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      A Chicago Mayoral Hopeful Who Took on Hard-to-Fix Schools Faces a Political Shift

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      Paul Vallas has long been a supporter of charter schools. He is running against Brandon Johnson, an ex-teacher with a different approach.CHICAGO — Paul Vallas took control of Chicago Public Schools when the district was among the country’s most troubled. He went to Philadelphia to head up a teetering education system that the state had taken over. And after Hurricane Katrina washed away much of the New Orleans school district, he helped rebuild it.Mr. Vallas built a reputation as the educational emergency responder of the 1990s and 2000s, someone sought out for the most challenging jobs. When he got to a new city, he moved quickly and forcefully, clashing at times with school boards and labor groups that objected to the pace and scope of his changes.“I’ll do 10 things and maybe accomplish five of them as opposed to someone who will do two things and maybe accomplish one,” Mr. Vallas said in an interview.One of two Democrats in Chicago’s mayoral runoff election on Tuesday, Mr. Vallas highlights his record of improving facilities, keeping schools open more hours and overhauling low-performing schools. He also forced out longtime educators, took a hard stance on student discipline and greatly expanded the number of charter schools, policies that earned him fans and enemies wherever he went.Mr. Vallas, 69, has put his education record at the center of his campaign for mayor of Chicago, arguing that the city needs that brand of crisis management to lower crime and improve schools. Yet he faces a changed political era in which teachers’ unions have asserted their power and many Democrats have grown skeptical of the idea of school choice, which Mr. Vallas supports and was once widely embraced by his party.Mr. Vallas is competing against Brandon Johnson, a county commissioner and former teacher who embodies the progressive critique of Mr. Vallas’s education philosophy. Mr. Johnson, a paid organizer for the last 12 years with the Chicago Teachers Union, has called for sweeping new investments in neighborhood schools and social programs. He wants to expand vocational programs, add resources for students who do not speak English and avoid closing schools with low enrollments. He has also been on the front lines of three work stoppages as his union clashed with two mayors and articulated a liberal vision for Chicago that extended well beyond schools.Mayoral candidate Brandon Johnson waited for a mayoral forum to begin at Kenwood Academy High School in February. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesIn Mr. Johnson’s telling, Mr. Vallas is an out-of-touch administrator whose policies would not help Chicago’s poorest residents. And when Mr. Vallas first ran Chicago’s schools, Mr. Johnson said, he made the city’s entrenched problems even worse.“The tale of two cities has been brought to us by Paul Vallas,” Mr. Johnson said. “He created a stratified system.”Mr. Vallas’s embrace of school choice, including magnet schools, military-style academies and charters, was a central part of the crisis playbook that he began developing when he ran Chicago’s schools in the late 1990s. Back then, though, many liberals as well as conservatives saw charter schools as a way to improve struggling school districts like Chicago. Charter schools, which are privately run and publicly funded, are popular in many low-income neighborhoods as alternatives to regular public schools. Teachers’ unions, though, have often bitterly fought the expansion of charter schools, most of which are not unionized. The unions contend the schools deprive the public school system of resources.Mr. Vallas came to Chicago’s schools from a finance role in Mayor Richard M. Daley’s City Hall instead of through the ranks of teachers and principals. He took over Chicago Public Schools in 1995 as Mr. Daley’s handpicked leader at a time of financial and educational crisis. The Illinois government, then controlled by Republicans, had just handed the mayor control of the system.Mr. Vallas quickly embraced other alternatives to traditional neighborhood schools, including magnet schools and military-style academies.His policies won praise from liberals who credited him with restoring order and raising test scores using a back-to-basics approach.The Clinton-era New Democrats were ascendant, and Mr. Vallas in many ways epitomized the moment, approaching the job like a corporate executive; his Chicago Public Schools title, after all, was chief executive.Under his leadership, the district placed faltering schools on academic probation, fired underperforming principals and ended social promotion, the practice in which failing students were advanced from grade to grade simply to keep them with their peers. The move helped him initially win over teachers. An official at the American Federation of Teachers hailed Mr. Vallas in 1997 for giving educators more leverage over students who were not doing their work.“People thought he was better than sugar,” said Josephine Perry, an instructor for a union that represents service employees in Chicago.Years later, though, much of what Mr. Vallas has spent his career championing — the tough disciplinary policies, the openness to charter schools — has lost some of its bipartisan sheen. Ms. Perry, who said she plans to vote for Mr. Johnson, summed up a concern of many Democrats: Mr. Vallas, she said, is “more aligned with Republican values.”Though Mr. Vallas is a Democrat, he has campaigned on a tough-on-crime platform and is far more conservative than Mr. Johnson. Mr. Vallas has also received endorsements from conservative organizations, including the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, and financial support from some prominent Republican donors.The political divide on charter schools is complicated. A national poll last year by Education Next, an academic journal, found that a majority of Black people surveyed supported charter schools, while fewer than half of white people and Hispanic people did. Along party lines, Republicans supported charters at a far higher rate than Democrats.Mr. Vallas says it is not an issue of Republicans versus Democrats. It is about teachers’ unions, which he said have become “more radicalized” with power to shape Democratic Party politics.“The unions realized that they were losing ground, and I think it forced them to become much more political than they had been,” Mr. Vallas said.Leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union, which has donated heavily to the Johnson campaign, said they had been defending public education in a city where mayors have repeatedly failed to invest properly in schools. Stacy Davis Gates, the union president, said she believed Mr. Vallas was going to close some schools and privatize others if elected mayor.Mr. Vallas, center, talked with local school council members as Chicago Public Schools chief executive in 1996.Ovie Carter/Chicago TribuneHe “is going to marginalize Chicago Public Schools in a way that will make getting a public education almost impossible,” she said.Mr. Vallas says he wants to expand high-performing charters in Chicago but has not called for eliminating neighborhood schools.Though comparing academic achievement data over time is difficult, Mr. Vallas compiled a mixed record as a school executive in four cities that included notable successes as well as disappointments.In Philadelphia, Mr. Vallas’s first stop after Chicago, proficiency in math and reading improved in the years after he arrived, according to a study by the RAND Corporation. But that study also found that privately managed schools in Philadelphia, which included some for-profit charter operators, performed no better than district-run schools, on average.Ed Rendell, a Democrat who was governor of Pennsylvania for much of that time, said he believed that Mr. Vallas did a good job under trying conditions, even though not all of his ideas worked.