Community Safety

A community without safety will soon cease to be a community. Crime is up nationally and regionally, but I recognize that statistic is of cold comfort to those who find themselves a victim to it locally. Fortunately, this Village Board has taken several steps to create a safer Oak Park for everyone who lives, works, visits, or travels through our village. 

Since I joined the Board in October of 2022:

We’ve hired Chief Johnson as the first Black woman police chief in OPPD history and was the best candidate to lead our police department after a nationwide search. Chief Johnson follows a tradition of hiring from within the department and embodies what it means to be an Oak Park police officer.

We’ve fully funded the police department in the 2023 budget per the Berry Dunn report’s recommendations. Our police force is working a lot of overtime and enduring a lot of ‘callbacks’ which is leading to sixteen hour shifts for a number of officers. This isn’t good for public safety.

We’ve convened a community safety task force charged with creating recommendations on non-emergency response including mental health crisis and other issues that do not require a police officer’s presence. The outcome of this task force should both increase community safety and reduce community interactions with the police at the same time. 

Emphasized the need for data, transparency, and accountability to continue to build and keep trust with our community. The Oak Park police are some of the best in the business, but there is always room for improvement. By emphasizing data, transparency, and accountability, we build trust in areas where it's needed and keep it in areas where we have it. 

However, this is where it gets complicated. Just as crime is up nationally since the pandemic, the availability of police officers is down substantially during that same timeframe. That means our recruiting efforts are meeting substantial headwinds making it increasingly difficult to fully staff the positions we added to the budget. 

While this is a challenge, it’s not insurmountable. This is how I will work to overcome it:

Modernize our HR approach to hiring police officers. Retention bonuses, referral bonuses, and other modern HR tools should be added to our toolbox to keep the good officers we have and get early access to those who might fit the values of Oak Park policing. 

Expand duties of non-sworn officers (cops without a gun) to handle more policing duties that don’t require a gun. Sworn police officers should focus on violent crimes, solving crimes, responding to in progress crimes, and crime prevention. We should investigate having other police duties handled by non-sworn officers and alternative response while we work towards fully staffing the department. 

Explore non-police traffic enforcement. In the last over 10 years (maybe longer), our police officers have used their weapon in the field twice. This shows that while the need to create traffic safety is high, we might not need sworn officers (cops with guns) to do it. We should investigate if a non-police traffic enforcement force is feasible in our village.

Use infrastructure for safety. Our village streets encourage the negative traffic patterns and habits we all notice. We should use protected bike lanes to narrow our residential streets - this would reduce speeds on streets that should be kept slow. We should implement roundabouts to break up long straightaways rather than relying on four-way stops that get ignored, and we should use our streets effectively by creating traffic patterns that encourage fast traffic to stay on bigger streets, while keeping traffic on residential streets slow for optimal safety.

Oak Park has a history of leading the nation when it comes to policing. Our implementation of Community policing has been studied, emulated, and written about at length. Chicago is just catching on in 2023 to what we implemented years ago.

The challenges of today present an opportunity to be at the forefront again, this time in alternate response and efficient policing. By rethinking how we task our sworn officers, we can make our village safer while increasing community trust in policing at the same time.