This coming Monday, Brandon Johnson will take office as mayor of Chicago with no shortage of urgent priorities, or of forces arrayed against achieving them. Maybe none is more pivotal than the issue of crime and public safety.

Crime was arguably the issue of the city’s 2023 mayoral election, with poll after poll after poll showing it was top of mind for many voters, if not most. You only need to look at Johnson’s campaign itself to get a sense of its centrality: while his campaign launch commercial didn’t mention crime once, the subject was ubiquitous in the candidate’s ads and media appearances by the end.

With a relatively slender mandate — Johnson’s four-point winning margin is the slimmest since Harold Washington’s in 1983 — the pressure is now on to prove to voters that Johnson’s innovative approach to tackling crime, by focusing on its root causes and pouring money into long-neglected human needs, is the right one. It won’t be easy, despite Johnson’s rhetorical shifts on the issue as he tried to strike a balance between speaking to voters’ anxieties about crime and maintaining a commitment to progressive criminal-justice reforms. But if he succeeds, Johnson will blaze a trail for progressive local officials around the country to follow.