“He was an innovator,” Mr. Rendell said. “Some his innovations were good and had a positive impact. Some were well-meaning and well-targeted but didn’t work.”Mr. Vallas’s tenure in Philadelphia ended after the district recorded a budget shortfall, which Mr. Rendell said “wasn’t a disaster” but also “wasn’t acceptable.”Mr. Vallas was especially aggressive in spending on school construction, which was also a theme of his tenure in other cities with decaying school buildings.“He always told me that if you send a kid to school in a school that has no paint on the walls and a heating system that doesn’t work and it hasn’t been cleaned,” Mr. Rendell said, “the kid’s going to figure out pretty fast that no one values their education.”But the scale of the change he sought, and the idea that the system needed an overhaul, made him plenty of enemies. Kendra Brooks, now a member of the Philadelphia City Council, said she got started in politics after watching with dismay as Mr. Vallas made extensive changes to neighborhood schools while expanding charter and magnet programs. She described his tenure there as a failure that continues to hurt the city.“When you restructure over 200,000 children into a new system, it’s not easy to just flip back to something else,” Ms. Brooks said.Building a new system was exactly what Mr. Vallas was hired to do at his next stop in New Orleans. He arrived in 2007, nearly two years after Hurricane Katrina had washed away much of the school system, and had to start rebuilding before it was even clear how many students would be returning to the city.To make it work, Mr. Vallas helped build a network of charter schools overseen by public officials but largely independent of the kind of bureaucracy typically associated with big-city school districts. A Tulane University study later found sustained improvement in achievement and graduation rates in the new, charter-centric school system that he developed.“Paul Vallas came in to stabilize schools. He didn’t come in to do charter schools,” said Paul Pastorek, the former state education superintendent of education for Louisiana and Mr. Vallas’s boss in New Orleans. “But I think he recognized the value of charters when he came here.”Mr. Vallas visited students at A.P. Tureaud Elementary School in New Orleans in 2007.Cheryl Gerber for The New York TimesStill, Mr. Pastorek stressed that Mr. Vallas was more than willing to close charter schools that were faltering, citing a 2011 decision to shutter the Harriet R. Tubman School in the city’s Algiers neighborhood.“Heavy political pressure was applied to keep it open,” Mr. Pastorek recalled. “Paul recommended the state board close it, and we did. Every school had to meet the same standard, including charters.”From New Orleans, Mr. Vallas went to take over the schools in Bridgeport, Conn., in 2012. Bill Finch, who was mayor of Bridgeport at the time, said he was impressed with the speed with which Mr. Vallas addressed budget problems, created academic programs and injected energy into a long-struggling school system.“We went from a disastrous situation to a normal situation,” Mr. Finch said. “And I think it was actually better than normal because Paul really innovated.”But as in other cities, Mr. Vallas upset people with the pace and type of change he was proposing. He was ultimately forced to leave after courts ruled that he did not have the proper credentials to lead a Connecticut school district.Now back in Chicago and running for mayor, Mr. Vallas continues to back charter schools and defend his education record against criticism that he breaks more than he fixes. He talks often about using schools “to fill gaps,” getting eyeglasses to children struggling to see and keeping buildings open into the evenings to keep students safe and engaged.“I’ve always been able to multitask,” Mr. Vallas said. He added: “I felt I had to level the playing field.”Julie Bosman More

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      Chicago’s Mayoral Race Pits the Teachers Union Against the Police Union

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      In a city known for its unions, two loom over the Paul Vallas-Brandon Johnson race, and no labor leader is as significant as the incendiary president of the Fraternal Order of Police.CHICAGO — When Bobby L. Rush, the Black Panther turned congressman turned elder statesman of this city’s South Side, stood last week to endorse Paul Vallas for mayor, the first question he confronted featured his own words.How could a man who just two and a half years ago called Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police “the most rabid, racist body of criminal lawlessness by police in the land” stand behind Mr. Vallas, the candidate endorsed by that police union?“I have no patience for their leadership,” whom “I detest,” Mr. Rush said, thronged by supporters with Mr. Vallas by his side. But, he added, “I had my son killed by street violence. I cannot be antipolice.”In a city where organized labor remains a powerful symbolic and organizational force, two unions have loomed over the race for Chicago mayor, which ends with a fiercely contested runoff election on April 4: Chicago’s Lodge 7 of the Fraternal Order of Police, which backs the more conservative Democrat in the race, Mr. Vallas, and the Chicago Teachers Union, which backs the Cook County commissioner Brandon Johnson, a C.T.U. member and former teacher.Both unions offer considerable muscle, which could prove vital if turnout remains around the 36 percent who came out for the first round of voting on Feb. 28. The teachers union has put $1.2 million behind Mr. Johnson, with a further $1 million coming from the national and Illinois federations of teachers. Armies of door knockers and phone bankers are pitching in, while the police union presses its members to volunteer for the final Vallas sprint.But no other union in the nation’s third-largest city carries the same liabilities either. An 11-day teachers strike near the beginning of the 2019 school year pitted the educators’ union against City Hall and many parents. Then schools shut again last year with the teachers union again at loggerheads with the city, this time over coronavirus policies as parents prepared to send their children back to in-person instruction.John Catanzara, president of Chicago’s Lodge 7 of the Fraternal Order of Police, which has backed Mr. Vallas. Mr. Johnson’s campaign has tried to tie Mr. Vallas’s tough-on-crime talk to the incendiary views of Mr. Catanzara.Ashlee Rezin/Chicago Sun-Times, via Associated PressStill, there is nothing quite like Chicago’s relationship with the Fraternal Order of Police, especially with its president, John Catanzara, who expressed sympathies for the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, called Muslims “savages” who “all deserve a bullet” and retired from the police force in 2021 rather than face potential disciplinary actions. He punctuated his retirement papers with a handwritten note, “Finally!!! Let’s go Brandon,” a stand-in phrase for a more vulgar insult against President Biden.