When TNT Exploded in Chicago: The Quiet Victory of Brandon Johnson

Treatment Not Truma: On the Shift from Policing to Public Health

Editor’s Note / Disclosure

Before going any further, a measure of transparency is owed. I am not a neutral observer. I am a fan and an advocate of Mayor Brandon Johnson, and I say that plainly because it shapes how I see this city—and how I write about it.

I have been an off-and-on resident of Chicago for most of my life, arriving here from rural Mississippi in the mid-1950s, part of a long Black migration seeking work, safety, and possibility. Over the decades, my life has taken me through probably every major city in the world. And still, Chicago has remained home—the place I return to, the place that formed me, the place whose failures and promises I take personally.

Dispatch from Occupied Chicago

I felt it in the air all summer as I moved through the city—a local clarity pressing against a harsher national noise. While cable news reduced Chicago to a single story of lawlessness or decline, something more complicated was unfolding at street level. On the South Side and the West Side, on buses and in clinic waiting rooms, in overheard conversations that never make it into press briefings, the city was testing a different idea of safety—one rooted less in punishment than in care.

Chicago was not living inside the national story being told about it.

Here lies the central irony of this moment. Just as Chicago was learning—slowly, imperfectly—to reduce violence by treating trauma rather than producing more of it, many residents were also living with another layer of fear that the city itself does not control. Federal immigration enforcement moved, unevenly felt and understood, through the background of everyday life.

This is not an argument about federal intent. It is an observation about lived contradiction. At the city level, officials and community workers were trying to persuade residents that asking for help would bring care, not punishment. At the national level, many people—especially in immigrant and mixed-status households—felt the opposite lesson reinforced: that visibility carries risk.

The effect was not abstract.

Fear changes how people move through a city. It changes who calls 911. It changes who stays silent in moments of crisis. And silence, too, is a form of violence.

At the city level, trauma was being treated. At the national level, trauma was still being lived.

Against this backdrop, Johnson’s most consequential victory in 2025 arrived without sirens. It did not come as a crackdown, a task force, or a show of force. It came as a reordering: clinicians instead of commands, care instead of coercion, prevention instead of punishment. Treatment, Not Trauma—once dismissed as campaign rhetoric—began to behave like a governing logic.

How the Shift Took Shape

This change did not arrive all at once, and it did not arrive cleanly. It came in pieces, through decisions that rarely make headlines.

Early in Johnson’s term, Treatment, Not Trauma was restated not as an aspiration but as a frame—an insistence that violence rooted in untreated pain could not be solved by force alone. That insistence mattered, because it guided what came next.

Budgets followed. Funds shifted—modestly at first, and still facing the test of long-term sustainability—toward behavioral health, crisis response, and alternatives to police-led intervention. This was not a dramatic reallocation so much as a quiet one, but budgets are where philosophies either live or die.

Over the course of 2024, Chicago’s CARE (Crisis Assistance Response and Engagement) teams expanded in select parts of the city. Clinicians and EMTs were increasingly dispatched—without police—to certain 911 calls involving mental-health crises. The program did not replace police response. It ran alongside it. But even in limited form, it altered expectations. The idea that an armed officer must always be the first response to distress began to loosen its grip.

That work became more visible in early 2025 with the reopening of the Roseland Mental Health Clinic as the Roseland Health Hub. More than a building, it represented a reconnection—between crisis response and ongoing care, between neighborhood memory and public responsibility.

This wasn’t one reform. It was a sequence: values → budget → response → infrastructure → continuity.

What It Looked Like, Up Close

In reporting by MindSite News in partnership with the Chicago Sun-Times, a North Side mother—identified as Ana R.—described calling 911 during a severe mental-health crisis involving her teenage daughter. In earlier encounters, police responses had escalated fear. This time, a CARE team arrived. Clinicians spoke calmly. The situation slowed. No arrest. No force. Her daughter was connected to care.

“Having clinicians instead of police changes everything.”

That same shift could be felt on the South Side. At the Roseland Health Hub, a clinician described what happens when responders arrive without weapons or badges.

“When we show up, people don’t tense up. We sit, we listen, and we stabilize. Most of the time, that’s enough.”

These are not miracles. They are moments. But moments accumulate. And accumulated moments change the emotional weather of a city.

Yes, But

And yet, no accumulation of moments yet amounts to a system.

CARE still handles only a fraction of the city’s mental-health-related crisis calls. Dispatch triage matters. Hours matter. Funding matters. Skeptics are right to ask whether a model like this can scale without breaking—or whether it risks being confined to the “manageable” cases.

Early data suggests that CARE calls overwhelmingly resolve without arrest or injury, and that use-of-force incidents are rare and limited. But context matters. This is not yet a citywide transformation. It is a direction of travel.

The honest claim is not problem solved. It is: the city is learning how to respond differently—and learning in public.

What the “Victory” Actually Is

The victory here is not a crime statistic. It is not a headline. It is the institutional permission to imagine safety differently—and to begin building systems that reflect that imagination.

This is violence prevention measured in years, not headlines.

Chicago did not become safe overnight. But it became clearer about what safety could mean. And in a moment when national narratives flatten complexity, and when fear still shapes too many interactions with the state, that clarity represents a profound, if quiet, form of self-determination, earned block by block and call by call: the right of a city to define safety on its own terms.

For those of us who call it home, that is not just policy.

It is a form of repair.

—Dispatch from a City in Repair

Method & Limits

This essay is written as a dispatch—a form that moves between observation, memory, and documented change. Some passages describe felt experience rather than formal policy intent: how fear, trust, and safety are lived in neighborhoods; how federal enforcement is perceived by residents; how local shifts register emotionally before they appear in statistics.

Other elements draw on verified reporting and public documentation, including coverage of Chicago’s CARE program, the reopening of the Roseland Health Hub, city budget actions related to behavioral health, and published accounts of federal immigration enforcement affecting Chicago-area communities.

This distinction matters. The essay does not claim that Chicago has solved violence or trauma. It documents a direction of travel—and the tension between what is being built locally and what residents continue to navigate nationally.

Further Reading / Listening

• MindSite News & Chicago Sun-Times — reporting on CARE and crisis response in Chicago

• City of Chicago, Department of Public Health — Mental Health System Expansion materials

• Alex Vitale, The End of Policing

• Ruth Wilson Gilmore — writings on abolition and structural violence

• The TRiiBE — community-centered reporting on Chicago public safety and health