Brandon Johnson, Paul Vallas grilled on past comments on policing and future plans for CPD at Tuesday’s Chicago mayoral debate

Chicago mayoral candidates Brandon Johnson and Paul Vallas differed on the city’s police chase policy, whether more detectives alone can solve crime, and approaches to education during a Tuesday night debate where they largely focused on substantive issues but occasionally attacked each other and answered for past controversies.

During the forum, moderated by WGN-TV’s Lourdes Duarte and Tahman Bradley, Johnson distanced himself from past comments about 2020′s civil unrest, where he said looters were acting “out of desperation,” while Vallas ducked a question about past comments he made criticizing “Democrats” on the blog site Barstool Sports.

The debate opened with Johnson being grilled about his past support of the “defund the police” movement, while Vallas was asked about his previous call for Chicago police to adopt “a willingness to arrest all criminal suspects.” Johnson responded flatly that he would not defund police, while Vallas stressed the need for proactive policing that respects people’s constitutional rights.

But the two candidates nevertheless clashed repeatedly over public safety, including a disagreement on the Chicago Police Department’s new foot chase policy.

The policy went into effect at the end of last August, after the shooting deaths of 13-year-old Adam Toledo and 22-year-old Anthony Alvarez. Both followed foot pursuits.

Prior to those shootings, the department did not have a formal policy on how or when to chase suspects on foot. The current policy states officers can only start a foot chase if there “is a valid law enforcement need to detain the person” that outweighs the dangers of a chase. There are also restrictions on an officer starting or continuing a chase if the officer is alone.

Vallas, who has criticized the new requirements as too burdensome as recently as this week, said: “They have just basically inundated the foot pursuit policy with a whole series of conditions under which you pursue and a series of conditions in which you disengage. Is it streamlined enough and basic enough so you can train the police officers in the policy in a redundant way so they’re following it?”

Johnson, meanwhile, did not directly answer but signaled support for restrictions.

“The foot pursuit has certainly caused a great deal of harm, and I will never forget the life of Adam Toledo,” Johnson said of the Little Village boy who was shot by police in 2021. “And when we see the type of brutality that exists in the city of Chicago, as mayor, we have to make sure that that’s not tolerated.”

The two also challenged the main tenets of each other’s plans to fight crime. Johnson reiterated his idea to promote 200 beat cops to detectives, but without a pledge to fill police vacancies, eliciting an attack from Vallas.

“I have to respond by basically saying promoting 200 detectives will do absolutely nothing,” Vallas said. “We are bleeding officers to the tune of 80 to 90 a month because they’re simply exiting. So this whole idea that somehow we’re going to promote detectives and that’s going to solve the problem, it’s going to do absolutely nothing.”

Johnson retorted, “If you don’t believe having more detectives is gonna help us solve crime, then that tells you you’re not ready to lead.”

The commissioner then repeated his estimate that it takes two years to become a police officer in Chicago and then went after Vallas for his plan to lure back former police officers who retired or transferred departments. It actually takes six months to graduate from the police academy, but the process to test into and be accepted can vary depending on department leadership and budget constraints.

“Paul believes that people are going to come off of retirement and come back to work after serving 25-plus years,” Johnson said. “That’s ridiculous.”

Vallas responded by saying he will make sure those ex-cops do not lose seniority or get penalized as an incentive to bring them back.

“I know for a fact there are hundreds of officers that will return if there is new leadership,” Vallas said.

At one point, Johnson was asked what consequences individuals who are repeatedly charged with gun crimes should face but he did not answer the question.

On the subject of city finances, Vallas started by criticizing Johnson’s bundle of taxes including reinstating a head tax on Chicago companies and raising the hotel tax. Vallas said instead he will cap residential and commercial property taxes on an individual level — which Johnson immediately shot down.

“Paul doesn’t have a plan,” Johnson said. “He doesn’t. That’s essentially what his answer is.”

Then Johnson went on to blame Vallas for the current state of underfunded pensions in Chicago, which Vallas has often hit back at by arguing he left Chicago Public Schools with a budget surplus at the end of his time as CEO. But he also oversaw changes that shifted annual payments from the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund that critics say hurt the system over the long haul.

“I’m surprised he’s not blaming me for the Kennedy assassination,” Vallas quipped.

Vallas pushed back on a question about New Orleans’ school system being populated by charter schools following his tenure leading the district after Hurricane Katrina, saying he had to start a new system from scratch.

“Charter schools are public, not-for-profit schools. In New Orleans, all the schools are neighborhood schools with local governing boards. This idea that I privatized schools — there was no system to privatize. We had to build them from the ground up.” Vallas did not respond to a question about how many new charter schools he would like to see in the city of Chicago.

Johnson, too, balked at a question on education. After arguing that standardized tests have “roots in eugenics to prove the inferiority of Black people should not be the measurement in which we determine whether or not a child is actually learning,” he was asked whether he would hold teachers accountable for student achievement.

“So you’re asking me whether or not we should hold teachers responsible for poverty?” Johnson said. He then highlighted the income gap between North Side and West Side families and called for a focus on improving the welfare of those raising children first.

For his part, Vallas dug into Johnson over the CPS in-person learning shutdown during COVID-19, again attributing it to children being murdered. Johnson responded that it was “unconscionable” for Vallas to blame a pandemic on teachers.

“I’m not blaming teachers,” Vallas said. “Chicago Public Schools remained closed long after other schools opened … I’m blaming the CTU leadership.”

The moderators repeatedly asked the candidates about their controversies. At one point, Duarte and Bradley played back a 2020 WGN interview in which Johnson said looters were “acting out of desperation.”

Johnson responded to a question about how he would convince businesses to remain in the city given those comments by more forcefully condemning the looting.

“I wasn’t hesitant” about condemning looting, Johnson said. “Not at all. What I’m saying is that we actually have to understand the pain of people. That’s it. No one is going to be OK with a society that is out of control. So I’m not hesitant to say that.”

Johnson continued: “What I’m clear about, though, is if we’re not solving crimes, if we’re not catching these coordinated efforts of smash-and-grab, that’s not going to deter it from happening,” he said, noting he had the endorsement of Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, the “top legal officer” in the state.

“It’s not OK to riot,” Johnson added. “What I’m saying is that it is important that we understand the level of desperation that’s in the city of Chicago has to be addressed.”

The moderators also played a clip from an interview Vallas gave to Barstool Chicago in February of last year, in which he noted the city had “been dominated by Democrats” for decades. “I mean, what do we have to show for it?”

Asked what he meant in that statement, Vallas repeated that he is a “lifelong Democrat,” and had run for office several times as one.

Johnson also brought up comments Vallas made on the “Morning Answer” show with conservative radio host Amy Jacobson in December 2021, where he suggested Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s and Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s reliance on executive orders — rather than legislative approval — during the COVID-19 pandemic gave them the ability “to act like dictators.”

Johnson praised Pritzker for doing the right thing, “unlike Paul Vallas, who was supported by the Republican Party, who referred to the governor as a dictator,” and associated with conservatives “who did not even believe that the pandemic was real.”

Asked about his Facebook and Twitter accounts liking offensive posts, Vallas said “campaigns can be loosely knit organizations” and numerous people had access.

“I’ll certainly be more thorough as mayor,” Vallas said before describing that he has perhaps been “open” with sharing his email addresses as well.

Vallas also said he tries not to spend too much time on social media.

“I’ll only look at the negative comments and I’ll dwell on them for days,” Vallas said. “So I’ve known just for my own mental well-being not to do that.”