As Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza strode toward the camera in an empty lot, she gave credit for Chicago’s plunging violence, but not to the man she’s hoping to succeed.
Homicides have dropped because “Chicago has the best trauma surgeons,” while shootings are in fact up, she said in a video posted to social media this month — a claim at odds with police data that shows shootings are marginally down this year.
“Trauma surgeons saving more lives is great, but we shouldn’t be taking a victory lap,” she said against a backdrop of wailing police squad car sirens and flashing lights. “As mayor, I’m not going to hide behind statistics. I’m going to have honest conversations about the level of violent crime across our city.”
It was an effort to spin a fact that could play a key role in Chicago’s February mayoral election: Homicides and shootings have sharply dropped during Mayor Brandon Johnson’s first term, along with declines in several other categories, according to police data. But presented with those numbers, Mendoza said when her video was filmed earlier this summer, year-to-date shootings in 2026 were slightly up compared with last year.
“That was a moment in time when we taped that video,” she said. “At the end of the day … I don’t think any amount of shootings is acceptable.”
The city experienced a recent peak of 719 homicides in 2022, a year before Johnson took office, and ended last year with 416, according to Chicago police statistics. In the same time, shootings plunged 48%, robberies 35% and car thefts 20% — and those levels have generally improved or held this year. It’s part of a broader trend that has seen violent crime plummet in cities across the U.S. in recent years, but one Johnson has regularly attributed to his own choices.
Despite the clear-cut improvements during Johnson’s time in office, nearly every declared mayoral candidate said in interviews with the Tribune that he has done too little to address violence. None gave his crime-fighting efforts full-throated praise, and all said Chicagoans still too often feel unsafe.
Instead, as they laid out their vision for curbing Chicago violence, several of them sought to bolster a “tough-on-crime” image by calling for a spike in police headcount and harsher penalties for lawbreakers. Others argued the city cannot afford massive new spending on police, its greatest expense, and must make the department more efficient.
For his part, Johnson — who has not yet announced a reelection bid — credits progressive policies aimed at the root causes of crime, including major spending on youth summer jobs and community violence intervention. Even as he warned “one act of violence is one too many,” he argued it is also important “to recognize that what we’re doing is proven to be effective.”
“I think what’s at stake here is we can revert back to failed policies, or we can double down on the efforts that I’ve made,” he told the Tribune, listing mass incarceration and school closures as examples of the former strategy. “Do Black lives really matter? And if they do, put some skin in the game.”
From 1,000 more officers to bringing in technology, old and new
For several candidates, a public safety platform breaking from Johnson’s efforts starts with a number: 1,000.
Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias, Mendoza, business owner Willie Wilson and lobbyist John Kelly have promised to boost Chicago police ranks by at least that much.
That could prove difficult given the city’s fiscal challenges. The Police Department is the most expensive city department by far, and Chicago already has one of the highest officer-to-resident ratios in the country.
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The salary for a probationary officer — who usually graduates from the police academy after half a year — starts at $63,000 but jumps to $111,000, plus benefits after four and a half years of service, per the department’s 2026 pay schedule. Out of the total 8,500 positions budgeted for general duty police officers this year, about 700 are vacant.
The candidates who support adding more officers note, however, that the city regularly blows past its annual budget for police overtime: $285.8 million versus the $100 million allocated for last year, despite Johnson saying it was a priority to cut overtime spending.
In an interview with the Tribune, Giannoulias said his goal is to grow the Chicago Police Department’s sworn headcount by 1,000 to 1,500 regardless of attrition. Asked whether that was fiscally responsible, he said, “I can make a strong argument that if we aggressively hire more police officers,” cut down the time it takes to enroll in the police academy and civilianize about 600 sworn positions, “we can bring down the cost of overtime, and ultimately at worst make this a revenue neutral; at best, maybe even cut some costs.”
“The narrative around Chicago is public safety continues to be an issue, and to me, it touches everything,” Giannoulias said. “It’s one thing to be a candidate and say I want to hire more police officers. You have to recognize the problems with hiring and get to the root.”
Giannoulias also said he would fill positions within constitutional policing roles. He pledged to create a high-level deputy position in his administration focused on addressing domestic and gender-based violence and debut a “rapid video response” for domestic violence victims to call a specially trained officer within minutes rather than wait for an in-person response.
Those four candidates who called for 1,000 more officers — along with two who have not, U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley and former Ald. George Cardenas — have also promised to bring back Chicago’s ShotSpotter acoustic gunshot detection system, which Johnson shut down amid grassroots pushback that contended the technology was ineffective and harmed Black and Latino communities.
Mendoza and Kelly, who’ve made much of their campaigns about crime, said the state must amend the SAFE-T Act to limit the use of pretrial release of defendants to home confinement, a sign of how they would use the mayor’s bully pulpit. In another key break from Johnson, Kelly said the work of community violence interrupter groups was “very important,” but he would prioritize spending on officers because “nothing replaces a Chicago police officer.”
“We need to find the money in the budget to pay for it because it’s a priority,” Kelly said. “It’s just a fact that Chicagoans feel safer when they have police officers around.”
Wilson, making his fourth run for mayor, said he would install four police superintendents, each representing different parts of the city and groups of Chicagoans, though he didn’t specify which groups would get distinct superintendents under his plan. After saying officers should be able to “hunt (suspects) down like a rabbit” in 2023, he doubled down on his calls to relax rules restricting police action.
“You’ve got to take the handcuffs off police,” Wilson told the Tribune. “Do I feel that crime has went down? No, the senior citizens is scared to come out their place.”
