Chicago City Wire

With their runoff election just days away, Chicago mayoral candidate Paul Vallas is accusing rival challenger Brandon Johnson of supporting the “defund the police” movement.

“There is no substitute for returning to community-based policing,” Vallas said. “You can’t have confidence in the safety of public transportation when there are not police officers at the platforms and police officers at the stations.”

Mayor Lori Lightfoot lost her reelection. Mayoral Candidates Johnson and Vallas will face each other during the April 4 election.

Far more moderate in his approach than Johnson, Vallas is backed by the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, has focused his campaign on a pro-police, tough-on-crime message. He has vowed to stem an exodus of city police officers and put more cops on Chicago Transit Authority buses and trains.

Move On, an organization that focuses on nonpartisan education and advocacy on important national issues, called out Vallas for privatizing schools and undermining unions.

In a recent debate broadcast on ABC 7, Vallas made it a point of pointing to Johnson’s previous comments in which he had broadly backed shifting public dollars away from policing and toward community-based programs, prompting Johnson to respond “I’m not going to defund the police, and you know that. You know that."

Johnson argued giving that money to the community would improve the community’s lives. He added that people are desperate because of dire living conditions.

“People are acting out of desperation,” Johnson said to WGN. “You have to pay attention to cries people have, there’s no way to embrace [looting].”

Violence in the city spiked in 2020 and 2021. And though shootings and murders have decreased since then, other crimes – including theft, car-jacking, robberies and burglaries – increased last year, according to the Chicago Police Department’s 2022 year-end report.