“When they talk about the F.O.P., they’re talking about me, which is hilarious,” Mr. Catanzara said in an interview, conceding, “If I got paid a dollar every time I was called a racist, I’d be an independently wealthy man.”In a mayoral campaign that has revolved around the two candidates’ very different stances on policing and public safety, Mr. Johnson’s campaign has tried to tie Mr. Vallas’s tough-on-crime talk to the incendiary views of Mr. Catanzara. One recent flier aimed at Latino neighborhoods compared Mr. Johnson’s promises — “Brandon will train and promote 200 new detectives” — to a single aspect of Mr. Vallas’s public safety record: “Vallas is endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police.”Mr. Catanzara’s Facebook post about Muslims has been a talking point in the multicultural quarters of this racially, ethnically and religiously diverse metropolis. And Johnson campaign workers are quick to link Mr. Vallas to the extended comments that Mr. Catanzara made to a Chicago public radio reporter about the Capitol rioters, which included, “There was no arson, there was no burning of anything, there was no looting, there was very little destruction of property. It was a bunch of pissed-off people that feel an election was stolen, somehow, some way.”Mr. Rush’s endorsement of Mr. Vallas, a potential boost for the white candidate facing skepticism among some Black voters, elicited reminders from the Johnson campaign of an interview in Politico where Mr. Rush said the police union “stands shoulder to shoulder with the Ku Klux Klan.”The broader aim is to convince Chicagoans that Mr. Vallas is some kind of secret Republican in a city dominated by Democrats. Linking him with Mr. Catanzara, an outspoken supporter of former President Donald J. Trump, is a key to that strategy, Johnson campaign aides said. Mr. Johnson did not have to name names during a debate last Tuesday night when he accused his opponent of hanging out with people in the “extreme Republican Party who did not believe the pandemic was real.” (Mr. Catanzara urged police officers in 2021 to defy the city’s vaccine mandate.)Paul Vallas speaks to supporters after advancing to the April runoff last month.Taylor Glascock for The New York TimesLittle wonder that Mr. Rush, who retired from the House last year, spent his initial comments on Tuesday vouching for Mr. Vallas as “a lifelong Democrat” and a “South Side Democrat” who “ain’t nothing but a Democrat.”In Chicago, unions stretch well beyond teachers and police, and organized labor — facing two starkly different candidates in a contest that has already sunk the incumbent mayor, Lori Lightfoot — is as divided as the city itself. Local 150 of the International Union of Operating Engineers has backed Mr. Vallas after its preferred candidate, Representative Jesús G. García, failed to make the runoff. So have union locals representing firefighters, ironworkers, elevator constructors, plumbers and electricians.Beyond the teachers unions, Mr. Johnson’s union backers include service workers, nurses and government employees.But Mr. Catanzara is a presence like none other, so much so that Mr. Vallas has made a show of not taking money from the Fraternal Order of Police or accepting any formal organizing muscle. When Ja’Mal Green, a 27-year-old activist who tried and failed to make the mayoral runoff, surprised the city by endorsing Mr. Vallas, he made a point of posting a video pressing his chosen candidate to say he is not beholden to the police union.“I’m not beholden to anybody,” Mr. Vallas responded.Mr. Catanzara is not lying low. He predicted that 800 to 1,000 Chicago police officers would leave the force if Mr. Johnson wins, adding to hundreds of vacancies already awaiting the next mayor.“If this guy gets in we’re going to see an exodus like we’ve never seen before,” he said, predicting “blood in the streets.”Mr. Catanzara was particularly hard on the teachers union and its “Manchurian candidate.”“They’re definitely pushing all their chips into the pot here,” he said.As for those who cast him as a bigoted bomb thrower, Mr. Catanzara just waved his hands. “I don’t waste my breath with them,” he said. “Like I tell everyone, read the book, not the cover.”Brandon Johnson, the Cook County commissioner, is a former teacher and member of the Chicago Teachers Union, which has endorsed him.Jim Vondruska for The New York TimesHis presence is especially troubling for Black Chicagoans, who must balance their concern over violent crime against their troubles with a police department that has been laboring under a federal consent decree after the Justice Department found routine use of excessive force. Mr. Johnson is Black. Mr. Vallas is white. And race has been a dividing line in Chicago politics since the city elected its first Black mayor, Harold Washington, in 1983.Last week, Paris Walker and her sister Emma gathered with others in Chicago’s historic Bronzeville neighborhood to march with Mr. Vallas and Mr. Rush to the storefront Beloved Community Church of God in Christ, where the former congressman was to bestow his blessing. Paris Walker shrugged off Mr. Vallas’s ties to the police union and said Mr. Johnson lacked the experience to run a city of Chicago’s size and complexity.Emma Walker was not as sure as she recounted menacing traffic stops, unwarranted violence and general intimidation from the Chicago police.“It bothers me,” she said of Mr. Vallas’s police union ties. “The police need a lot of cleaning up.” More

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      In Chicago Mayor’s Race, a Former Teacher Rises With Union Support

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      CHICAGO — Brandon Johnson had a problem. In a crowded Chicago mayoral race full of established liberal politicians — a sitting congressman, the incumbent mayor, two City Council members — many voters had never heard of Mr. Johnson, a county commissioner from the West Side.But he had something those other contenders did not: the Chicago Teachers Union.Loved and loathed, the teachers’ union has emerged over the last dozen years as a defining voice on Chicago’s political left, putting forth a progressive vision for the city that extends well beyond its classrooms. After highly public fights with the last two mayors that led to work stoppages, union leaders see in Mr. Johnson a chance to elect one of their own, a former teacher who shares a goal of rebuilding Chicago by spending more on schools and social programs.Boosted by the union’s endorsement — and perhaps more critically, its money — Mr. Johnson, a paid C.T.U. organizer since 2011, faces Paul Vallas, a former public school executive who has far more conservative views on policing and education, in an April 4 runoff. With the two finalists coming from opposite ideological ends of the Democratic Party, the runoff will test whether voters prefer Mr. Vallas’s plan to crack down on crime, hire more police officers and expand charter schools, or Mr. Johnson’s call to spend more on public education and social services, add new taxes and look to neighborhood schools as an engine for broader social change.“Our school communities really are a microcosm of all of the political problems that exist,” said Mr. Johnson, who taught social studies to middle schoolers in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing complex, and who frequently refers to the time a student raised her hand and told him that he should be teaching at a good school, not hers.“It was in that moment where I recognized how much our system has failed, where our students and our families can recognize quality, but do not believe that they deserve it,” Mr. Johnson said in an interview. “And so where I am today is the result of that moment.”Mr. Johnson, second from right, traveled to Selma, Ala., this month as a guest of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, seated, for the annual commemoration of Bloody Sunday. Andi Rice for The New York TimesMr. Johnson, who is on leave from his job with the teachers’ union, entered the field in October with low name recognition and a daunting path to electoral relevance. One early poll showed him with about 3 percent support. But as the weeks went by, he shot up in the polls, introducing himself to voters with 15-second TV spots and surprising competitors who focused their early attack lines on better-known candidates.Mr. Johnson, 46, who is Black, came in second in a first round of balloting last month. He performed especially well in liberal, mostly white wards along the city’s northern lakefront and in areas northwest of downtown with large Hispanic populations. Mr. Vallas, 69, who is white, came in first place, running up large margins around downtown and also carrying majority-white areas on the Northwest and Southwest Sides. Mr. Johnson’s rapid ascent was fueled by his gift for retail politics, a message that resonated with the city’s sizable bloc of liberal voters and large donations from labor unions. State records show that of the more than $5.6 million in contributions Mr. Johnson’s campaign reported between the start of 2022 and earlier this month, more than $5.2 million came from organized labor, including significant sums from the Chicago Teachers Union, the American Federation of Teachers, the Illinois Federation of Teachers and branches of the Service Employees International Union. Since last fall, the Chicago Teachers Union and its political action committee have contributed more than $1 million to the Johnson campaign.Stacy Davis Gates, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, which has more than 20,000 members, said there was no expectation that Mr. Johnson would be in lock step with the union if elected. But she said the possibility of having a mayor who understood the struggles of classroom educators and would listen to their concerns had motivated teachers to support him.