U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley opened his interview with a number of his own: 14.6, Chicago’s homicides per 100,000 residents in 2025, far higher than New York’s 3.4 figure.
“We’re four times higher per capita,” he said. “So let’s deal with the reality and remember that Democrats get in trouble telling people how they feel.”
But the nine-term congressman nonetheless dismissed his rivals’ hiring pledges as political showmanship. The call doesn’t account for the city’s dire financial straits and the years it takes to recruit and train enough police classes, he said, instead advocating for more officers working during high-violence times.
“It sounds like soundbite to me because it’s going to be very time-consuming, very expensive and it’s not going to happen right away,” he said. “I think the immediate response is using the ones we have more efficiently now.”
Chicago Housing Authority board member Matthew Brewer, meanwhile, concurred it’s not a question of whether the city is overpoliced or underpoliced but rather “properly policed.” He said “a small number of blocks is responsible for a disproportionate amount of violent crime” and vowed to flood those streets with resources including law enforcement, job opportunities and new policing technology.
“The days of having 15,000 officers are gone,” Brewer said. “We’re closer to 12,000 right now, and we do have technology that can enhance, supplement what our officers are doing.”
Entrepreneur Joe Holberg said he would also focus on civilianizing clerical jobs in the Police Department and push for more officers walking beats rather than just responding to emergencies, to build trust and repair relationships.
Holberg has focused in particular on transit safety, calling for more train cleaning, new smoke sensors, a better complaint system, stricter fare enforcement and more services to get unhoused Chicagoans off trains and into shelters.
Dr. Lisa Nee, a cardiologist-turned-medical whistleblower, said the department’s issues go deeper than headcount. Even though she hopes to grow police ranks, targeting a number is insufficient, she said.
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“You’re now putting hundreds of people into an existing system that clearly isn’t working to its best,” she said.
Arguing she is a “data-driven individual,” she said she also opposes the use of pretextual traffic stops and called for department improvements to bolster recruitment, officer wellness and more opportunities to advance within CPD.
Former Ald. George Cardenas said he would build a new public safety command center within his first 100 days in office, arguing the office would be substantially different from the city’s Office of Public Safety Administration.
Cardenas, now a Cook County Board of Review commissioner, acknowledged homicides have declined but added “the perception of crime, that has not gone down, and that becomes the reality.”
He also argued the mayor’s so-called “root causes” approaches to preventing crime are “just not connected to anything” in terms of material results, such as Johnson’s much-touted focus on youth summer jobs that Cardenas sees as busy work rather than actual enrichment.
“We are spending money, we are investing in our young and we should be rewarding them with skills that are going to then change their lives,” he said. “We’re wasting an opportunity to make that happen.”
Credit due?
As he laid out his broad efforts to fight crime, Johnson took aim at the policing-first focus shared by many competitors.
He has put careful effort into improving the Police Department, picking a widely praised, morale-boosting superintendent in Larry Snelling — who stepped down last month — and focusing on hiring and promoting detectives to support clearance rates, he noted.
On the last campaign promise, to add 200 more detectives, the actual headcount has not grown much thanks to department attrition. Chicago police employed 1,102 total detectives as of May 2023, and 1,163 as of last week.
That “full-force” approach has included Johnson’s ramped-up spending on infrastructure on the South and West sides and city lawsuits against gun manufacturers to pressure them into removing guns easily altered by criminals to become more dangerous, he said. It also included youth hiring programs and community violence intervention in neighborhoods where homicides have halved, he added.
The decline is real, but the cause is unclear, said Roseanna Ander, executive director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab. It’s hard to credit Chicago-specific levers because other cities that saw crime spike during the COVID-19 pandemic are likewise seeing decreases now, she said.
“That wouldn’t explain why Baltimore is seeing historic lows, why Philadelphia, lots of other cities are as well,” she said.
And while Chicago’s falling crime rates are encouraging, they are also slowing as steep declines continue elsewhere, she said. Gun-related homicides have slightly increased year over year even as the overall homicide number falls, a change Anders attributed to the spread of high-capacity magazines and Glock “switches” that allow handguns to fire more rapidly, she said.
For his part, Johnson maintained no issue matters more to him than safety. Unlike the other candidates who he argues are myopically pursuing tried-and-failed efforts to pour money into policing, he is raising a family in one of the city’s most high-crime neighborhoods, he said.
“The tendency to get it wrong tends to take place from individuals who don’t have, they don’t have the same stakes,” he said. “There are too many politicians who I believe are just out of touch. I don’t know if they value Black lives.”
The latter remark drew criticism from mayoral challengers. Brewer, Cardenas and Mendoza cited their own upbringings, while Kelly and Wilson jabbed at the mayor for framing crime as an issue of race.
Giannoulias scoffed. “Under this administration, morale at the Police Department is at an all-time low,” he said. “That’s not my opinion. Those are police officers and people up high at CPD, literally calling me, meeting with us, telling us that morale’s at an all-time low. So I would say ask them.”
Last week, Mendoza gathered a handful of community leaders and gun violence victims inside a Bronzeville ice cream shop to hear their stories — and make a commitment.
She vowed as mayor she would dramatically cut down the size of the office’s security detail because she would rather have more officers on the street than “some entourage.” Currently, about 100 officers are assigned to CPD’s government security detail that’s mostly used to protect the mayor.
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Then, she lamented that Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke and Snelling “could have been a dream team.”
“But we were missing, in the third-legged stool, the third leg of the stool,” she said, “which is a mayor who believes in our Police Department.”
This story was updated to clarify that Mendoza committed to reducing the size of the mayor’s security detail but not by what amount.