5 questions for Police Chief Brad Dixon: ‘We’re real people, just like everyone’

When sworn in on May 15 to lead some 250 employees of the Peoria Police Department, Brad Dixon expressed gratitude for the opportunity in general,  but particularly for community support.

“I am committed to strengthening that partnership every single day,” he said.

Along with community relations, Dixon will focus on reducing violence, especially by young Peorians, and staffing.

Born and raised in Peoria, a graduate of Richwoods High School, Dixon grew up playing stickball and working at Sheridan Nursery, which his family operated, plus getting up at 5:30 in the morning to help with his brother’s paper route. “I always worked,” he says.

After attending Illinois Central College, Dixon earned a B.A. and an M.B.A. at Western Illinois University, where he became the first in his family who graduated college.

Hired on March 26, 2001, Dixon progressed through the ranks, from officer and Sergeant to Captain and, for more than four years, Assistant Chief. Following the retirement of Police Chief Eric Echevarri, Dixon inherits good momentum in the department’s goals, with crime down and homicides halved since 2024.

Challenges remain, of course. Technology is a double-edged sword, for example. The department has dealt not only with ShotSpotter and drones, but body cameras, realizing they needed better batteries, and Narcan, which police found can expire after a while.

“Tech is weird,” he says. “More’s coming out, but it gets more expensive. It doesn’t make sense.”

As far as staffing, “diversity” may be a shunned term, but Dixon sees opportunities created with officers who look like the community they serve, “whether Hispanic or African American or women or Muslims…”

 

Donuts or bagels?

Bagels. I can’t get caught in uniform with a donut.

 

Is there anything in your police career you needed to learn  -- or unlearn?
How to talk to people, listening and not confronting, which doesn’t get you anywhere. Treating people with respect and dignity gets you so much further.

 

Do you have a go-to ‘escape’ from what must be a stressful job?

It’s an intense job. I lean on family, faith and fishing. But you never get away all the way. We’re exposed to a lot. Over the years there are things you never forget, not good: accidents, homicides.

We shouldn’t be put on pedestals, either. We’re real people with real problems, just like everyone.

 

How about a favorite TV show about police?

I can’t watch them. Well, there’s one, “Dateline,” that I see sometimes. Forensics interests me.

 

Do you have a little known talent, like wiggling your ears or dancing…?

I play hockey – at a decent level. Or, I did until an injury. And I don’t now; I’m too busy.

First Amendment includes more than the press

Thoughts turned to the First Amendment on World Press Freedom Day May 3, when Reporters Without Borders announced that the United States’ global rank in nations’ levels of press freedom fell to its lowest ever: 64^th out of 180 countries – down seven places in a year. (The U.S. was 17^th out of 139 in 2002.)

Of course, the First Amendment is about more than the press. (In a college press law class, we used the mnemonic device “GRASP,” for rights tied to Grievance, Religion, Assembly, Speech and Press.)

Religion is increasingly under fire, in unusual ways.

A few days before World Press Freedom Day, Stateline news reported a disturbing revival of anti-Islam attacks by Republican candidates as midterm-election campaigns get going, “a strategy aimed at energizing voters by claiming without evidence that Muslim culture and religious tenets threaten American political values,” said journalist Anna Claire Vollers.

MAGA politicians have made Muslims a target in their fight to hang onto power. (Muslims say the rhetoric is misleading and misrepresents Islam’s values – and threatens their faith and its adherents.)

It’s a far cry from 25 years ago, when days after Sept. 11’s terror attacks GOP President George W. Bush visited a Washington, D.C., mosque and met with Muslim leaders, declaring “Islam is peace” and condemning retaliation against Muslim Americans.

Today, even the conservative Cato Institute scoffs at candidates’ shameless tactic.

“To think that American Muslims – which make 1% of the whole population – can enforce Shariah or force it on other people, that’s a very exaggerated claim,” said Mustafa Akyol, a Cato researcher who’s Muslim.

Explicit disrespect and outright attacks on the First Amendment’s first point – “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …” – goes beyond Muslims and the troubling resurgence of antisemitism..

In the Southwest, President Trump’s expansion of the border wall damaged a rare Native American site in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in the desert near Mexico. Lorraine Marquez Eiler, an elder of the Hia-ced O’odham Indigenous people, said the site held special significance for Native Americans.

“If someone came to Washington and started destroying all the different sites that people in the United States revere, it’s the same thing for us,” she told the Washington Post.

Some faiths are not accepting marginalization by powerful political interests.

