With the state legislature set to reconvene this month, there’s a sudden burst of interest on the Republican side of the aisle for investing in public safety. They even took language from a new public safety law we passed this year without a single Republican vote.
Better late than never, but they might start by getting up to speed.
Last spring, we passed the Reimagine Public Safety Act, or RPSA, which provides $65 million aimed at strengthening community-based approaches to reducing gun violence. It includes funding for outreach and youth programs, trauma treatment and community investments that can help address the root causes of crime. It also funds a new class of state police cadets and establishes Illinois as the first state in the country to authorize use of Medicaid funds to support violence prevention programs.
Republican legislators not only opposed the RPSA but also voted against funding in the budget for public safety and mental health. Now they’re singing a different tune, but it’s really the same old song.
A new website, Reimagine Illinois, features Republican lawmakers calling for recruiting police more aggressively, making it easier to buy guns and reversing efforts to reform the cash bail system that effectively imprisoned generations of low-income people of color before trial. They might want to consult a dictionary because their proposals fall far short of any standard definition of the word “reimagine.”
We both represent communities facing extreme gun violence. Some of us in the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus have been personally assaulted. We have witnessed gun violence firsthand and lost friends and family members. Tragically, we have attended more funerals of children and teens than anyone could ever expect.
Many of us, at one time or another, have also had negative interactions with police officers. We reject the false choice between safe communities and constitutional policing. We need both, and the RPSA lays the groundwork for making our communities safer and respecting the rights and the dignity of all people in our state.
Our colleague, state Rep. Kam Buckner, put it well in a recent interview, saying, “We need to treat violence like we treated the COVID-19 pandemic and give it all the resources, energy, time and dollars that it deserves.”
Gun violence is an epidemic, and we can’t rely on police alone to solve it. As with COVID-19, we need a “vaccine” that stops the virus before it strikes. That vaccine is in development all across Chicago where organizations such as READI Chicago, Communities Partnering 4 Peace, Acclivus, Chicago CRED and dozens of other community partners are working directly with the young men most at risk, providing counseling, treatment, educational support, job training and placement.
These organizations are intervening directly in disputes that can escalate into gun violence, such as the recent incident on Chicago’s West Side that took the life of 7-year-old Serenity Broughton and wounded her 6-year-old sister Aubrey. They negotiate nonaggression agreements between street factions — something police are neither trained nor authorized to do.
This is not to say we do not need to support our police officers. They are overwhelmed, demoralized and retiring in droves. Chicago is struggling to recruit new officers. But hollow calls to get “tough on crime” will not make people or police any safer. Instead, we need to free up police from time-consuming, noncriminal activities so they can focus more on violent crime and boost Chicago’s anemic homicide clearance rate.
The RPSA will expand violence prevention programs and support police, and it’s nice to see our colleagues across the aisle showing sudden interest in joining these efforts. Perhaps the party of big business could go further and support business development in violence-prone neighborhoods instead of issuing idle threats to leave town.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker has all but declared a state of emergency in Chicago but is rightly holding off out of respect for Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Her police superintendent, David Brown, faces pressure to get results, even as his department is under a consent decree to reform long-standing abuses that have undermined trust between police and the community.
Public safety in cities such as Chicago is complicated and challenging. The last thing we need is a phony “law and order” campaign masquerading as reform. Lives are on the line, including the lives of police officers, who are facing more gunfire today than ever before, due in part to right-wing resistance to common-sense gun safety laws.
If Republicans in Illinois really want to make our streets safer, they should sit down with us and our partners at the local level, get a better understanding of the work already underway in our communities, and offer a genuine and sincere helping hand.
Illinois state Rep. Justin Slaughter and Sen. Robert Peters are Democrats from Chicago.
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