“It’s been difficult for my members over the course of these few years,” said Ms. Davis Gates, whose union engaged in work stoppages in 2012, 2019 and, after a dispute with Mayor Lori Lightfoot over Covid-19 protocols, again in 2022. “They have not been respected or treated as the stakeholder that they are in this city,” Ms. Davis Gates added. “They’re looking for partnership.”Paul Vallas, a former public school executive who has far more conservative views on policing and education, will face Mr. Johnson in the April 4 runoff. Taylor Glascock for The New York TimesMr. Johnson’s close ties to the teachers’ union can be helpful: Liberal politicians covet the union’s endorsement, and in a 2019 poll reported by The Chicago Sun-Times, 62 percent of voters said they had a favorable opinion of C.T.U.But among Vallas supporters, Mr. Johnson’s C.T.U. ties have become a point of criticism. As a C.T.U. member and organizer, Mr. Johnson helped the union exert its influence and challenge the mayor on several issues.“He’s going to do what the union wants to be done,” said Gery Chico, who led Chicago’s school board when Mr. Vallas was the chief executive of Chicago Public Schools, and who has endorsed Mr. Vallas for mayor.As the C.T.U.’s political influence has grown over the last 12 years — first as a chief antagonist of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who oversaw school closures, then with Ms. Lightfoot, who fought with the union about work conditions and Covid reopenings — some have questioned its role in Chicago politics. In an interview in 2021, Ms. Lightfoot suggested that both the C.T.U. and the local chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, which has endorsed Mr. Vallas and whose leaders often support Republicans, had moved beyond the traditional role of labor unions and become more overtly political, creating inevitable conflict.Mayor Lori Lightfoot conceded on Feb. 28 after failing to make the runoff in the first round of balloting.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesMr. Johnson, the son of a pastor, plans to end his membership in the teachers’ union if elected mayor. When asked whether there were areas where he expected to have to tell the union no, Mr. Johnson did not provide specific examples.If elected mayor, “my responsibility is to the entire city of Chicago,” he said. “And look, I’m getting new friends every single day. And I have a bunch of old friends that we will have to have hard conversations with.”Mr. Vallas has repeatedly criticized the C.T.U. and tied Mr. Johnson to the union’s reluctance to return to in-person instruction during the pandemic.“Brandon was in part responsible for the shutting down of one of the poorest school systems in the country, with devastating consequences,” Mr. Vallas said during a recent debate, adding that “if you look at the crime statistics, and you look at the violence, and you look at the dislocation and declining test scores, you can see the results.”During the campaign, Mr. Johnson has described a Chicago dogged by inequality, plagued by violence and constrained by schools that lack the resources they need. That worldview, he said, was shaped by his time in Room 309 of Jenner Academy in Cabrini-Green, where he taught from 2007 to 2010, a time when many of his students’ homes were being demolished as part of a citywide push to knock down public housing high-rises.“The children were waking up to bulldozers — literally just bulldozers staring at us all day long,” Mr. Johnson said in an interview in Selma, Ala., where he traveled this month as a guest of the Rev. Jesse Jackson for the annual commemoration of Bloody Sunday. “And there were families where their homes had already been dismantled, so we had students who were taking two buses and a train to come back to the school.”In Cabrini-Green, former colleagues said, Mr. Johnson was a rare Black male teacher at a school where almost all of the students were Black. He revived defunct basketball and flag football teams, gaining a reputation as a nurturing coach with a competitive streak. And he was known as an engaging but demanding teacher who asked students to dress up on days when they gave a presentation.“The discipline that he showed and the love that he showed for the kids, the kids respected him,” said Pat Wade, a school security officer and coach who worked with Mr. Johnson in Cabrini-Green. “And they worked hard because of what he gave to them. A lot of people can’t do that.”Mr. Johnson meeting with voters on the South Side this month.Jim Vondruska for The New York TimesMr. Jackson, a Chicagoan who has endorsed Mr. Johnson’s bid for mayor, emphasized the candidate’s record of working with children in a city where many young people lack opportunity and are caught up in the criminal justice system.“These troubled youth in Chicago,” Mr. Jackson said, “he represents a face of hope for them.”But Mr. Johnson has faced criticism for his views on crime, the biggest issue in the campaign. In 2020, he described defunding the police as a political goal and supported a County Board resolution to “redirect funds from policing and incarceration to public services not administered by law enforcement.”As a candidate, Mr. Johnson has tried to distance himself from questions about defunding, and he has called for hiring more police detectives as well as increased funding for mental health services.Mr. Johnson said he saw similarities between the criticisms he has faced on policing and those leveled against Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black mayor, 40 years ago.“This is not new to the city of Chicago: Yet another attack on a Black man as an elected leader who is committed to investing in people,” Mr. Johnson said. But just as his ties to the teachers’ union have been seized on by his political opponents, skepticism about Mr. Vallas’s endorsement from the police union could provide an opening for Mr. Johnson.Scott Lewis, a North Side resident, said he agreed with Mr. Vallas that crime was out of control. But he still planned to vote for Mr. Johnson.“Compared to the others, he seems a little too cozy with the F.O.P. for my taste,” Mr. Lewis said of Mr. Vallas. “The police do have an important role, but I think reform is important.”Robert Chiarito More

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      It Would Be Foolish to Ignore What Just Happened in Chicago

