Defund the police betrayed Black America. I'm rebuilding what activists broke

MR T TAUGHT ME A LESSON EVERY KID ON CHICAGO'S SOUTH SIDE NEEDS TO HEAR

In 2019, Chicago recorded roughly 500 homicides. In 2020, that number climbed to 781. In 2021, it reached 804—the city’s deadliest year in a quarter-century. The spike was national—FBI data showed murders rose nearly 30 percent in 2020, the largest single-year increase on record, with Black Americans hit even harder. Chicago’s South and West Sides absorbed a disproportionate share. Police staffing fell as retirements and resignations surged. Morale collapsed under canceled days off, forced overtime, and the constant message that the job itself was illegitimate. Arrests and proactive policing dropped. The outcome was not a policy experiment. There were more funerals in the neighborhoods that could least afford them.

So many of those who died during this time should be alive. They died because Black activists demonized the police to advance their own activist agendas, which led to the very destruction of the people they claimed to be helping. To date, none have taken responsibility for their deadly rhetoric.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINION

There is nothing I can do about the dead. My focus has been on the living, especially the young minds. They are the ones still paying the cost. Years of being told that the police are the enemy taught some of them never to call when something bad is happening. They see the uniform and assume hostility rather than help. I have watched that fear take root in kids who have already lost too much. It is one of the lasting wounds of the defund era: not only fewer officers on the street, but a generation that learned the people sworn to protect them cannot be trusted.

At Project H.O.O.D., we are repairing that damage the only way I know how—by bringing the police into our building and letting our kids see them as people. Officers come in and sit with the children, the teenagers, and the adults who walk through our doors. They answer questions. They listen to the stories that our young people carry. They show that the uniform does not hide a monster; it covers a man or woman who chose a hard job as they want to keep this community safe. Some of the kids who used to freeze up at the sight of a squad car now stay after and keep talking. A few have even started asking what it takes to become an officer themselves.

The fear does not disappear in a single afternoon, but the wall starts to crack. That is the work. It is not a press conference. It is not a slogan. It is one conversation at a time inside a building where we refuse to let the lies of the last decade become the future of the next one.

The police are not the enemy. Treating them as if they are has already cost too many lives on these streets. We are done accepting that.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM PASTOR COREY BROOKS

生成文章海报 / 分享二维码