Do the 34 city council members know something that Mayor Brandon Johnson apparently doesn’t?
The arguments for and against ShotSpotter, the gunshot detection technology being installed in Chicago’s most violent crime-ridden neighborhoods, are familiar by now. Opponents (though their numbers seem to decrease by the week) argue that ShotSpotter doesn’t do much to prevent gun violence or solve crimes. But they conveniently ignore that the debate moved beyond those issues a long time ago and is now focused on how ShotSpotter speeds up police and emergency services response when someone is shot. As we’ve said many times on this page, ShotSpotter can help save lives that would otherwise be lost, and it can potentially prevent retaliatory attacks.
The time for discussion is over.
The future of ShotSpotter rests squarely on politics and the will of the majority. In the face of an overwhelming rebellion from the City Council, Johnson continues to insist that the contract with the company that owns ShotSpotter will expire in late November. This comes after the City Council, in a 34-14 vote to override the veto, preserved the right to keep the technology under the jurisdiction of any alderman who so wishes. Even when I think back to the darkest days of the City Council wars of the 1980s, I can’t remember such a one-sided rebuke of a Chicago mayor.
“Whatever this text is, it has nothing to do with my executive power,” Johnson told reporters afterward.
“Whatever it is.” Of course, it was democracy in action.
It’s fair to say that most, if not all, of Chicago’s 50 city council members are more attuned to the wishes of their constituents than the mayor is, given the nature of the mayor’s job. If 34 of the council members are willing to incur the mayor’s wrath over something he says he’s already decided, it’s fair to conclude that the majority of the residents in their districts feel the same way. So there’s now considerable evidence that the mayor and the city want to keep ShotSpotter.
A more capable, more pragmatic leader than Johnson would acknowledge this political reality and come up with a clever way out of the trap he finds himself in. Johnson seems to think it would be seen as a sign of weakness – and to an extent he is right, given that he left himself no way out with ShotSpotter – but it is not too late for him to take the brunt, to move on and pick a bigger fight – one that has the backing of a majority in Parliament.
A sign of just how politically weak the mayor is is that the City Council continues to vote on the same issue over and over again, even as the technology in question continues to be deployed.
The people have a say through their elected representatives, and a mayor who does the opposite of what Chicagoans want is unlikely to be successful in office, or even win a second term.
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