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      Bret Stephens: Gail, the biggest political news from last week was the resounding defeat of the mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, in the primary. Your thoughts on her political downfall?Gail Collins: Well, running Chicago is a very tough job in the best of times, and Mayor Lightfoot was stuck doing it in the pandemic era.Bret: Hmmm …Gail: OK, that was my best shot at defending her. She was a huge disappointment — in a place like Chicago, you expect the mayor to get into a lot of fights, but she seemed to pick a new one every hour.If you’ve got a city beset by crime and economic problems, any incumbent mayor would need a great plan and a whole lot of emotional connection to the average voter to deserve another term. None of that there.What’s your opinion?Bret: Every thriving city needs to get two basic things right: It has to be safe for people and safe for commerce. Under Lightfoot, homicides, carjackings and shoplifting skyrocketed, and businesses fled the city. Nearly a third of Michigan Avenue’s retail space is vacant. Boeing decided to move its headquarters out of the city. When the McDonald’s C.E.O. complained about crime, Lightfoot scolded him. So I’m glad Chicago voters had the good sense to give her the boot. I just hope they also have the good sense to go with the centrist Paul Vallas in the runoff election instead of his opponent, Brandon Johnson, who may be even further to the left than Lightweight — er, Lightfoot.Gail: We’re gonna have more to discuss on that point.Bret: The election will also have national implications, Gail. Notice that President Biden has said he won’t veto a bill in Congress that would reverse a District of Columbia law that lightened sentences for various felonies. Higher crime rates are going to dog Democratic candidates everywhere until they start to get as tough on the issue as they were when Biden was in the Senate, promoting the federal crime bill.Gail: Doubt there’s a Democrat in America who isn’t sensitive to the crime issue now. But as we follow this story, just want to leave you now with one thought: Getting tough on lawbreakers is not enough to make a great chief executive. Nearly. Remember Rudy Giuliani.Bret: A highly successful mayor who brought down crime, made the city livable again and was endorsed in 1997 for a second term by the editorial board of … The New York Times. Granted, it’s a shame about the rest of his career.Gail: Now Bret, here’s a change of subject for you. Masks! Been so eager to converse about your anti-mask column the other day. Eager in part because people keep stopping me on the street and yelping: “Bret! Masks!”Bret: Oh, yeah. I’m aware.Just to be clear, Gail, my column was not against masks per se. It was anti-mask mandates as an effective means of curbing communitywide spread. Masks can obviously work in tightly controlled settings, like operating rooms. People who correctly wore high-quality masks probably protected themselves and others, at least if they never removed them in public.Gail: Go on …Bret: But the mandates didn’t work, and it’s not just on account of the recent Cochrane analysis that I cited in my column. Our Times colleague David Leonhardt came to basically the same conclusion last year based on U.S. data. What can work at the individual level can, and often does, totally fail at the collective level.It’s also common sense. If you’re required to wear a mask on an airplane but allowed to take it off to eat or drink, the requirement becomes useless. If you’re supposed to wear a mask while walking to a table at a restaurant but not when sitting down, it’s useless. If you’re supposed to wear a mask but nobody is very concerned about whether it’s an N95 or a cloth mask, it’s useless.Gail: “Less useful” yeah. But my understanding has always been that the masks aren’t as important for protecting the healthy as they are critical for keeping people who are already infected from spreading germs to others.Those folks are going to go out sometimes whether we like it or not, and if they’re the only ones who have to wear masks, it’s like a walking declaration of disease — ringing a bell to warn that the leper is coming.Make sense? Why do I suspect I haven’t persuaded you?Bret: Human nature. People who are infected but don’t know it will be no better about wearing masks properly than anyone else. People who are infected, know it and irresponsibly walk around with the disease are probably not going to be responsible mask-wearers, either.There’s also the fact that, in a culture like America’s, there was never a chance we’d get the kind of compliance we need to make a real difference. Maybe in China, which could be draconian in its enforcement, but I don’t think any of us would have wanted that here.Bottom line, the government would have been wiser telling people: If you are immunocompromised or you have a potential comorbidity like obesity or diabetes, please wear N95 masks at all times in public. If you aren’t, please be respectful of those who do wear them.Gail: Not necessarily. One of the things that struck me when mask wearing began was how it kinda defined community. Folks declaring solidarity with their fellow citizens in joining together to fight a common battle.Bret: To me, the lesson was the opposite. Many of the people who were most emphatic in their belief in mask wearing — particularly those with media bullhorns — worked the sorts of jobs that didn’t require them to wear masks all their working hours. Not like waiters or store clerks or Uber drivers who had to wear them 8, 10, 12 hours a day, and sometimes wound up with sores in their mouths. The mandates didn’t just polarize us politically, they also exacerbated class divides.Gail: I got into the habit of telling Uber drivers to feel free to take off the mask. Most of them didn’t, which made me presume they were voluntarily protecting themselves against the passengers.Bret: Gail, you scofflaw!Gail: But on to another topic entirely — the Murdaugh murder trial! I have to say when you spend most of your life listening to reports about political drama, a major murder trial reminds you how nondramatic that stuff can be.Did you follow the case? I did and figured he’d be convicted. But I was shocked by how fast the jury came to a decision.Bret: You and our colleague Farhad Manjoo, who looked at the case through a technological lens and offered a terrific, contrarian take on the trial. That said, from what I watched of the trial, Alex Murdaugh struck me as evil incarnate. My wife will probably kill me for saying this — er, so to speak — but while I can at least grasp how someone can murder a spouse, I simply can’t comprehend how anyone could murder his own child.Gail: Yeah, but about the jury: I remember years and years ago, being a juror on a trial where the defendant had punched an old lady on a bus. In front of a lot of other people. Tons of testimony and the defendant himself — if I recall this correctly — took the stand to offer the excuse that he found the old lady really irritating.Still, we deliberated for hours! Not because there was any doubt about what we were going to do. It just seemed to show respect for the process. And, maybe, to qualify for another excellent free courthouse lunch.Bret: Spoken like a true journalist: Anything for a free lunch.Gail, before we go, I hope all of our readers spend some time with Hannah Dreier’s moving and brilliantly rendered report on the thousands of migrant children, sometimes as young as 12, who came to this country alone and are now working grueling hours in factories, kitchens, construction sites, garment makers, slaughterhouses and sawmills trying to survive and sending what little extra money they have to help their families back home. It’s a powerful reminder that the migration crisis isn’t just happening at the southern border. In many ways, it’s just beginning there.Gail: Bret, I love the way you point to the great work our colleagues are doing. Hannah’s reporting on the migrant children was heartbreaking. Politically, both sides agree there’s a terrible problem here in regulating both migration itself and what happens to people who arrive in hopes of creating better lives.But do you see any hope — any at all — of their getting together on a solution? Even a partial one?Bret: The problem shouldn’t be difficult to solve through compromise. Discipline and order at the border combined with compassion and aid toward those who are vulnerable and suffering. America has shown in the past that we can meet that challenge. We just need to muster the will to meet it again.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      ‘The Holly’ Review: The Tragic Case of a Denver Activist

