One of the leading architects of the SAFE-T Act has deleted his Twitter history as he gears up to run for a seat in Congress next year. Robert Peters has championed the state’s cashless bail legislation and other changes to the criminal justice system, like giving people on electronic monitoring the right to leave their homes two days a week, as a state senator.
He’s now in the running to become the U.S. Representative from Illinois’ 2nd District, which runs from the city’s Kenwood neighborhood down the state line to Danville.
Within days of announcing his candidacy, Peters erased his entire history on X, the social media platform also known as Twitter. Over the years, Peters built a reputation for posting controversial comments on his social media accounts, often turning off comments so people could not respond. Many of the senator’s tweets are still visible on Instagram.
It was Peters who, as the COVID pandemic raged in April 2020, blamed the virus’ spread on “the travel of wealthy white people.” And, just to make his thought extra fiery, he opined that the conduct of those “wealthy white people” was “disproportionately hurting working class Black folks.”
After a large teen trend turned violent in the Loop in April 2023, with two teenagers shot and a couple violently robbed in a video that went viral, Peters decided to share his opinion on the matter “since I’m a glutton for punishment.”
“I would look at the behavior of young people as a political act and statement,” the senator tweeted. “It’s a mass protest against poverty and segregation.”
As the city was being ripped apart by rioting and looting on May 31, 2020, Peters threw a twig on the fire by posting a screenshot of a text he said he received from his sister.
“Please be careful with all that is going on,” the sister purportedly wrote. “Had really scary dream last night that cop killed u and it didn’t matter that you senator so like please be careful cause I need my big brother alive.”
A couple of days later, Peters wrote, “If we want to heal our city, defund the police, bring about accountability, bring real equity to our people…”
Peters also offered his opinion that “We need more social workers and not cops to bring us real safety and justice.
In the fall of 2020, as the city experienced a rash of incidents in which young people carried out drive-by paintball shootings, Peters expressed that he hoped the kids would stop.
Did he want them to stop because they shouldn’t shoot people with paintball guns? No.
He wanted them to stop because he was “very concerned this will lead to ‘law and order’ fear mongering or someone getting shot by a cop or bystander with a gun.”
Not long after Chicago Police Officer Andres Vasquez-Lasso was murdered in the line of duty in 2023, Peters opted to blame gun manufacturers rather than the murderer. In fact, he spent most of his tweet casting blame rather than reflecting on the slain officer.
“Officer Andres Vasquez-Lasso should be alive today,” Peters tweeted, “but we have a public safety status quo that fails to hold gun manufacturers and investors accountable for profiting off of such violence.”
Also gone from Peters’ Twitter history are his efforts to get Brandon Johnson, the mayor with a 6.6% approval rating, elected.
We asked Peters why he deleted his Twitter history. He didn’t reply.
