Shocking revelations from earlier this month out of Chicago should jolt every American out of complacency when it comes to public safety. A commander in the Chicago Police Department ordered officers not to respond to calls for help from federal law-enforcement agents who were under duress, surrounded by vehicles and under threat.

This should not be dismissed as just a Chicago problem. It is a real, present warning sign for all of us of how deeply fractured our policing institutions have become.

What happened in Chicago is not an isolated incident. Rather, it represents the next inflection point in a precipitous decline in law enforcement that has been gathering steam since the defund-the-police movement.

Across the country, police departments are struggling with ballooning response times, with jurisdictions reporting that they have doubled the time it takes to react to 911 calls. What we are seeing is a rapidly developing erosion of the “thin blue line.”

This breakdown should give pause to every law enforcement officer, who now must wonder if their “brothers in blue” will be there. In the dispatch logs, federal agents reported they were boxed in by 10 vehicles, under attack and requested urgent backup. In response, the Chicago Police Chief of Patrol can be heard on dispatch recordings

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