Lake County Gazette

Defunding the police will lead to a civil war, says Joe Ptak, an Island Lake political activist.

“Anybody talking about defunding the police or getting rid of the police is somebody working for socialist-type organizations that are preaching civil war,” Ptak told the Lake County Gazette. “That is the whole intent behind defunding the police is to destroy America and replace it with socialist-communist programs.”

Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters gathered daily nationwide after Minneapolis Policeman Derek Chauvin pinned an unarmed black man named George Floyd to the ground and strangled him to death with his knee on May 25, 2020. Rallying cries that started as "Hands Up Don’t Shoot" have since evolved into chants of "Defund the Police” in some areas.

Protestors at a Defund the Police rally | stock photo

“The communists want a civil war to destroy our country,” Ptak said in an interview. “Right now, they are using black people as a catalyst. The Democratic Party I grew up with no longer exists. It’s now totally controlled by socialists and communists and it’s a crying shame. People across the country I’ve talked to, black and white, are scared.”

As previously reported, calls to defund the police come at a time when Chicago public schools, students, teachers and other community members have been rallying at Lincoln Park High School, requesting that the city allocate less money to the Chicago Police Department.

“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.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, however, dismissed the idea of lowering the police budget and instead favors police reform.

As previously reported in the Chicago City Wire, Alderman Anthony Napolitano (I-41) 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. 

Napolitano tweeted about the resolution from his @aBlueCanary Twitter account on June 10, 2020.

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 Superintendent of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) 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.”

The next city council meeting is on July 22, according to media reports.