How many police entities do we need?

It seems to be a new trend; the Cook County sheriff’s police taking over patrol duties in assorted suburban communities.

It is being done because those municipalities in the southern suburbs are financially impoverished – they can’t afford to have police on the streets to maintain the public safety.

ALTHOUGH A PART of me wishes that these municipalities could provide an inspiration to all of the Chicago area. Because I have always wondered why each and every one of the 129 communities in Cook County (with Chicago being merely one), along with the hundreds of suburban communities in the collar counties, needs to have its own police department.

Wouldn’t it make more sense if the county sheriffs had jurisdiction over their entire counties? Perhaps they should be a law enforcement agency whose officers routinely cross over the municipal boundaries that define the various suburban communities?

I’d like it if the experiences of places like Ford Heights, Dolton and Dixmoor could somehow inspire the local communities to think in these terms, rather than maintaining their own departments that all too often are understaffed and ill-equipped to deal with the realities of crime and criminal activity.

In the cases of Ford Heights and Dolton, financial problems are so intense for their local governments that they’re using the county sheriff to save themselves some money.

AS FAR AS Dixmoor is concerned, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that the sheriff took over patrols on the overnight shift this week because of a labor dispute (two officers walked off the job in protest).

But even in communities where finances are more solid, the realities of municipal budgets are that the public safety entities take up a majority of the money spent. A Police Department can easily take up more than a third of a community’s tax dollars.

I can’t help but think that having the sheriff handle suburban patrols as a single entity would be cheaper (and more professional) than having each and every community try to do it themselves.

But I’m realistic enough to know that any suburban government officials who might ever read this commentary are going to be repulsed by the very thought.

BECAUSE ONE OF the biggest decisions (if not THE biggest) that any suburban village president gets to make is picking him(or her)self a police chief. Someone who has to answer to him, and can be dismissed at that official’s desire.

Having a professional lawman under their control is an ego boost that I’m sure they would resist giving up! A fight to the death? It would be pretty close.

Then again, there are times when I wonder if an idea’s unpopularity amongst political people is all the more evidence of how sound it truly is?

Seriously. I realize the current county sheriff budget would be woefully inadequate to ask them to assume such intense patrols of all 129 communities (or 120 or so, if you assume that Chicago and the largest suburban communities would keep their police departments intact).

BUT PERHAPS EACH community should make a contribution to the county sheriff to help cover the cost. I’m sure it would be less than these communities in recent weeks had to set aside for a Police Department of their own.

It also would benefit in that a county sheriff would easily cross over municipal boundaries – which many suburban cops say are the mechanism that the crooks use to their advantage to avoid arrest.

But government egos likely will prevail.

Even though I’d like to think the situation in suburban Dixmoor in coming weeks could help sway people over to realizing that change would be an improvement.

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The bulk of you are lazy goofs who deserve whatever abuse government gives you during the next four years

I cast my ballot a couple of weeks ago – in the morning hours of Good Friday, to be exact.

I used one of the early voting centers so that I could get it out of the way and have my Tuesday free on the off-chance that I wind up spending the day as a reporter-type person trying to figure out how other people are voting.

YET THE HONEST truth is that the people I will be focusing on are NOT the bulk of our society.

For most of us are going to sit on our duffs and do nothing. If anything, the bulk of us will get irritated at the presence of elections, and act as though they ought not to take place at all.

Now I have made this argument before – and I suspect I will make it repeatedly for as long as I live. Those people who don’t vote are allowing government to run roughshod over them.

A good part of the reason I insist on casting a ballot (even in an election cycle like this one where the posts up for grabs were of no interest to anyone who didn’t live in my immediate community) is that I believe I am ensuring my right to complain for the next four years.

PEOPLE WHO CAN’T be bothered to cast a ballot really have no right to gripe!

So for the at least 80 percent of people who don’t bother to vote on Tuesday (the estimates are that, at best, 20 percent of the electorate will cast ballots), I don’t really want to hear your complaints.

You have your chance on Tuesday to have a say over how those local officials will spend your local tax dollars, and how all those local school districts and park boards and sanitary districts and other entities will operate – and you chose to remain silent!

Now having said that, I do realize that for many people, there isn’t much of a choice come this particular Election Day.

THE REALITY IS that in too many of those suburban communities, there is a local political establishment that tries to operate in as much anonymity as possible – and there isn’t any opposition.

In some cases, no one else could be bothered to challenge the incumbents. Not because of any real satisfaction, but because of apathy.

