Barring another outbreak of teen trends-turned-violent, the heated debate over “snap curfews” in Chicago is likely being put to rest.

The City Council is expected to put the nail in the legislative coffin on Wednesday by upholding Mayor Brandon Johnson’s one and only veto.

Thirty-four votes are needed to override Johnson’s veto. The override is likely to fall several votes short.

The outcome is not in doubt.

The ordinance that would have empowered Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling to declare three-hour-long curfews anywhere in the city with just 30 minutes’ notice was approved last month by a vote of 27 to 22.

Chief sponsor Brian Hopkins (2^nd), who chairs the City Council’s Committee on Public Safety, has acknowledged openly and repeatedly that the two-thirds vote needed for an override are just not there.

Mayor Brandon Johnson was so confident about the outcome, he took a victory lap before Wednesday’s expected vote.

Surrounded by City Council allies and youth advocates outside the mayor’s office, Johnson reiterated his now-familiar argument that empowering Chicago Police officers to sweep wayward youths off the streets would not only be “counterproductive to the progress” Chicago has made toward reducing homicides, shootings and other violent crime.

It would “create tensions” between citizens and police so vital to solving violent crime “at a time when we have worked so hard to rebuild that trust.”

“When I was elected two years ago, I made a pledge not to simply do the easy thing, but to do the right thing,” Johnson told the cheering crowd. “The easy thing to do would be to play into the political theater of safety. The easy thing to do would be to tell people that, if we threaten young people and families with severe repercussions that that somehow would make us safer. But, we know from years of doing the same old tired forms of policy that it doesn’t get the results that people have longed for. It doesn’t keep us safe and it doesn’t make our city stronger.”

Doing “the right thing” is to “invest in people” by creating jobs, recreational, training and mental health programs for young people who crave those opportunities, but don’t have enough of them in the South and West Side neighborhoods where they live.

Johnson told the cheering crowd there is “no study that we have seen or, frankly, anyone in Chicago has seen” that suggests that curfews will keep young people safe.

“In fact, if we were to enact such a thing, we would leave ourselves vulnerable to potential and costly lawsuits that do nothing to make our city safer,” he said.

Johnson frequently points to the tangible progress being made by his “holistic” strategy of having police work in tandem with community-based “violence interrupters” while investing more in young people to confront the “root causes” of crime.

He reiterated that point again on Wednesday, saying Chicago is coming off the “safest Memorial Day weekend in sixteen years” and the “least violent July 4^th weekend” in six years.

“To build on that progress, we must lean into the strategies that have been working, investments that have been working… It doesn’t mean criminalizing our young people,” Johnson said.

“As we address the root causes of crime, we must continue to strategically deploy our officers to high-crime areas rather than dictate their time in enacting and enforcing curfews.”

Reynia Jackson, a youth organizers for the group Good Kids Mad City, told the crowd she has “lost a lot of people that I call family” over the years. She was angry, lost and in pain. She lost her “sense of safety and trust” in systems “supposed to protect us.”

That’s why she joined Good Kids Mad City to build opportunities for young people like herself, keep them off the streets and “put money in their pockets.”

“We don’t need more control. We need to feel human again. We need to feel like our lives matter. And if you pass this ordinance, you’re saying the exact opposite,” Jackson said.

Jackson said she knows how hard it already is to “be a young person just trying to survive.” The last thing Chicago needs is to “give police even more power to decide where we can go and when we can exist in public with just 30 minutes” warning.

“That’s not safety. That’s targeting. That’s trauma added onto more trauma. This curfew would allow police to shut down parks and beaches and public spaces—the few places where we can go to breathe and turn them into war zones…and zones of punishment and for what? For being young in our city? For being Black and Brown in our city?” she said.