
It’s unusual for aldermen to reject a settlement recommended by the city’s law department. I wanted to know if Johnson was surprised by this.
“The unfortunate aspect of this particular settlement is that the settlement was centered around the pretextual pullovers that those officers were engaged in, and that is what the judge was reacting to. City Council members were reacting to something different — to what happened afterward,” Johnson explained.
Reed’s family is suing the city and officers for the unlawful traffic stop that led to his death. First the Chicago Police Department (CPD) said they pulled Reed over for not wearing a seatbelt, then they said he was pulled over for tinted windows. Reed’s family and attorneys argue he was pulled over for being Black. The issue of Reed firing the first shot before officers fired at him 96 times in 41 seconds has nothing to do with the civil rights lawsuit.
Still, I don’t believe it mattered at all to some members of City Council that before the fatal encounter with Reed, the officers involved already had seven complaints for stopping motorists and pedestrians for no reason and collectively had been investigated by the Bureau of Internal Affairs (BIA) and the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) at least 41 times since 2019. The team’s pattern and practice of targeting low-level infractions for invasive, intensive and inhumane enforcement, and their use of a dangerous and unauthorized vehicle maneuver to box Reed’s truck in was neither here nor there for Ald. Marty Quinn (13th Ward), who voted against the settlement and told Block Club Chicago, “The message should be you can’t shoot at Chicago police, period.”
I would like to believe members of the Black Caucus and Progressive Caucus could be revolutionized by the right leader. Johnson vowed to do better.
“I’m going to take some ownership of being able to communicate stronger and more effectively to people who are serving us in their capacities as alders, as well as the people who trust us in these positions and in this moment, so that everyone is absolutely clear on what we’re debating,” he said.
We are 20 minutes into the interview, and I still have quite a few other topics to get to. But in true preacher’s kid fashion, the mayor offered a biblical allegory. I didn’t want to interrupt, but I did get him back on track. I asked Mayor Johnson flat out if he wanted to settle the Reed family’s lawsuit out of court. He said “absolutely.”
“In order for us to build safer communities, there has to be an agreement and trust between law enforcement and the community,” Johnson said. “And this settlement calls out how that trust was broken.”
Black people have never been able to trust CPD, and Johnson knows that. Reed’s family wants to abolish pretextual traffic stops. Police Superintendent Larry Snelling wants to normalize them. I asked which side Johnson was on. He acknowledged “obvious problems with the pretextual approach” before going into what he described as a complexity in our community.
“Historically Black folks in the city call police more than most groups, and at the same time, we get nervous when they show up. And unless you’ve lived our experience, you can’t appreciate that. And so if we’re calling and we have an expectation but we also feel trepidation about that, then government has a responsibility to ease those anxieties,” Johnson said.
The mayor actually gave me anxiety. Trump recently signed an executive order to unleash law enforcement, and offer legal resources and protection for officers who “aggressively enforce the law.” It’s imperative that Johnson take a bold stance against racist police practices in defense of Black lives right now, but every time I gave him an opportunity, he failed to meet the moment.
I asked about Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke’s newly launched Felony Review Bypass pilot program in Englewood. The program allows officers to file felony gun charges without the approval of an assistant state’s attorney, an erosion of her predecessor Kim Foxx’s process.
Johnson told WTTW the program was worth trying, and I wanted to know what makes him believe Chicago police officers — who are currently under a federal consent decree for routinely violating Black peoples’ Fourth Amendment right to freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures — can do away with these checks and balances.
“I vehemently oppose the ongoing addiction that our country has to the incarceration of our people and criminalization of our people,” he said.
It was downhill from there, though.
Instead of defending the integrity of the felony review process as a first line of defense for Black Chicagoans who disproportionately suffer from police corruption, Johnson went on and on about getting as many guns off the streets as possible and making “sure that police officers are not bogged down by paperwork.”
I do not have a poker face, y’all. I know my disappointment was showing, and the mayor saw it.
“Now look, if it turns out that this review or pilot comes back and there’s data and empirical evidence that it is targeting and it is violating and breaking trust and violating the constitutionality of our existence,” he said, “then I’ll be the first to get up and say this is not the pathway forward.”
Johnson should know better. He’s toeing the line on issues that are literally life or death for Black Chicagoans.
