What Eddie Johnson had to say about gun crimes, bond reform, solving murders and more

You don’t get to do dinner with the city’s top cop every day. Yoshi’s Café was packed when Eddie Johnson spoke last week at my regular political salon in Lakeview.

“I didn’t know quite what to expect, but it wasn’t this,” he opened, to warm laughter from the 100 or so diners.

“Usually when I go places as a representative of the police department, it’s a little, a little, hostile sometimes.”

Johnson is fighting to convince Mayor Lori Lightfoot to retain him as police superintendent.

Johnson’s calm, regular guy persona belies the reality that he’s got the toughest job in Chicago.

His 31 years on the force have prepared him well, he said. “If you see me panic about something, it’s time to pack your ,” Johnson joked.

Johnson, Lightfoot, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle and Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx are mired in a finger-pointing blame-game over whether Chicago is too soft on crime.

Preckwinkle and Foxx have long crusaded to encourage judges to release non-violent criminal suspects on low- or no-cash bonds.

Johnson and Lightfoot suggest that some reforms may be giving criminals a license to terrorize our streets.

That’s a “false narrative,” Preckwinkle retorted in a recent letter to Lightfoot, to shift the blame from a police department that can’t get a handle on gun violence.

“Let me clarify something,” Johnson declared at dinner. “Kim’s vision for low-level, non-violent offenders, I’m OK with that.”

He added: “The people that I blame are the ones pulling the trigger.”

If you “decide to pick up an illegal gun in this city and you shoot it, or you have it with you and you get caught by the police … (we need) a common-sense bond …”

A $100 bond is “just chump change.”

What’s enough? “$4,000 or $5,000, at least,” Johnson replied. “Because these guys, look, the best way for us to hit them is in their pocketbook. Because they don’t want to spend five grand every time they get caught with a gun.”

Johnson parried questions for more than an hour. What is he doing to curb street crime? Is there a “code of silence” in the police department? What ever happened to community policing? How is the CPD helping officers who struggle with trauma?

And what about the department’s dismal, 20 percent homicide clearance rate?

To solve more crimes, Johnson acknowledged, more needs to be done to improve “fractured” police-community relations. “We have to put people in a better position where they feel comfortable coming forward when they have information.”

But, he added, “the clearance rate formula is created by the FBI. When you hear about our clearance rate being 20 percent, we’re talking about a calendar year.”

That means that “if a murder was committed in 2015 and then we solve it in 2019, you get for the clearance rate in 2019.”

Solving serious crimes takes time, he argued. “This isn’t CSI (the TV show). We don’t solve homicides in less than an hour. That just doesn’t happen.”

“So the actual clearance rate is not just that calendar year. The other cities won’t give you that calendar year. Chicago does, because we’re transparent.”

The “total” clearance rate is at about 53 percent, he said. “Now that’s still not where I want it to be, but it’s still not as dire as you think.”

Will he have time to get there?

Laura Washington is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and a political analyst, ABC 7-Chicago

Follow her on Twitter @MediaDervish