Of all the places to cut down on police presence, the city of Chicago should be the last one to do so.
But Mayor Brandon Johnson and the city’s Board of Education are pushing to remove police officers from the city’s schools as soon as next school year.
“The Board of Education is moving in the direction that I do support,” the mayor said on Tuesday in an interview with two Chicago news outlets. “There is an intergovernmental agreement between Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Police Department. To end that agreement, there’s no qualms from me there.”
The effect of the direction that the board is moving is that students in Chicago’s public schools are going to be unsafe.
In 2023, 2,883 were victims of shootings in Chicago. And in the same year, there were 617 murders. For a city of 2.6 million people, that is an astounding number that is worse than many of the most dangerous countries in the world.
The violence epidemic that has plagued Chicago has affected young people as much as it has affected adult residents. In 2021, a year that saw 800 murders in the city, 276 children aged 16 and under were victims of shootings.