Mayor Brandon Johnson on Tuesday left no doubt he remains opposed to a downtown curfew of 8 p.m. for unaccompanied minors — even after a tourist was shot while walking with her son outside a Streeterville movie theater.
Instead of using the stick to prevent young people summoned by social media from congregating and sometimes creating havoc downtown, Johnson favors offering them the carrot of paid employment.
That’s what the mayor was attempting to do during Tuesday’s news conference at Uplift Community High School, 900 W. Wilson Ave. That’s where he formally launched the online application process for 29,000 youth employment opportunities in this year’s version of “One Summer Chicago.”
That’s 1,000 more jobs than the city offered last summer. Johnson had hoped to spent $50 million to create 2,000 more summer youth jobs, but was forced to cut it in half during the marathon budget stalemate during which a recalcitrant City Council refused to approve any property tax increase.
“Shootings in Chicago are still very much a problem. No one’s gonna disagree with that,” Johnson said. “But as far as making sure that we keep our communities safe, we have to do the things that work. And what works is that, we have to invest in people.”
There is “more work to be done” to get illegal guns off the streets and “hold people accountable when they do commit crimes,” Johnson said, but “I believe that by having policies in place that actually work and investing in people—that’s our pathway to continue to build a better, stronger, safer Chicago.”
Downtown Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd) said Johnson’s mantra about “investing in people” has become a “meaningless cliché” and a mayoral “cop-out.” He favors the 8 p.m. curfew, which has been bottled up in the Council’s Rules Committee since he introduced it last June.
“We had violence interrupters who were present in this crowd of teenagers and they were unable to stop this shooting from happening,” Hopkins said Tuesday.
“We need to address root causes, but we had young people fighting with guns. To say the answer to that is investing in people doesn’t get us out of the immediacy of this situation where gun violence is breaking out on the streets of Downtown.”
Hopkins accused Johnson of “trying to distract from his opposition to basic law enforcement tactics” by saying the answer to the escalating problem of youth violence downtown is to invest in people.
“If that’s the only solution, then we might as well surrender our streets to teenagers with guns,” he said.
The shooting that damaged Chicago’s reputation as a tourist-friendly city happened shortly after 8 p.m. on Sunday.
A Connecticut woman and her son who came to Chicago for a school choir conference were walking back to their hotel after a pizza dinner when they “heard two gunshots and saw feathers flying” from the woman’s coat.
In spite of the mayor’s opposition to a downtown curfew, Hopkins vowed to try again to pass it before the traditionally violent summer months.
“Each year, we’ve seen a continuation if not an escalation of the phenomenon of teen-aged flash mobs. What’s changing is the frequency and the number of times it erupts into gunfire,” Hopkins said.
“The bullet that struck [the tourist’s] arm was inches away from her heart. She got hit by a second bullet which hit her purse…To say the answer to that is to say, `Let’s invest in people’ is absurd on its face. The inadequacy of that as a response to this is pathetic.”
It’s not the first time that Johnson has been accused of behaving like a permissive parent.
In August, 2023, Fraternal Order of Police President John Catanzara unloaded on the mayor for referring to the ransacking of a South Loop convenience store as a teen “trend” and not a “mob action” and for telling reporters it was inappropriate “to refer to children as, like, baby Al Capones.”
During Tuesday’s news conference on summer jobs, Johnson pretty much came clean about the political motive behind his more lenient approach.
“I won by roughly 26,562 votes. And there were 27,000 new voters that voted in April that did not vote in February,” Johnson said, comparing the voter turnouts in rounds one and two of the 2023 mayoral sweepstakes.
“I’m mayor of the city of Chicago because of young people. … So if there is anybody that I owe and I have to show up for, it’s for the people who know that this city is better, stronger and safer when our young people are loved and supported and invested in.”