On the topic of Shotspotter, I told him his termination of the city’s contract with the gunshot detection technology seemed like a radical rejection of Chicago’s slide into a surveillance state. Then his administration released a Request for Proposals (RFP) for new vendors to bid on a replacement contract. Now it’s giving reformist political theater.
“Here’s my position on technology: We used the Democratic National Convention to leverage a new helicopter. We have three of them. I think those are effective forms of technology,” Johnson said, adding that the use of police helicopters helps with robbery strategy and builds capacity to move police officers into strategic places in response to crime.“
In the RFP, he said, “there’s a $10 million appropriation to help improve first responders’ response time. So what I’m doing is, we’re not just looking at technology. We’re looking at other ways in which we can improve how first responders can show up to scenes.”
None of the company pitches received by the city mention reducing response times for ambulances, emergency medical technicians or firefighters, according to summaries released by ABC7’s I-Team.
The campaign to stop Shotspotter emerged in the wake of the 2021 CPD murder of 13-year-old Adam Toledo, and grew as a call to action to divest from war profiteers. Shotspotter also sells technology to the Israeli military.
Johnson has shown great symbolic support for Palestinians throughout Israel’s ongoing genocide. His tie-breaking City Council vote in 2024 made Chicago the largest U.S. city to pass a resolution calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, and he recently drew criticism for wearing a keffiyeh during an Arab American Heritage Month celebration. Still, in this McCarthy-esque era of political repression, symbolic solidarity is woefully insufficient.
I asked why his Law Department is pursuing charges against some pro-Palestine protesters — known as the O’Hare 40 — and what power the mayor has to institutionalize the values and protection of the movement that elected him.
The Law Department brought charges against the group after Foxx’s office kept its promise to drop charges against peaceful protesters as a matter of policy and principle.
“This is one of those tensions that exist within government where once you get to the other side, as I have, I’m never going to turn my back on the people who helped me get elected,” Johnson said. “The level of grace and patience that the movement has had with me, I appreciate, because we’re working through those elements in particular and even around those individuals who stood firm at O’Hare.”
He’s trying. But he either doesn’t know what he’s doing or doesn’t really have the power to do what he wants to do. Either way, it’s a disservice to the liberation movements that are counting on him.
Trump knew on day one who he needed to put in positions of power and what policies would carry out his agenda. Johnson appointed a Daley alum to lead his Law Department.
This month, Johnson says he’ll seek advice from James Montgomery, who served as corporation counsel for Mayor Harold Washington. Before leading the city’s Law Department, Montgomery was a civil rights attorney and represented the families of slain Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in their lawsuit against CPD.
“I do believe that we have to think more strategically about how he saw the legal division of Chicago as a way to create protection for our people in the things that I know that we have to do a better job at in terms of providing maximum protection for all the residents of this city,” Johnson said.
My 30 minutes was up. I didn’t get to ask all my questions, but there was one I couldn’t leave without an answer to.
How far is Johnson willing to go to resist Trump and protect Black Chicagoans from being kidnapped, trafficked and disappeared to a foreign penal colony? I prefaced my question with mentioning the Homan Square Black site. I co-led the 2016 Freedom Square encampment across the street from the Chicago police interrogation facility, urging the city to reallocate the site’s budget to neighboring communities.
Johnson started off strong: “Whether it’s protest and resistance, taking arrest again, using the legal system, using the legislative power, or me using my executive power— this is the moment in which everybody who claims what they would have done during slavery, well, now it’s your chance to prove that,” he said before going into a spiel about what he’s already accomplished.
“We have to do all that is necessary to ensure that our people are protected. And so that’s why in the teachers’ contract we protected Black history and Black veteran educators. That’s why we’re putting forth affirmative litigation to use the legal system. It’s why I put forth the $1.25 billion bond investment, $830 million for infrastructure, the Green Social Housing [plan] to build more affordable units because we cannot count on the federal government to show up for our people now as much as they are required to.”
Evoking what he called a “generational moment,” Johnson said future Chicagoans will have a blueprint for collective impact: “They need to have proof positive that whatever their fight is 100 years from now that we give absolute demonstration and direction of how we can win when we do it together.”
On this, I agree with the mayor 100 percent. I wholeheartedly support his efforts to protect Black history and invest in Black futures in Chicago. But none of that answered my question about potential for more state-sponsored kidnappings and human trafficking.
I don’t know what his legacy will be 100 years from now. But if Johnson intends to run again in 2027, he’ll need to do less political grandstanding and more radical problem-solving. I’m still rooting for him.