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      Julian Rubinstein’s investigative documentary traces the engrossing case of a Denver community organizer, Terrance Roberts, who faced charges of attempted murderAt the point where Julian Rubinstein’s investigative documentary “The Holly” begins, an entire biopic’s worth of drama has already happened. After years in gangs and prison, Terrance Roberts became an activist and founded a successful youth program to rejuvenate a troubled Denver neighborhood known as the Holly. Then, in 2013, while organizing a peace rally in the area, he shot a gang member he knew, and was arrested and charged with attempted murder.The film portrays Roberts’s turmoil as the 2015 trial approached, and sorts through a paranoia-inducing churn of local police crackdowns, gang activity and general controversy. Roberts prepares a self-defense plea, but vents about further blowback after he speaks out against the back channels between law enforcement and gangs.Dangling speculations in voice-over, Rubinstein at times suggests a lower-key, adenoidal Nick Broomfield as he taps his surprisingly outspoken sources: amiable former gang members, the flamboyant Rev. Lee Kelly (who takes over as a neighborhood liaison after Roberts) and Roberts’s supportive father, also a reverend.Roberts emerges as a Shakespearean figure of forceful magnetism who fights mightily against being viewed as a walking metaphor for the Holly’s struggles. His fearlessness is both heroic and tragic, though Rubinstein’s sometimes foggy explanations of community politics make the film feel as if it might vanish into the night at any moment. (The director, a journalist, partly shot the movie while writing a more detailed book with the same title.)It’s all a heady brew that leaves one wanting to know even more about Roberts, who is now running for mayor in Denver. The movie resists encapsulating him, or perhaps he escapes its director’s full understanding.The HollyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major streaming platforms. More

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      How Chicago’s Mayoral Runoff Could Play Out on a National Stage

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      The two mayoral candidates, both Democrats, are on opposite sides of the debate over crime and policing. Republicans, with an eye toward 2024, are watching closely.CHICAGO — For nearly three years, since the ebbing of the George Floyd protests of 2020, almost nothing has divided the Democratic Party like the issues of crime, public safety and policing, much to the delight of Republicans eager to center urban violence in the nation’s political debate.Now, an unanticipated mayoral runoff in the country’s third largest city between Paul Vallas, the white former Chicago public schools chief running as the tough-on-crime candidate, and Brandon Johnson, a Black, progressive Cook County commissioner questioning traditional methods of policing, will elevate public safety on the national stage and test how ugly the Democratic divide might get in a city known for bare-knuckled politics and racial division.Mr. Vallas, as Chicago’s schools chief, expanded charter schools, then virtually eliminated neighborhood public schools in the New Orleans school system.Taylor Glascock for The New York Times“Oh, it’s going to be good,” Christopher Z. Mooney, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said of the runoff contest, which will culminate on April 4. “It’s going to get pretty rancorous, and underlying all of it will be the racial subtext.”The mayoral runoff pits two Democrats against each other, divided not only by ideology but also by race in a city where racial politics have been prominent since it elected its first Black mayor, Harold Washington, 40 years ago.A Republican hasn’t controlled City Hall since William H. “Big Bill” Thompson left office in 1931, with an open alliance with Al Capone and three safe deposit boxes containing almost $1.6 million.But this year’s Chicago election will be watched by Republicans intently. Crime has already emerged as a potent weapon for a G.O.P. eager to win back the suburbs and chip away at Democratic gains among urban professionals.It has also highlighted the Democrats’ divide between a liberal left that coined the phrase “defund the police” and a resurgent center insisting the party does “back the blue.”In New York City, a moderate Democrat, Eric Adams, harnessed the surge of violence that hit cities across the country, exacerbated by the pandemic, to win the mayoral race in 2021. A Republican-turned-Democrat, Rick Caruso, leaned on the issue of crime last year to force a runoff in the nation’s second largest city, Los Angeles, though he ultimately lost the mayoralty to the more liberal candidate, Karen Bass.In San Francisco, Chesa Boudin, the liberal district attorney of a city once synonymous with liberalism, was recalled last year by voters infuriated by rising disorder, and similarly progressive prosecutors from Philadelphia to Chicago have become lightning rods in conservative campaigns against supposedly “woke” law enforcement. Michelle Wu, the newly elected mayor of Boston, was forced just this week to respond to criticism of her handling of violence, after Black leaders accused her of ignoring their safety.And while the G.O.P. was disappointed with its showing in November’s congressional elections, one bright spot for Republicans came in victories in New York and California that were fueled by advertisements portraying Democratic cities as lawless. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said her Democratic Party may well have held onto control of the House in November if candidates had a better answer to Republican attacks on crime, especially in New York.Add to that the issue of education, another sharp divide between Mr. Johnson and Mr. Vallas, and the mayor’s race in the city of broad shoulders may play out exactly as Republican presidential candidates would want. Ever since Glenn Youngkin recaptured Virginia’s governorship for his party in 2021 with an education-focused campaign, Republicans have made problems in the nation’s schools a centerpiece of their attempted national comeback, especially in the suburbs.And that has included a pitch for more school choice, whether through charter schools or vouchers to help public school students attend private schools. Again, Mr. Vallas and Mr. Johnson represent polar opposite positions on the issue: Mr. Vallas, as Chicago’s schools chief, expanded charter schools, then virtually eliminated neighborhood public schools when he took over the New Orleans school system after Hurricane Katrina. Mr. Johnson, a former schoolteacher and teachers union leader, stands firmly against that movement.Mr. Johnson, a former schoolteacher and teachers union leader, has fought against charter schools.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times“This is a microcosm of a larger battle for the soul of the nation,” said Delmarie Cobb, a progressive political consultant in Chicago, “and being the third largest city, it’s going to get all the national coverage. This is going to be an intense five weeks.”For the national parties, those five weeks will be tricky. The runoff between Ms. Bass and Mr. Caruso in Los Angeles forced the Democratic establishment to get behind Ms. Bass, a known quantity with a long career in the House of Representatives. If the Democratic establishment rallies around Mr. Johnson, the outcome of the Chicago mayor’s race could mirror Los Angeles, come Election Day.But Mr. Johnson’s ardent progressivism, including his outspoken skepticism of policing as the answer to rising crime, could make him toxic to Democrats with national ambitions, including Illinois’ billionaire governor, J.B. Pritzker.Likewise, Mr. Vallas’s pledge to beef up Chicago’s police force and unshackle officers from the controls put on them after high-profile police shootings like the killing of Laquan McDonald could make him a hero of Republicans eying a run at the White House next year. But their endorsements would run counter to Mr. Vallas’s efforts in the nonpartisan mayoral race to persuade Chicagoans that he really is a Democrat.Rodney Davis, a former Republican House member from central Illinois, said that he had no doubt Mr. Vallas was a Democrat, but that the ideological divide in the mayoral contest was no less important because the contestants are from the same party.