As law enforcement officers, we support more investment in pre-k education

Neil Steinberg raised some important, societal questions in his Jan. 26 Sun-Times column.

“What if young children don’t get all the stuff they need?” he asked. “We see the results every day. Bad childhoods lead to bad adults, often, which help create the bad situations we must cope with on personal, family, neighborhood, city, county, state, national and world levels.”

Indeed, we write from the perspective of dealing with many such situations — arresting, locking up and prosecuting people, some of whom are alarmingly young, who’ve crossed the line into criminal behavior and endangered their communities.

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It’s necessary work, protecting public safety. But it’s reactive work, and only an incomplete effort, without the addition of proactive measures that can help prevent crimes from being committed in the first place.

With that in mind, we echo the headline of Steinberg’s column: “Illinois can do better on pre-K education.” In fact, research repeatedly demonstrates that a high-quality early education helps kids stay in school and out of trouble. Plenty of research demonstrates how that happens: Kids who have benefitted from high-quality preschool are significantly more likely than non-participants to graduate and far less likely to be arrested for a violent crime, become chronic offenders or land in prison.

Gratefully, Illinois has a good jump on “doing better,” fueled by inspiring, bipartisan action from our policymakers. For several years, they’ve increased investments in state-supported preschool to strengthen both access and quality.

Recently, a new commission — including Republicans and Democrats alike — has begun meeting to study the full costs of ensuring access to quality early learning opportunities for every young child in Illinois, and developing plans for pursuing it.

Plus, Gov. J. B. Pritzker and fellow policymakers have collaborated on a number of other important advancements in early care and education within the past year — from securing $100 million in funding for early childhood construction projects to reducing the co-pays that struggling, working families face for state-supported child care.

We join 350 other members of Fight Crime: Invest in Kids Illinois — prosecutors, sheriffs, and police chiefs — in pledging to help state leaders continue making solid investments in our children and families that will cut crime and strengthen our communities.

We do this because it is the right thing to do and, as Mr. Steinberg noted, “because it’s necessary.”

Honorable Bob Berlin, DuPage County State’s Attorney
Honorable James Mendrick, DuPage County Sheriff

Remembering Jim Lehrer

With so many people expressing grief over Kobe Bryant’s tragic passing, and before the next celebrity death grabs our attention, I’d like to review another recent notable loss: PBS NewsHour co-founder Jim Lehrer.

There’s Mount Rushmore, sports, and Oscar-winning level greatness, and then there’s the rest of us. Jim Lehrer seemed like one of us.

That doesn’t diminish his legacy. His ability to ask tough questions in a curious rather than confrontational manner convinced me that while network news is a profession, what he and Robert MacNeil pioneered is a calling. To me, there has always been a second tier of people whose greatness rested in their ability to make us feel good about ourselves; to share their wisdom and insights without making others feel uninformed or less educated.

Charisma can be big and bold, or calm and understated like Jim Lehrer. We need both.

Jim Newton, Itasca