Plainfield Police have changed their minds about potentially keeping gun safes at four Plainfield high schools in the event of a "worst-case scenario" on campus.
In a Wednesday letter to the school district, Plainfield Police Chief John Konopek withdrew his proposal made last month to install locked steel safes, each containing a patrol rifle at Plainfield Central, North and East high schools and Plainfield Academy.
Konopek said Wednesday he still strongly supports the idea but said the attention received by the proposal has overshadowed its initial purpose.
"First and foremost it has changed the focus on what people should be concentrating on within the Plainfield School District, that being education," he wrote in the letter.
Konopek said the idea was to give school officers another way to respond to an imminent threat in the school, not as an indicator of "on-going concerns within the School District."
"With the amount of media attention this topic has received I feel that some of the proposed security measures that would have been implemented have been compromised," he wrote.
District 202 said in a release it will not put the gun safes in its schools
Board of Education President Roger Bonuchi said the district "appreciate[s] the police department’s concern for the safety of our students and staff and our continued partnership with all of our law enforcement agencies."
