Criminalizing Police Becomes Law in Illinois

Legislation proves once again Chicago, Illinois, lead the revolt against the American Republic

Other cities and states run by Democrats have learned a valuable lesson from the Illinois General Assembly in the war on police: Defunding is not the only way to undermine local police departments. An equally effective method is merely to criminalize them through the abuse of the legislative process.

This is exactly what took shape in Chicago on July 1, a date ironically close to the anniversary of the country’s birth and taking effect when the daily violence in the city, particularly murder, has generated shock and disgust throughout the nation. In the midst of so much carnage and chaos, a bill that barely passed the Illinois state legislature now allows any of the useless idiots occupying the city’s myriad reform outlets, law firms, activists, academics and plain nutcases to initiate criminal complaints against the police.

In Illinois, there really isn’t any reason to defund the police. It’s easier to just make them illegal.  

The true obscenity of the bill, the one that now institutionalizes the anti-police movement in a manner that causes every revolutionary, gang member and loser with a chip on his shoulder against the police to swoon with delight, is the section of the bill imposing a class 3 felony criminal violation on a collection of acts and allegations so opaque, ambiguous, arbitrary and malevolent that virtually any officer now faces being transformed into a criminal.

In effect, the bill allows anyone to find anything, even a detail or error, in a police officer’s report or statements and turn it into the basis for a criminal accusation. It includes the mandate that a police officer cannot review his own body worn camera before writing a report in a use of force incident, all but guaranteeing there will be inconsistencies between the report and recording of a high-stress, rapidly evolving incident. The statute, coupled with the holy grail of the anti-police movement – the elimination of the requirement that a complainant must sign an affidavit when alleging a complaint against an officer – has now turned the police into criminals throughout the state as a matter of law.

No one in their right mind cannot see that this legislation has both, in its inception and the manner by which it was passed late at night with barely enough votes, has nothing to do with justice. It was nothing more than the willingness of legislators to sacrifice the state into an instrument of the most bizarre and dangerous progressive fantasies. For some, it may come as a surprise, but the truth is that Chicago and the state of Illinois have led the nation for more than three decades in this process of criminalizing the police, in part because the Windy City has cultivated the most radical factions in the Democratic Party for all those years, but also because the both the city and state are run by one political apparatus that provides, shelter, support and legitimacy to these factions.

It was this political machine that harbored then nurtured the revolutionaries from the 1968 riots who so earned their disdain of the American public that voters returned President Richard Nixon to the White House in 1972 in what was at the time the biggest presidential election landslide since FDR dismantled Alf Landon in 1936. Nevertheless, Chicago’s one-party rule provided the soil in which they could plant roots. Now, with legislation now criminalizing the police, they may very well have won their war in Illinois. The fact that such laws and policies are polluting other major American cities and that the Democratic Party as a whole is working tirelessly to eliminate their political opposition should be obvious to these elected officials.

Probably no one celebrates such a bill more than Cook County State’s Attorney Kimberly Foxx, whose transformation of that office into a primary agent attacking the police is two-fold. On the one hand, Foxx caters to activists and law firms representing offenders accusing the police of misconduct by letting them out the back door of the prison system under the most bizarre and baseless claims. On the other, Foxx lets it be known her administration will embrace virtually any accusations against the police as part of her political agenda, not the law, a strategy now all but rubber stamped by perverse legislation handed to her by legislators manipulated all too easily by the radical upstarts of their own party.

The bill also rescues the Chicago media. Reeling from a host of cases in the federal courts rejecting their tired, hole-filled claims that a bunch of murderers and rapists are innocent and should become millionaires through civil lawsuits because the police framed them, Foxx and the media are now empowered by such legislation to push their police vilification narrative long ago crying out for real journalism.

Far be it for one of the activists who call themselves journalists in the city to point out the connection between Chicago’s daily carnage and this type of legislation. Such obvious connections are verboten in a city where the party line is so militantly protected by the phalanx of scribes bearing laptops and notebooks. Indeed, the function of the media in Chicago and Illinois is to wage a propaganda war on those who would point out the correlative affects, most common under some twisted claim of racism even though it is minority groups themselves who suffer most under such laws.

For decades, Chicago’s corruption was watched from afar by the rest of the nation with a kind of fascination and anxiety, as well as a deceptive romanticism, but, with legislation like this, the consequences of its one-party machinations are revealing themselves to be both sickening and threatening.  Progressive victories such as this legislation becomes a cancer on the rest of the republic, for whom it works as an inspiration, a precedent and rallying cry for progressives, empowering other cities and states run by a Democratic political machine seeking to undermine opposition.

It is not difficult to see without looking too far that the sanctity of human life, a phrase routinely pushed in police training despite the fact that law enforcement personnel risk their lives every day, is, for the real power brokers and hardcore progressives in Chicago, little more than a punch line of the dark comedy unfolding in Chicago. The body count is refutation enough for what is taking shape here and it’s obvious such legislation will only further prevent police from tempering the violence.

Illinois, and Chicago in particular, will not recover from this legislation. For many here the only obvious solution is to move.

But as the question becomes more ominous every day as the cancer of Chicago’s anti-police movement burrows deeper into cities, states and even the Department of Justice.

Where?

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Martin Preib is a Chicago police officer and author of three books. More information on his writing can be found at crookedcity.org.