When Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel failed to secure 50 percent-plus-one of the vote in the February municipal elections, leading to an April 7 runoff with Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, progressives and many radicals across the country were elated. Thousands of activists of all stripes have rushed to join his campaign, ecstatic that they might actually be able to defeat an incumbent whose neoliberal policies have proven devastating to all but the ultra-rich.

Recently, however, some on the Left — including Tyler Zimmer in Jacobin — have attacked Garcia, calling him a middle-of-the-road Democrat who, in his unwillingness to endorse concrete progressive policies around policing, economic inequity, and other fundamental issues, offers no meaningful alternative to neoliberalism.

On that last count, Garcia is surely guilty as charged. Progressives would be foolish to whole-heartedly embrace Garcia as some kind of a populist hero. While the Cook County commissioner does have real progressive bona fides and has paid the price throughout his career for running as a reform candidate against the city’s Democratic machine, he has also promised to hire one thousand new police officers — in a city where, according to a new ACLU report, residents are stopped-and-frisked by cops four times as often as in New York City.