In late March, as Paul Vallas’s grip on the Chicago mayoral race was slipping away, the city’s Fraternal Order of Police president John Catanzara sounded the alarm: a Brandon Johnson victory was going to result in violence and chaos.

“If this guy gets in we’re going to see an exodus like we’ve never seen before,” Catanzara told the New York Times, predicting that eight hundred to one thousand police officers would walk off the job if Johnson was elected. He then promised there would be “blood in the streets.”

Chicagoans were not impressed with Catanzara’s threat. Eight days after the article in the Times was published, Johnson, a former teachers’ union organizer who ran a progressive campaign calling for a holistic approach to public safety, beat Vallas by more than four percentage points — running up the score in areas of the city that have been most severely affected by violent crime over the last five years.