I recently invited several Chicago police officers to visit my community center, Project H.O.O.D. I invited the police in to do my part to repair the damage done by the Defund the Police movement, one encounter at a time. (Reuters)
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In my neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, too many of our residents, especially the children, fear the police. They have been taught that the police are not their friends, that officers might shoot them, arrest them for being Black, and that they are their enemies. I do not believe any of this, and I have sought to correct these misperceptions, which could have fatal consequences.
I recently invited several Chicago police officers to visit my community center, Project H.O.O.D. They came in full Chicago blue uniforms, with their police visor caps with the checkered bands, and their guns. At first, there was tension in the room. You could feel it. Some of the kids hid behind the adults, some of whom stood defiantly. The gulf was profound, and that is why I invited the police in to do my part to repair the damage done by the Defund the Police movement, one encounter at a time.
This damage goes back years, a lifetime for most of our youth who know nothing but hostility to the police. For more than a decade, Black Lives Matter and its allies conditioned a generation to treat the police as the problem. Fear and hatred of the police had always been there to some degree in the Black community.
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But there was something different about this conditioning, which began to take off after Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012. When George Zimmerman was acquitted, the phrase “Black Lives Matter” was born, and the message that began to spread was that the police were hunting Black boys. Zimmerman was not a police officer, but for the sake of the narrative, he was made the stand-in as the neighborhood vigilante.
Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman. (AP)
Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson in 2014 only reinforced the narrative. “Hands up, don’t shoot” became a slogan that was not true. Brown did not have his hands up — instead, he charged the cop, but the image of a White cop and a dead Black teen was all the narrative needed to continue. Police officers nationwide were demonized as an occupying force rather than neighbors with badges.
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.
By the time George Floyd died in Minneapolis in 2020, the groundwork had already been laid. The New York Times published its May 30 opinion piece titled “No More Money for the Police,” arguing that the path to safety was to reduce police power and contact with the public and redirect the money elsewhere. In Minneapolis, a majority of the City Council stood in a park and pledged to dismantle the police department. The loudest voices were not asking for better training or more accountability. They wanted abolition.
When I heard that, I knew one thing: it would be us who paid the price. Not the folks living in leafy suburbs with Black Lives Matter signs in their front yards. And the impact was felt immediately. No police officer wanted to risk going viral. They pulled back. And, shamefully, many in my community demanded that.
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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.
Defund the police activists flooding the streets of Brooklyn, New York, in the summer of 2020. (Getty Images)
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.
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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 price. 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 because 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.
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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.
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