Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who was dragged for spending over $30,000 of his campaign funds on hair and makeup in a year, is now facing scrutiny over the optics and price tag of his personal security force.
A robust protection squad is apparently one of the perks that comes with being Chicago’s top elected official. Johnson’s immediate predecessor, Lori Lightfoot (D), had a special police security detail created to protect her and her home and office, and to “oversee her personal bodyguard detail.” “Unit 544” consisted of approximately 71 Chicago Police Department (CPD) officers in addition to the mayor’s “separate personal bodyguard detail” of 20 officers. Interestingly, Unit 544’s creation coincided with Lightfoot’s proposal to cut the CPD budget by $80 million as part of addressing a citywide budget shortfall.
Johnson, another anti-gun progressive Democrat, has reportedly been guarded by a security detail dwarfing that of Lightfoot’s, at up to 150 CPD officers. According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, Johnson’s equivalent of an army company in personal protection costs taxpayers around $30 million annually, an amount that would clearly be unaffordable on his salary of $221,052.
A brief examination of the 2026 City of Chicago budget allocations shows that $30 million is just under twice the amount for the entire City Clerk’s Office, and much less than the $19.5 million appropriation for The Office of the Mayor. Johnson’s dedicated police detail is not only one of the largest of any mayor in the country, states one source, but significantly exceeds the 130 full-time officers allocated to patrol the entire crime-ridden Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) and its 79 stations, 146 platforms, 335 trains, and millions of passengers. “Aggravated assaults and batteries on the [CTA] reached at least a 25-year high in 2025, according to a March 2 article in the Chicago Sun Times, and the “upward trend has continued into 2026, with those crimes climbing 33% over the same period last year.”
Even as taxpayers are picking up the tab for his own safety and security, Johnson promotes the de-policing of, and more gun control for, the same taxpayers who have no choice but to become their own personal “bodyguard detail.”
Johnson, like Lightfoot, blames the federal government and the gun laws in red states for violent crimes committed in Chicago, rather than the actual homegrown perpetrators who’ve opted to ignore some of the “strongest gun safety laws in the country.” Crime in Chicago, he claims, is caused by other states and President Trump’s failure to stop firearm trafficking into Illinois. In response to a court ruling upholding an “assault weapon” and magazine ban, Johnson’s office commended such “common-sense gun control measures that have been so desperately needed in our city,” that keep “weapons of war out of our neighborhoods and off our streets.”
Anti-policing has been another consistent theme. Johnson’s vision, A Blueprint for Creating a More Just and Vibrant City for All, emphasized that Chicago needed to “acknowledge and repair the historical harms from traditional policing, reimagine what policing is and how policing is done to ensure the development of community led approaches to co-creating public safety.” The action plan for this concept of public safety includes erasing the CPD gang database and adopting an “alternative response model” that does not depend on police for law enforcement.
Just last fall, Johnson, replying to a question on how to make Chicagoans feel safe in their communities, called “jails and incarceration and law enforcement … a sickness” that he plans to “eradicate,” sparking criticism from John Catanzara, Jr., head of the union representing Chicago’s front-line police officers, and the Cook County State’s Attorney. Catanzara filmed a video in front of the mayor’s home saying, “[Johnson] has always hated us. He still hates us. He just can’t say what he wants to publicly. But two days ago, the truth came out a little bit.” Referring to the home, he pointed out the “[t]hree squad cars blocking it, patrolling it, protecting it for him and his family, yet he calls law enforcement a sickness. What a hypocrite. Piece of garbage.”
Johnson’s public disparagement of law enforcement, calls to reduce reliance on the police as a public safety resource, and opposition to lawfully owned firearms are blindingly at odds with a very sizeable armed police squad dedicated to his personal security.
It remains to be seen how the mayor will reconcile this contradiction. Johnson defended his personal grooming expenditures as support for minority businesses (“Go get your hair and makeup done by Black people in particular”) but that rationale won’t fly here. Perhaps he’ll borrow from Michael Bloomberg, billionaire gun control bigwig and former New York City mayor, and claim that VIPs like him simply aren’t like you and me.
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