While in other places, local officials know how to game the electoral process to eliminate anyone who had the “gall” (in the incumbents’ opinion) to challenge them.

Is this what it takes to get people to vote?

And within Chicago proper, this is the election cycle where nothing is at stake – with the exception of those who live in the Far South Side and will be picking a replacement for Jesse Jackson, Jr., to represent them in Congress.

EVEN THERE, THE real election cycle came back in the special primary election held in February. Tuesday is likely the night that one-time state Rep. and Cook County CAO Robin Kelly gets rubber-stamped to go to Washington.

We can speculate all we want about the possibility of a long-shot victory for Republican Paul McKinley or Green Party-type LeAlan Ford – yet the key to a long-shot upset electoral victory is candidate interest.

Yet even so, I still felt compelled to cast my ballot. Like I said, I like to be able to complain about the status quo. Which in this case constitutes a rant about the bulk of people who on Tuesday seemed to only have interest in ignoring the fact that it is Election Day.

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Do we need so many police chiefs?

There’s a bill pending these days before the Illinois House of Representatives; one that would make it easier for police departments in individual municipalities to be done away with and combined into larger law enforcement entities.

I heard about this particular bill earlier this week from a state legislator who absolutely detests the idea. He denounces it as a “bad bill” and makes it clear that he’s going to do whatever it takes to kill this concept off.

PERSONALLY, I THINK his effort will succeed – although not because of this individual legislator (who is way too low-ranking to have any such influence, which is why I’m not going to name him). It’s just that I can see his attitude when it comes to local police to be very pervasive among political people.

There’s no way they’re going to give up their local police departments – which make them feel like they are people of importance. After all, they have their own departments and their own chiefs who have to answer directly to them.

If their respective home communities got merged into some larger-scale law enforcement agency, it might very well show how insignificant some of these towns and villages truly are.

So for the time being, we likely can count on each and every ‘burg having its own police chief and its own law enforcement officers – anxiously patrolling their local streets to keep them safe from crime that they likely think spills over from surrounding communities.

AFTER ALL, ___________________ is far too fine a community to have criminals of its own, the local officials (fill in the blank yourself) will proclaim.

Nonsense!

Because I have to admit that when I heard this particular legislator (who comes from Cook County) start attacking this particular bill, I couldn’t help but get motivated to think what a wonderful idea it truly is.

Perhaps it is because I come from Cook County, where our 129 municipalities run the gamut from Chicago’s 2.7-something million people to the communities that barely have 1,000 people.

HAVE YOU EVER been to Hometown, Ill.?

Not that this is a bash on Hometown, a southwestern suburb so tied into Oak Lawn that I’m sure many people passing through don’t even realize they are separate municipalities.

I also have seen many smaller suburbs where the local police department is a chief, a second-in-command (who usually carries the rank of Lieutenant) and a full-time patrol officer or two – backed up with many part-time cops who do their patrols to bring in extra money to bolster their “real” job.

I wonder what is truly accomplished – other than the fact that the mayor (usually a ‘village president’ in reality) of that town gets to say he has his own department.

PERHAPS WE’RE AT the point where we ought to merge all these local departments into one law enforcement agency. In fact, there are times when I think that the Cook County sheriff’s police ought to be patrolling all of the county – and not just the little patches of unincorporated area that exist.

Of course, that would require a significant upgrade in the budget the county sheriff gets. I’m sure Tom Dart wouldn’t be able to undertake such an effort on his current budget – although he’s already being asked to patrol the streets of suburban Ford Heights without any increase in funding.

Although considering that many suburban municipalities are having their own budget crunches these days and that the cash-consuming part of their budgets is their public safety agencies (police and fire departments), maybe it would cost the towns less money if a larger-scale entity were to do the patrols.

They likely could do it at a slightly lesser cost than it now takes to maintain individual police agencies in all those suburban towns.

PERHAPS IT SHOULD be only the largest of suburban towns (and the city of Chicago itself) that have their own police departments?

Then again, perhaps even that is a mistake. Take Miami and Dade County, Fla., where it literally is the equivalent of a county police that patrols the entire area. Maybe that’s something that city is doing right.

Besides, I have often heard those suburban officials complain about how they are susceptible to gang-related crime because those gang members know how to jump across suburban boundaries at-will – using jurisdictional issues to evade arrest for their actions.

Making an all-mighty Cook County police (or Chicago-area police, if you will) could help get around that, while also potentially making police structure more efficient.

