[American Thinker] It is time to leave Illinois. It's not the three feet of snow; the corruption and tax increases; or even that my city, Evanston, voted in 2019 to award reparations. The tipping point is that my alderman, the lone reasonable, fiscally responsible voice on the city council, was trounced in our city primary election.
Illinois has been in a steady decline, but there are now "new and improved" reasons to leave the state. In the last month, Governor J.B. Pritzker signed one of the most aggressively anti-police crime bills in the country, and the state adopted the most progressive, anti-intellectual education bill in the country.
Illinois H.B. 3653 removes the handcuffs from criminals and puts them on the police. Its anti-law enforcement measures include:
- lowering the standards for cash bail, resulting in far fewer pre-trial detentions;
- banning chokeholds and changing "use of force" standards;
- limiting and requiring protection of vulnerable people during searches;
- allowing unsworn anonymous complaints as a permanent part of an officer's misconduct file; and
- controlling the certification and de-certification of law enforcement.
Police families' frustrations are felt in their dinner conversations about drug-dealers flushing evidence in the toilet while cops knock to announce their searches and the now weekly social media posts announcing the death or injury of police co-workers. Normally welcome warmer weather just means more crime along with an explosion of car-jackings and robberies in broad daylight. The irony of the un-self-aware family (whose basement-dwelling, drug-dealing son has inspired two drive-by shootings) moving because the neighborhood is "too dangerous" is not lost on my neighbors who no longer have to police the block themselves. |