“Are voters going to think about whether Brandon Johnson calls Paul Vallas a Republican, or are they going to think, ‘Do I feel safe when I leave my kid in the car to go back inside and grab something? Do I feel like the public school system is getting better or worse?’” he said, adding, “This has set up a fight that really is less about politics and more about issues.”National Republicans, eager to make the crime debate central as they joust with each other for their party’s presidential nomination in 2024, are not likely to stay quiet.“They may want to exploit the situation,” said Marc H. Morial, a former New Orleans mayor who now heads the National Urban League.Last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida swung through New York City, the Philadelphia suburbs and a bedroom community outside Chicago to speak to police unions about crime, and to lambaste what he called “woke” urban officials who he contends have eased up on policing and criminal prosecutions.“They just get put right back on the streets and they commit more crimes and it’s like a carousel,” Mr. DeSantis, an as-of-yet undeclared candidate for president, said Tuesday night during a speech in The Villages, a heavily Republican retirement community in Central Florida.Next, Mr. DeSantis is taking his critique of big cities on a national tour, including stops in states with the first three Republican primary contests, and will promote his new book, “The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival.”Though Donald J. Trump erected a gleaming skyscraper on the Chicago River, he has made the city his No. 1 example of what is wrong with urban America.“It’s embarrassing to us as a nation,” Mr. Trump said on a visit in 2019. “All over the world, they’re talking about Chicago.”Criminal justice could be a centerpiece in the coming fight between Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis for the 2024 nomination. As president, Mr. Trump signed the “First Step Act,” a bipartisan criminal justice law that has freed thousands of inmates from federal prison. As a House lawmaker from Florida, Mr. DeSantis supported Mr. Trump’s bill in Congress in 2018, but as governor in 2019, when the state passed its own version of that federal legislation, he opposed a measure that would have allowed certain prisoners convicted of nonviolent felonies to be released after serving at least 65 percent of their sentences.The Trump measure was opposed by some Republicans, including Mr. Trump’s own attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, and the former president has since appeared eager to distance himself from the law.The race in Chicago will pit a candidate with the police union’s support against one who has the teachers’ union on his side.Taylor Glascock for The New York TimesDuring the past two years, Mr. Trump has spoken more about the need for tougher criminal justice laws, renewing his widely criticized proposal to execute drug dealers, and less about the benefits or outcomes of the First Step Act. Speaking to New Hampshire Republicans in late January, in the first public event of his latest presidential campaign, Mr. Trump said he would have a tougher response to civil rights protests if elected to a second term.“Next time, it’s one thing I would do different,” Mr. Trump said.A Republican intervention in the mayoral runoff here would not be helpful to Mr. Vallas. He was forced to denounce Mr. DeSantis’s appearance in Elmhurst, Ill., last week lest he be tied to the polarizing Florida governor ahead of Tuesday’s voting.But Mr. Johnson almost certainly represents too perfect a target for Republicans to sit this one out. He may have walked back earlier comments on “defunding” the police, but last month, he was the only mayoral candidate who refused to say he would fill the growing number of vacancies in the Chicago Police Department.“Spending more on policing per capita has been a failure,” Mr. Johnson said at a news conference outside City Hall last month.“Look, I get it,” he continued. “People are talking about policing as a strategy. But, keep in mind, that is the strategy that has led to the failures we are experiencing right now.”A substantive debate on the best approach to public safety could be good for Chicago and the country — if it stays substantive, Mr. Morial said. Policing is not only about the number of officers, he said, but about the accountability of the force and the trust of the citizens.Mr. Morial expressed doubt that Mr. Trump or Mr. DeSantis would keep the debate focused that way. But the nation will be watching, starting with the Chicago mayoral runoff, he said.“I’m watching this race closely,” he said. “I think it’s going to become a national conversation, which I think is going to be good.”Jonathan Weisman reported from Chicago, and Michael C. Bender from Washington. More

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      Chicago Police Superintendent Steps Down After Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Defeat

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      David O. Brown, the superintendent, said he had accepted a job as chief operating officer of a personal injury law firm in Texas.CHICAGO — David O. Brown, the embattled superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, announced his resignation on Wednesday, on the heels of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s defeat in a mayoral race that was dominated by voter concerns about public safety.Superintendent Brown’s resignation will take effect on March 16.After Ms. Lightfoot lost her bid for a second term in office on Tuesday, the swift departure of her handpicked police superintendent was all but assured. Both of the mayoral candidates who advanced to an April 4 runoff, Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson, had said that they intended to fire Mr. Brown, if elected.In a statement, Mr. Brown said that he had accepted a job as chief operating officer of a personal injury law firm in Texas.“It has been an honor and a privilege to work alongside the brave men and women of the Chicago Police Department,” he said. “I will continue to pray that all officers return home to their families safe at the end of their shift. May the good Lord bless the city of Chicago and the men and women who serve and protect this great city.”Ms. Lightfoot praised the superintendent for his department’s work in recovering illegal guns and reducing violent crime and for recruiting 950 new hires to the department in 2022. Eric Carter, the first deputy superintendent, will serve as interim superintendent until a new mayor is sworn into office in May, Ms. Lightfoot said.Superintendent Brown, a former chief of the Dallas Police Department, was hired by Ms. Lightfoot to lead Chicago’s force in April 2020. At the time, he was hailed as a reformer who had increased transparency and diversity in the department and instituted de-escalation training for officers.He gained national prominence for leading the Dallas department during a tragedy that shocked the country: In 2016, a Black man, intent on killing white officers, fatally shot five police officers in downtown Dallas while the country was reeling from the deaths of two Black men at the hands of the police in Louisiana and Minnesota.Asked about how to bridge the gap between the two brotherhoods — Black and blue — he belongs to, Superintendent Brown said at a news conference at the time, “I’ve been Black a long time, so it’s not much of a bridge for me.”When Mr. Brown arrived in Chicago, the coronavirus pandemic had just begun, and a crime wave that would sweep across the nation took hold in the city.But he soon faced scathing criticism for his handling of protests, looting and civil unrest in Chicago during the summer of 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis.Joseph Ferguson, then the city’s inspector general, issued a report in 2021 detailing failures in Superintendent Brown’s response and faulting city officials for “poor coordination, inconsistency and confusion” that left the police “outflanked, underequipped and unprepared to respond to the scale of the protests and unrest with which they were met in the downtown area and across Chicago’s neighborhoods.”Under Superintendent Brown, homicides in Chicago soared to generational highs. He also endured complaints from rank-and-file officers, who frequently said they were exhausted and struggling with understaffing, and the pace of retirements accelerated in the last several years.The Rev. Ira Acree, a pastor in a neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago that has been hit hard by gun violence, said that he saw Mr. Brown as a competent police official.