THE ONLY ONE who really suffers is the politician – whose electoral ego will take a body check.

Then again, that probably is sufficient reason in the “real world” for legislators to vote against this (they don’t want to tick off the local political operatives who got them elected to their seats in Springfield in the first place).

So in the name of political expediency, the one who will take a body check this spring will likely be we, the people, when this bill withers away faster than Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s attempts to have the General Assembly impose that registration fee on people who own handguns.

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The Fantastic(??!?) Five too good for cost-savings Cook County furloughs

From what I have heard and read, this seems to be an effort led by Cook County Commissioner William Beavers, with support from commissioners Earlean Collins, Joan Patricia Murphy, Deborah Sims and Robert Steele.

BUTLER



They are the five county commissioners (out of 17 total) who are pushing forward with an effort to be reimbursed money from their county salaries that was part of a plan to cut the county budget – but which they say is an illegal attempt to cut their pay.

COMMISSIONERS SENT LETTERS to the county demanding to be reimbursed for the 10 “furlough” days they were supposed to use to take time off. Since they officially weren’t working, they weren’t paid for those days.

This is a move being asked of every single person on the Cook County payroll. All the people who do the actual work in the assessor’s office or the recorder of deeds or in the other agencies are being asked to do the same thing.

Yet in letters sent this summer that came to a head when the county board met this week, these five commissioners contend that since they’re elected officials, this cost-cutting move cannot be done to them.

We’re hearing a lot of rhetoric about how it is “against the law” to cut an elected official’s salary during their current term. Which would imply they would accept the idea of a furlough if its implementation were postponed until county board members begin their new terms in 2015.

I MUST ADMIT that I don’t get what is going through the minds of these five county commissioners. This is a cut that everybody in the county, and even many people in city government, has been taking in recent years.

To suddenly come up with this objection now makes them look absurd.

COLLINS



Besides, it becomes quite apparent upon listening to the commissioners that I’m not sure they truly comprehend exactly what state law says on this subject.

What the law says is that an elected official’s salary cannot be changed during their current term. Whenever a government body approves pay raises for themselves, those pay hikes must be delayed so that they don’t take effect until a new term.

WHICH MEANS IF government officials want to approve pay raises for their future successors (or themselves if they manage to get re-elected), that is acceptable.

MURPHY

It is the law that is meant to prevent county board members from approving big fat raises for themselves up front, knowing there would be at least four years before the next election cycle.

The law itself makes sense. Officials know going into a political post what (if anything) it pays. If it is insufficient, then perhaps they should reconsider their desire to hold an elective government office.

But no matter how many times I hear Beavers say the words “pay cut” and “illegal” (as he did Wednesday night on WTTW’s “Chicago Tonight” program), I’m not sure how this current situation applies to the law that says a salary cannot be changed.

BECAUSE AS I see it (maybe Beavers and crew can convince a judge to see it differently if this ever winds up in court), the base salary being paid to these people – along with all the county employees who also are taking the furlough – remains the same.

The reason why a few of their paychecks were smaller is because they were asked to work fewer days. They’re being paid at the same rate, but for less work. Where’s the pay cut?

SIMS



Now I realize that a county board member, in a sense, is on call at all times. If some business had come up on one of the days that they were officially “off-duty” and not being paid, they likely would have tended to it anyway.

But that, in a sense, is the drawback of doing a job that one enjoys (and I don’t doubt they enjoy carrying the title of “government official” with all its perks). If you don’t like it, go find one of the declining numbers of assembly line jobs – where management will likely laugh at you before firing you if you were to pull this kind of rhetoric on them.



I’M SURE SOME people are going to argue that less money in the check constitutes a pay cut, and that trying to view the issue any other way is wrong. Actually, trying to view the issue that way is simplistic – and misses the whole point.

STEELE



That point being that the county government, along with city and state governments, businesses and just about everybody, are enduring tight economic conditions.

County government employees and officials are far from the only people who are enduring the possibility of working fewer hours in order to help their companies maintain the same number of jobs.



Considering that the county furlough amounts to less than one day per month, it is not the most intense pay loss one could suffer. I’m sure someone who got whacked from full-time to perhaps 30 hours per week feels the loss more intensely.

SO NO MATTER how much Beavers tried spinning the issue on Wednesday as one where he agreed to a furlough only as part of a since-ignored deal to keep Provident and Oak Forest hospitals open, it just doesn’t play.

