Defund the police betrayed Black America. I'm rebuilding what activists broke

In my neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, too many of our residents, especially the children, fear the police.They have been taught that the police are not their friends, that officers might shoot them, arrest them for being Black, and that they are their enemies.

I do not believe any of this, and I have sought to correct these misperceptions, which could have fatal consequences.I recently invited several Chicago police officers to visit my community center, Project H.O.O.D.They came in full Chicago blue uniforms, with their police visor caps with the checkered bands, and their guns.

At first, there was tension in the room.You could feel it.

Some of the kids hid behind the adults, some of whom stood defiantly.The gulf was profound, and that is why I invited the police in to do my part to repair the damage done by the Defund the Police movement, one encounter at a time.This damage goes back years, a lifetime for most of our youth who know nothing but hostility to the police.

For more than a decade, Black Lives Matter and its allies conditioned a generation to treat the police as the problem.Fear and hatred of the police had always been there to some degree in the Black community.CONTROVERSIAL SOCIALIST CHEF FLIP-FLOPS ON ABOLISH THE POLICE, SAYS SHE’S ‘SERIOUS ABOUT PUBLIC SAFETY’But there was something different about this conditioning, which began to take off after Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012.

When George Zimmerman was acquitted, the phrase "Black Lives Matter" was born, and the message that began to spread was that the police were hunting Black boys.Zimmerman was not a police officer, but for the sake of the narrative, he was made the stand-in as the neighborhood vigilante.Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman.

(AP)Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson in 2014 only reinforced the narrative."Hands up, don’t shoot" became a slogan that was not true.

Brown did not have his hands up — instead, he charged the cop, but the image of a White cop a...