Chicago City Wire

A Chicago alderman has come up with a fix to address calls by Black Lives Matter (BLM) proponents to defund the Chicago Police Department.

Anthony Napolitano of the 41st Ward plans to submit a resolution that he wrote and distributed on June 10, which would remove police personnel from districts and wards that don’t want them and reallocate them to those that do. Each of Chicago's 50 wards is represented by an alderman. 

“Let's test the waters and see if defunding the police is the right concept to go with,” Napolitano told Chicago City Wire. 

Napolitano tweeted about the resolution from his @aBlueCanary Twitter account: “Outstanding. If you don’t want police in your ward, agree to reallocate them to a ward that wants them.”

According to a copy of the resolution obtained by Chicago City Wire, the temporary initiative will be submitted to the Chicago City Council next week and is positioned as an experiment.

The resolution states, “We, the members of the city council of the city of Chicago, gathered here [on June 17] do hereby call upon Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Chicago Police Department Supt. 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.”

Black Lives Matter have been gathering nationwide since Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pinned George Floyd, an unarmed black man, to the ground with his knee and strangled him to death May 25. Rallying cries that started as "No justice, no peace" have evolved into chants of "Defund the police." 

“If the ward or district has up to 100 percent of working police officers in the district but they don't want the police in their district anymore, and they want to defund or remove police, then we will remove police from the ward but there will be no replacing it with anything else,” Napolitano said in an interview.

The alderman's proposal comes at a time when Chicago public schools, students, teachers and other community members are rallying for the city to allocate less money to the police department and, instead, replace it with a civilian police accountability council, according to media reports, however Lightfoot dismissed the idea of lowering the police budget.

“It comes down to either we rid ourselves of police officers and funding for them and not worry about the 85 people shot last week in 24 fatalities or are we going to, hopefully, encourage people to come to Chicago because our exit rate and crime rates are astronomical but we're still telling people that they will be protected to best of our ability,” Napolitano said.