A coalition of Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and others is suing the Trump administration over its White House Religious Liberty Commission. They say it’s illegally skewed toward evangelical Christians, plus one Orthodox Jewish rabbi.

Represented by lawyers from Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Democracy Forward organization, the suit cites the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act, which says all such government panels should reflect varied viewpoints and competing ideas.

The Religious Liberty Commission, which meets behind closed doors at the new Museum of the Bible near the U.S. Capitol, doesn’t have variety and competition, the coalition says, They want judges to order its proceedings opened up and minutes published as the law requires, and that any future report to note that the commission was illegally tilted.

The suit also draws on the U.S. Constitution and U.S. history. From before the American Revolution, there was no “established church,” unlike Great Britain’s Church of England. Mark Gruenberg of Press Associates Union News Service writes, “Most New England pilgrims were Protestant dissenters. Roman Catholics founded Maryland. Quakers established Pennsylvania. Jews first arrived in Nieuw Amsterdam (New York) in the 1600s, which was already inhabited by members of the Dutch Reformed Church. White Baptists, then persecuted in Europe, were prevalent in the deep South. And Roger Williams established freedom for all religions in Rhode Island.”

Unlike some conservatives’ recent rewrites of history, the Founders were varied, too, according to the suit, which quotes George Washington’s letters about religious freedom to various denominations. The most famous Washington letter was in 1790 to the elders of Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island, where he wrote the government “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

The case challenges the composition and secrecy of the Religious Liberty Commission, which was supposed to defend religious liberty for all Americans but does not.

“All members of the commission advocate for increased religiosity, and specifically their brand of Judeo-Christian religiosity, in public life. Members promoted the primacy of a Judeo-Christian world view in the public sphere, advocated for discrimination against minority groups under the guise of ‘religious liberty,’ and otherwise supported policies that threaten religious freedom for all those who do not conform to their particular worldview.”

Ria Chakrabarty of Hindus for Human Rights commented, “Religious liberty means religious liberty for everyone, not just one faith community. By stacking this Religious Liberty Commission with a narrow set of voices and hiding the commission’s work from the public eye, the Trump administration is evading the transparency and balance that federal law requires. Hindus for Human Rights is proud to stand with our multifaith partners to defend a pluralistic democracy where Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, and nonreligious people all belong as equals.”

Early in the U.S. war on Iran, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asked Americans to “pray for victory in the name of Jesus Christ.”

That irked Pope Leo XIV. The Chicagoland native, Catholicism’s first U.S.-born Pope, said the Christian mission “has often been distorted by a desire for domination.”

Superfund sites upstream remain a concern for the Illinois River

In her 1997 book “Living Downstream,” Pekin native Sandra Steingraber wrote, “Giving people cancer in order to ensure them a water supply safe from disease-causing microbes is not necessary. Our drinking water should not contain the fear of cancer. The presence of carcinogens in groundwater, no matter how faint, means we have paid too high a price for accepting the unimaginative way things are.

“A so-called private industry is engaging in a very public act when it releases toxic chemicals into a community’s air, water and soil.”

Elsewhere, the Environmental Working Group’s 2024 drinking water quality report found Peoria’s tap water contains dozens of contaminants many times the recommended levels in EWG’s health guidelines, between 2.2 times (1,4-Dioxane) to 2,149 time (Perfluorohexane sulfonate).

“Tap water provided by this water utility was in compliance with federal health-based drinking water standards,” EWG said, adding, “Legal does not necessarily equal safe.”

Former Community Word columnist William Rau (“Heat Waves in Red and Black”) commented from his home in Bloomington, “If I were living in Peoria, I would find their results very disturbing.”

It could get worse.

Concentrations of hazardous materials are sometimes segregated as Superfund sites (See below), and three of them are at or near the Illinois River some 70 miles upstream from metro Peoria. Technically, they and their substances are secured, but like almost anything else, they’re not invulnerable to catastrophes, such as earthquakes or floods.

On April 23, a mild, magnitude-4.0 earthquake was felt in Illinois, Indiana and Missouri when the New Madrid Seismic Zone made its presence felt. The New Madrid fault system, covering almost 1 million square miles from Arkansas to Illinois, has been mostly quiet since a series of large earthquakes in 1811-1812, but the U.S. Geological Survey says the probability of a quake of 6.0 to 7.0 on the New Madrid Fault Line is 28-46% over the next 50 years.

(As for floods, Illinois already has had four “100-year floods” in the 2020s, including one in Central Illinois in 2021.)

