The president of Chicago’s bus driver union is calling for the Illinois National Guard to patrol the city’s transit system.

President of Amalgamated Transit Union 241 Keith Hill made the call following Gov. Kathy Hochul’s (D-NY) decision to send National Guardsmen to perform bag checks on New York City’s subway system, according to a report.

“The police got their hands tied with everything that’s going on in the city, so any assistance is more than welcome to make passengers, workers, everybody feel safe if they use the system,” Hill said. “It’s still the best way around the city, but the only way people are going to realize that is if they feel safe.”

“What’s two minutes of having somebody’s bag checked? You’re arriving at your destination safely. … We know for a fact on the bus, people get on with weapons. They have left their weapons on the bus. While asleep, weapons fall out. So, a bag check is more than welcome to me.”

The Amalgamated Transit Union 241 represents bus drivers within the Chicago Transit Authority, while train employees are represented by the Amalgamated Transit Union 308, the report noted.

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Neither the head of that union nor Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson has spoken out about the proposal to station National Guardsmen within the transit system, but Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-IL) has suggested that the force would not be appropriate to combat city crime.

“National Guardsmen and women are trained to kill people on a battlefield. That is what they are trained to do,” the governor previously said. “They are not police. They don’t know how to do crowd control.”