I have no doubt that the public is going to see this issue as a matter of five government officials who are even more lacking in public perception of themselves than the typical politician.

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Firearms are issue that won’t go away

We’re in a mode these days where the so-called firearms aficionados are determined to pressure people to accept their view of the world – which is based too-heavily on some Wild West concept that people being threatened will be able to whip out their pistols and shoot the offender.

McDERMOTT: Actions not good enough?

Honestly, I see way too many scenarios in which someone manages to shoot themselves, or winds up getting shot by their own weapon when the threatening force manages to take it away from them.

BUT WE’RE IN a “no-compromise” mode by those people with ideological leanings that makes them think they have their right to use their pistol and hold it over everybody else. I guess they just don’t feel secure otherwise.

Take the situation on the other side of State Line Road, where the Indiana Legislature earlier this year passed a measure that has the effect of striking down any attempts by municipal government to impose restrictions on firearms possession.

That means the laws passed in Hammond in the early 1990s in response to an incident where someone walked into City Hall and started shooting (and killing) are no longer valid.

Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott went so far this week as to approve an executive order that tells police officers in his city of just over 80,000 people that they are no longer to enforce the municipal ban on bringing firearms into public buildings or city parks.

NOT THAT THEY were enforcing the measure. No one has been charged with an offense in years, and especially not since the state Legislature took its action.

What would have been the point? Anyone who would have been arrested would have easily been acquitted by citing the state law, then would have had a completely legitimate lawsuit against the city for a false arrest.

The executive order acknowledges reality.

FORD: Another African-American first?



Except in the world of the firearms aficionados (people who live in the real world use a more impolite phrase to describe them), who are behaving in a way that would make you think the Indiana Legislature had approved a law opposing their view – rather than giving them exactly what they wanted.

TWO PEOPLE WHO purport to represent firearms owners in that part of the Chicago area that spills over the Illinois/Indiana border filed a lawsuit against Hammond, and are now saying that the executive order is not good enough.

That city’s firearms ban in public buildings effectively got struck down when the state acted. But these people want the City Council to now pass a measure that specifically strikes down their own act – which was a response to a particularly emotional incident in Hammond history.

Perhaps they also want an apology for the city for ever daring to think that a restriction on firearms in public makes sense? Or maybe they’re just the equivalent of that schoolyard bully who, after taking a kid’s lunch, forces him to eat a clump of dirt.

Because when it comes right down to it, that is what many of these firearms aficionados come across as – the bully. He’s probably the person we need protection from, instead of him thinking his firearm protects him from us.

THEN, WE COME back into Chicago, specifically into the inner-city neighborhoods of the West Side. The ones with heavy African-American populations and large amounts of violence. A place where there probably are too many firearms in circulation for anyone to feel truly comfortable.

There, state Rep. LaShawn Ford, D-Chicago, is now telling reporter-types that he could favor the bills that have failed in the past that would allow Illinois residents to carry pistols on their person when they are in public.

He would be the first African-American legislator to throw in with supporters of that idea, who largely come from the rural parts of Illinois.

If anything, I take his constituents’ concerns about self-protection a little more seriously than the people suing Hammond, Ind., which literally includes a grandmother who says she wants to carry a pistol on her when she takes her grandchildren to the park.

HAMMOND MAY HAVE its less-than-pristine parts of town, but it is not the West Side.

Of course, Ford is asking for something from the National Rifle Association in exchange for his support for any future “concealed carry” bills – he wants the NRA to pay for police to receive sensitivity training.

Most likely so that cops don’t automatically think every single black person with a pistol is a gang member worthy of arrest.

Somehow, I sense many of the ideologues who get excited for this issue will have a problem with anything that says the police themselves might be part of the problem.

FORD HAD A forum on the issue in his district last week, and the Austin Weekly newspaper reported that most of those who attended were supportive of the concept. But what caught my attention was less the arguments back and forth, but instead the comments of a couple of Chicago police types (one current and one retired).

The current cop argued like many police officers do that more firearms ultimately threatens the safety of the police on the street. But the retired cop admitted the indifference of some police officers toward anyone who isn’t an affluent white person.

“Why would you count on anyone who doesn’t like you to protect your home?,” that officer asked during the forum.

My thought is that any “concealed carry” proponent who is seriously willing to acknowledge that aspect is going to get taken more seriously by me than anyone who bases their argument for packing a pistol in public solely on a partial reading of the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

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