Will County Gazette

Defunding the police is dangerous, according to the chairman of the Will County Republican Party.

“It’s ill-conceived,” said George Pearson, chair of the Will County GOP and a former U.S. Navy sailor. “Defunding the police with the murder rate increase in the city of Chicago is dangerous.”

During the month of May, victims of gun shootings spiked 71 percent, according to the Chicago Sun-Times and police data, while murder victims rose by 60 percent compared to the same time last year.

Instead of reducing police personnel, Pearson would like to see an increase in community involvement by those who live in Chicago’s neighborhoods.

“If more police officers derive from within the Chicago community, they will know what's going on,” Pearson told the Will County Gazette.

Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters were gathering daily nationwide after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pinned George Floyd, an unarmed black man, to the ground with his knee and strangled him to death May 25. 

Rallying cries that started as "Hands Up Don’t Shoot" have since evolved into chants of "Defund the Police.”

“If people think it’s dangerous now, what will they get if the police department is defunded,” Pearson said.

BLM protests continue nationwide at a time when Chicago public schools, students, teachers and other community members rallied last month at Lincoln Park High School, requesting the city allocate less money to the Chicago Police Department, according to media reports.

“We are tired of being harassed and abused by police officers in schools. We are tired of the school-to-prison pipeline that is directly attributable to the tradeoff of spending on police rather than schools,” stated a Facebook page called CPS Community Protest promoting the rally.

 An alternative solution to cutting the Chicago police department budget, according to Pearson, is to cut teachers' salaries.

“If everybody’s all in, I say we look at the average salary of a Chicago public school teacher because how much more can you get out of the taxpayers in the city of Chicago when you have such massive flight out of there,” Pearson said. “Seventy-five percent of property taxes are going to teachers and teachers' unions so that they can push for a more communist-socialist ideology.”

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has dismissed the idea of lowering the police budget in favor of police reform.

“The public schools in Chicago have dwindled from thousands of students down to hundreds in a couple of these buildings yet they've lost no teachers,” Pearson said.

As previously reported in the Chicago City Wire, Alderman Anthony Napolitano (41st Ward) proposed an alternative to entirely defunding the police in the form of a resolution that would remove police personnel from districts that don’t want policing, re-allocating them to those that do. The next Chicago City Council meeting is scheduled July 22.

The resolution states, “We, the members of the City Council of the city of Chicago, gathered here this 17th day of June do hereby call upon Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Police Supt. David O. Brown to develop and submit for approval to the Committee on Public Safety a one-year CPD personnel and resource reallocation pilot program.”