Here's a summary of those sites, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency:

* LaSalle Electric Utilities in LaSalle--

Until 1982, the "industrial complex" made capacitors for electric power transmission. It has “contaminated soil and groundwater with polychlorinated biphenyl (PCBs) and chlorinated solvents.” The EPA removed 23,000 cubic yards of PCD-contaminated soil and thermally destroyed them, but consolidated drummed wastes; years later the complex was demolished and non-destructible material was shipped off-site. In 1995, groundwater monitoring and treatment started.

* East about 20 miles are the “Ottawa Radiation Areas,” EPA says, “ -- 16 areas contaminated by material from two companies, the Radium Dial Co., and Luminous Processes, Inc.” EPA says it removed radium-contaminated soil from five of the areas affected, but “ongoing work consists of securing funding to implement remedies at a local landfill, “which the agency says is a “capped stockpile” to be inspected at unspecified intervals.

* Another 12 miles east is the former Matthiessen and Hegeler Zinc Co., which until 1978 did zinc smelting and rolling, and manufactured chemicals. The site has a slag pile on the Little Vermillion River, a tributary to the Illinois River, containing “cadmium, copper, chromium, lead, nickel and zinc,” says the EPA, which placed a soil cover over the area and has “short-term groundwater monitoring.”

 

Dr. Peter Schwartzman, who teaches environmental studies at Knox College in Galesburg, says, “Many chemicals mentioned (and emitted by industrial facilities) do not break down easily and thus can be found in measurable concentrations decades after they were ‘freely’ emitted into the air and water. These chemicals – PCBs, cadmium, etc. – are definitely harmful to life, even at low concentrations.”

In “Living Downstream,” Steingraber highlighted the Illinois River as an example of industrial pollution, utilizing the U.S. EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) data to map toxic hotspots and connections to Superfund sites. The award-winning author’s analysis connected the historical and ongoing pollution of the Illinois River to contaminated sites requiring environmental remediation, highlighting the ecological impact of industrial waste.

It doesn’t take an earth-shaking disaster to see material migrate from Superfund sites.

“Numerous Superfund sites in Illinois have contaminated groundwater and surface/river water, primarily due to industrial waste, landfills and chemical dumping,” Rau added. “I would not want to live downstream from one of these sites if my drinking water from came from a river adjacent to these sites.”

And the sites themselves are just part of the picture.

“There are additional sites in Illinois that had ‘scores’ in excess of Superfund status that were not declared as such,” Schwartzman says. “So, the current map is missing heavily contaminated, and likely hazardous, sites.”

Awareness of sites and the risks is key, Schwartzman says.

“We’ve had more than a century’s worth of toxic waste disposed – some legal, some illegal – and to ensure public safety requires vigilance and public involvement,” he says.

 

What are Superfund sites and how they came to be

Superfund sites contain a wide variety of hazardous materials — not only toxic, but sometimes corrosive or flammable. All of them can hurt people, more so when they seep into drinking water.

Historically, there were few to no state or federal laws forbidding the disposal of those hazardous materials in places where they could poison or harm people. They might have been buried in unstable terrain, or left in 55-gallon drums that would rust and leak. This happened for decades.

The Superfund story began with Love Canal in the southeast corner of Niagara Falls, N.Y.. Starting in the 1940s, the Hooker Chemical Co. had used the upstate site as a dump for harmful chemical wastes. Then it was covered over, and a housing development was built on top of it. In the 1960s and 1970s, people living there got sick with diseases like leukemia. Eventually, the health harms were traced to the toxic wastes mobilized by shallow groundwater. Neighbors organized and demanded help. In 1980, Congress finally passed the Superfund law to deal with similar problems all over the United States. That law held hazardous waste dumpers strictly liable for the damages they had caused. Once those “responsible parties” were identified, victims and governments could go after them in court to recover cleanup costs.

In cases where danger was immediate, the EPA could step in and do immediate stabilization of the site. This was called “removal,” although it was rarely so simple as merely trucking away some drums. This was paid for by the multibillion-dollar Superfund, which was originally paid for by a tax on petrochemical companies. What followed was a complex array of lawsuits against (and between) companies.

There are currently about 1,342 contaminated sites on the EPA’s Superfund National Priority List. These are the worst of the worst. There’s at least one in almost every state. The EPA estimates that some 78 million people live within three miles of a Superfund site. That’s almost a quarter of the U.S. population. Many more are not on the list.

Although normally Superfund cleanups have been slow, the EPA under Trump 1.0 and 2.0 has made a big deal over efforts to speed up the process. One worry that has arisen is that faster cleanups will be superficial, temporary and less clean.

-- By Joseph A. Davis, Society of Environmental Journalists