(The Center Square)–A retired police chief says Illinois’ SAFE-T Act has emboldened individuals who could attack law enforcement officers.
Officers in Chicago and Granite City have been shot in recent days, and a Cook County Fugitive Task Force member was struck by a suspect’s vehicle last week.
Retired Riverside, Illinois police chief Thomas Weitzel said the SAFE-T Act reduced authorities’ ability to keep people in custody.
“Those types of individuals that would attack a police officer are just emboldened by that,” Weitzel told The Center Square.
A suspect was arrested early Saturday morning after a shooting left a Granite City officer hospitalized in stable condition. The incident happened Friday afternoon when police were responding to a call.
The Chicago Police Department said an officer’s protective vest saved his life when he was shot in the chest early Sunday morning on the city’s Far South Side. Police said another individual was also shot and injured during an altercation and the suspect and the other individual were injured when police returned fire.
A Ford Heights man is charged with attempted murder, aggravated battery of a police officer and leaving the scene of accident after he allegedly used his vehicle to strike a Cook County Fugitive Task Force member on Chicago’s South Side last Tuesday afternoon. Police said the Cook County task force member was seriously injured. Antwan Ford, 27, was arrested in Vernon Hills Wednesday morning by Chicago Police and members of the U.S. Marshals Great Lakes Regional Fugitive Task Force.
Weitzel said violence against police officers has been influenced by the way politicians speak about officers and try to take tools away from law enforcement.
According to the Fraternal Order of Police, 83 officers have been shot in ambush attacks across the United States this year.
“An ambush attack is an attack against a police officer for no apparent reason,” Weitzel explained.
In addition, Weitzel said situations sometimes escalate when officers respond to calls.
“If you’re armed, if you’re a homeowner or you’re an individual that either has a firearm illegally or, in many cases, individuals have firearms that are legally possessed, when it’s readily available and law enforcement walks into the situation, many times it’s used against the officers,” Weitzel said.
Last month, Gov. J.B. Pritzker suggested he would be open to amending the state’s SAFE-T Act after a man with a long criminal history was charged with setting a Chicago train passenger on fire.
The incident drew the attention of President Donald Trump, who said crime in Chicago is out of control.
Another incident involving a suspect with a long history of prior arrests happened at a Chicago hospital campus last month. Sean Popps, 39, is accused of repeatedly punching and striking a cardiologist the afternoon of Nov. 2, in a parking garage elevator at Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s Streeterville campus. CWB Chicago reported that Chicago police arrested Popps twelve times this year, mostly for allegedly trespassing or damaging property on or near hospital grounds. Popps was also arrested seven times in 2024 and six times from 2020 through 2023.
Weitzel said Illinois has a pattern of suspects not staying in custody.
“That’s a pattern, right? They’re getting out. They’re not staying in custody. These individuals are being released from first appearance court or sometimes directly from the police station because, under the SAFE-T Act, we’re not allowed to hold them as law enforcement,” Weitzel said. “You have to give them a notice to appear, and then they walk out the front door of the police station.”
Weitzel said unprovoked attacks are a familiar problem in the Chicago area.
“There was this serial puncher that was walking around the Loop. He was targeting females and just punching them out and sometimes knocking them out completely on the public streets. Over and over again, he was let out of custody after being arrested to repeat the same crime against female victims,” Weitzel said.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.