“I do, however, think that he was overmatched,” he said, noting that Mr. Brown had begun his job just as the pandemic and the national crime surge hit. “He did not have the degree of familiarity that is needed to inspire a police department that already had low morale.”Ms. Lightfoot said during her campaign that she intended to keep Superintendent Brown in place if she were re-elected, but there were signs that he was leaving, whether the mayor was re-elected or not: The Chicago Sun-Times reported last month that Mr. Brown would have reached the department’s mandatory retirement age of 63 in October. More

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      The Spectacular Fall of Lori Lightfoot

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      It was a stunning rebuke. On Tuesday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago, the first Black woman and first openly L.G.B.T.Q. person to lead the city, failed to advance to a runoff, earning just 17 percent of the vote and becoming the first incumbent mayor in 40 years to lose a re-election bid.Four days before the election, I interviewed Lightfoot in her Chicago office. The space, with its soaring ceiling, was a clash of aesthetics, like many government buildings, displaying a kind of prudent grandeur, evoking the gravitas of the office without signaling excess, much like Lightfoot herself, who settled her small frame, dressed in a smart gray suit, into a large chair.During our nearly hourlong interview, she choked up and fought back tears when discussing the sacrifices her parents had made for her and her siblings. A smile lit her face when she talked about all the memes that had made her a folk hero in the early days of her term, and she puffed up with pride when discussing her proudest moments as mayor, including how she and her team had dealt with the Covid-19 crisis.But those weren’t the reasons I’d trekked to the frigid city on the lake. I’d come because Lightfoot belongs to a group of recently elected Black mayors of major American cities, including Eric Adams in New York, Sylvester Turner in Houston and Karen Bass in Los Angeles.In those cities, Black people are outnumbered by other nonwhite groups, and in New York City and Chicago their ranks are dwindling.Each of these four mayors was elected or re-elected around the height of two seismic cultural phenomena — Black Lives Matter and the pandemic. Of the four, Lightfoot would be one of the first to face voters and test the fallout. (Turner is term-limited and can’t run again.)It clearly did not go well.On one level, the results of Tuesday’s election speak to how potent the issue of crime can be and how it can be used as a scare tactic. Lightfoot said that it was absolutely used as a political tool in her race: “You’ve got people who are using it as a cudgel against me every single day. You’ve got the only white candidate in the race who’s acting like he’s going to be a great white savior on public safety.”That white candidate is Paul Vallas, who finished at the top of the crowded field on Tuesday with 34 percent of the vote. Vallas had run a tough-on-crime, law-and-order campaign in which he told one crowd that his “whole campaign is about taking back our city, pure and simple.”Lightfoot called the remark “the ultimate dog whistle.”In our interview, she was brutal in her racial assessment of Vallas: “He is giving voice and platform to people who are hateful of anyone who isn’t white and Republican in our city, in our country.” She is also surprisingly candid about how race operates in the city itself: “Chicago is a deeply divided and segregated city.”It is that division, in her view, fomented by candidates who see politics in the city as a zero-sum game, that provided Vallas with an opening to win over the city’s white citizens. As she put it, “People who are not used to feeling the touch of violence, particularly people on the North Side of our city, they are buying what he’s selling.”Indeed, Vallas won many of the wards in the northern part of the city, while Lightfoot won most of the wards on the largely Black South Side.But two things can be true simultaneously: There can be legitimate concerns about rising crime, and crime can be used as a political wedge issue, particularly against elected officials of color, which has happened often.In this moment, when the country has still not come to grips with the wide-ranging societal trauma that the pandemic exacerbated and unleashed, mayors are being held responsible for that crime. If all politics is local, crime and safety are the most local. And when the perception of crime collides with ingrained societal concepts of race and gender, politicians, particularly Black women, can pay the price.In 2021, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta chose not to seek re-election, becoming the city’s first Black mayor to serve only a single term, after wrestling with what she called the “Covid crime wave.” Mayor LaToya Cantrell of New Orleans is facing a possible recall, largely over the issue of crime in her city, and organizers said this week that they have gathered enough signatures to force a recall vote.Even in cities where Black mayors aren’t likely to be removed from office, their opponents are searching for ways to limit their power, using criminal justice as justification.The Mississippi House recently passed a bill that would create a separate court system and an expanded police force in the city of Jackson, one of the Blackest cities in America. The new district “would incorporate all of the city’s significantly populated white-majority neighborhoods,” as an analysis by The Guardian pointed out. Jackson’s mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, said the plan reminded him of apartheid.Crime often comes in waves, but a question lingers about how people, even liberals, respond when a crest arrives under Black leadership: Are Black mayors too quickly and easily blamed for rising crime, and if so, why? Because of an unwillingness to crack down on criminals or because of a more insidious, latent belief in ineffectual Black leadership in times of crisis?Lightfoot told me she understood that as a woman and as a person of color, “I’m always going to be viewed through a different lens, that the things I do and say, that the toughness that I exhibit, is viewed as divisive, that I’m the mean mayor, that I can’t collaborate with anyone.”Even so, she conceded, “If you feel like your life has been challenged because of the public safety issues coming to your doorstep, it doesn’t matter what the numbers are — you need to feel safe.”But feelings on issues of politics, crime and race also tap into our biases, both conscious and subconscious. In that vein, Lightfoot may be a harbinger, or at least a warning, for the other big-city Black mayors: As the Covid crime wave wears on, will their mostly non-Black citizens feel that their safety is being prioritized and secured under Black leadership?The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More