Chicago Pastor Works to Rebuild Police Trust After Defund Movement

A Chicago pastor is working to rebuild trust between police and Black residents on the city's South Side, arguing that the defund the police movement has left deep wounds in the communities it claimed to protect. Pastor Corey Brooks, who runs the community center Project H.O.O.D., recently invited several Chicago police officers in full uniform into his building to meet with children and adults who have been taught to fear law enforcement.

The encounter was tense at first. Some children hid behind adults, and some of those adults stood defiantly as the officers, wearing blue uniforms and visor caps, entered the room. Brooks said the gulf between police and residents is profound, and that is precisely why he invited officers in — to repair the damage done by the defund movement, one encounter at a time.

Brooks traces the damage back more than a decade, to the period after Trayvon Martin's death in 2012 and the acquittal of George Zimmerman. Although Zimmerman was not a police officer, Brooks argues he was made a stand-in for the narrative that police were hunting Black boys. The death of Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014 reinforced that message, and the slogan «Hands up, don't shoot» spread widely even though, Brooks writes, Brown did not have his hands up and instead charged the officer.

By the time George Floyd died in Minneapolis in 2020, the groundwork had been laid for a national push to reduce police funding and presence. The New York Times published an opinion piece titled «No More Money for the Police,» and a majority of the Minneapolis City Council pledged to dismantle the police department. Brooks said the loudest voices were not asking for better training or more accountability — they wanted abolition. He knew immediately that it would be residents of neighborhoods like his who paid the price, not those living in leafy suburbs with Black Lives Matter signs in their yards.

The impact was swift. Officers pulled back, afraid of going viral, and many in Brooks's community demanded that they do so. Chicago recorded roughly 500 homicides in 2019, then 781 in 2020 and 804 in 2021 — the city's deadliest year in a quarter-century. FBI data showed murders rose nearly 30 percent nationally in 2020, the largest single-year increase on record, with Black Americans hit even harder. Police staffing fell as retirements and resignations surged, morale collapsed under canceled days off and forced overtime, and arrests and proactive policing dropped.

Brooks is blunt about the consequences: there were more funerals in the neighborhoods that could least afford them. He argues that Black activists demonized the police to advance their own agendas, leading to the destruction of the very people they claimed to help, and that none have taken responsibility for their rhetoric.

His focus now is on the living, especially young minds. Years of being told police are the enemy taught some children never to call when something bad is happening. At Project H.O.O.D., officers sit with children, teenagers and adults, answer questions and listen to their stories. Some kids who once froze at the sight of a squad car now stay after to keep talking, and a few have asked what it takes to become an officer themselves. The fear does not disappear in a single afternoon, Brooks writes, but the wall starts to crack.

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Delaney Sawyer

Society Reporter

Delaney Sawyer covers public affairs, politics, business, culture and daily news for Core Memo. The role focuses on verification, context, and clear explanations for readers.

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