The Brookfield Police Department is set to receive nearly $15,000 from the Illinois State Police as part of its third round of firearm enforcement grants.
ISP announced July 1 that it will issue $1.5 million in grants for fiscal year 2025 to 21 law enforcement agencies across Illinois, enabling their officers to “conduct enforcement details for individuals legally barred from having a firearm.” Most departments on the list will receive grants in the range of $10,000-$30,000, including Brookfield’s grant worth $14,791.30.
This year’s round of grants is ISP’s largest monetarily. In 2023, the first year of grants, ISP issued nearly $1 million to 30 police departments that completed more than 300 details consisting of more than 3,500 compliance checks, according to the announcement. In 2024, it awarded $1 million to 16 law enforcement agencies. Brookfield did not receive a grant from ISP in either of the previous rounds.
This year, the Chicago Police Department was awarded more than $600,000 while the Cook County Sheriff’s Office was granted nearly $480,000, accounting for nearly $1.1 million of ISP’s grants.
Brookfield Police Chief Michael Kuruvilla said that to his knowledge the money from the grant will go toward paying officers for the time they spend conducting firearm enforcement details. He said Brookfield is still in finalizing its deal with ISP and that no money from the grant has yet been disbursed to the village’s police.
Those officers’ work, he said, mostly involves notifying people when their firearm owner’s identification, or FOID, card is no longer valid.
“There is a portal where the Illinois State Police now provide us notifications as to when [Brookfield residents’] FOID cards are put into a suspended or revoked status,” Kuruvilla said in a phone call Thursday. “Once we get that notification, there’s a sense of responsibility to us that we need to” then notify that individual of the change in their FOID card status.
He said Brookfield officers are placed on details as a “semi-frequent” occurrence but that there is no “exact frequency” to how often it happens, as the decision to revoke or suspend someone’s FOID card is passed on from ISP.
When ISP revokes or suspends an Illinois resident’s FOID card, that person is required by state law to surrender their FOID card to their local police department and transfer all firearms they possess to someone who is legally allowed to hold onto them, be it a police officer or another FOID card holder. As members of firearm enforcement details, Brookfield officers are tasked with facilitating that process and assisting residents with filling out firearm disposition records that they must file with the state.
Kuruvilla said that officers are not asked to seize the firearms of people whose FOID cards have become invalid. He said a police department seeking to seize an individual’s firearms would first need to convince a judge to issue a search warrant.
Kuruvilla said Brookfield police applied for the grant funding from ISP after state police, which used to handle enforcement details itself, “offloaded” some of those duties to local police departments before this year.
“I believe they’re still involved, and there’s some ambiguity in this, but they’re basically looking to share some of that responsibility with us, the local departments and local municipalities,” he said. “It’s not a, ‘Hey, this is completely your responsibility now’ … Depending on the circumstances, if there’s significant action to be taken, I’m confident we’d still be reaching out to state police and leaning on their expertise.”
In its announcement, ISP said its grants come out of the State Police Revocation Enforcement Fund as established by Public Act 102-0237. According to the Firearm Owners Identification Card Act, the fund accrues $5 every time a resident pays the state’s $10 fee to obtain a FOID card.
ISP said that law enforcement agencies that join the Violent Crime Intelligence Task Force are eligible for grants from the state fund. It is not immediately clear whether police departments outside of those on the task force can receive the grants or whether Brookfield is a member of the task force.
Kuruvilla said he did not have much information on the task force, as BPD learned about its grant around the same time that ISP announced this year’s recipients publicly.
The police chief said Brookfield police would need to decide whether they want to apply for another grant in the future over the coming year.
“That is probably something that we’ll have to evaluate after we engage in this,” he said. “It actually started July 1 of this year and it goes through June 30 of next year, so over the next 12 months … I think we’ll really get an idea of just how much staff time we really need to dedicate to this endeavor.”
Brookfield police are cracking down on speeding violations this month
Brookfield announced July 8 that the village, alongside more than 200 local municipalities in Illinois, is joining up with ISP and the Illinois Department of Transportation to increase the amount of police patrols keeping track of traffic speeds for the month of July. Kuruvilla said the joint effort is funded by grants from IDOT; while he did not recall the amount of the grant, he said it is “not substantial to [his] knowledge.”
Kuruvilla said traffic enforcement is always part of an officer’s responsibilities, but the initiative for July represents “an elective effort from our staff” to focus on catching drivers who speed.
“Our officers are aware of that and conduct those duties in the course of their regular tour of duty, but, obviously, that competes, or has to be managed and balanced, with their other responsibilities. Calls for service, of course, are paramount,” he said. “On a normal basis, you have to juggle all of that, and, especially, calls for service generally take up more time. Traffic enforcement is done in between, when there are gaps and when there’s time. So, this is an initiative where the officer is working above and beyond their tour of duty, and the individual’s sole focus is to spend that time out there, working toward identifying and stopping” drivers going above the posted speed limit.
In Brookfield’s announcement for the initiative, Kuruvilla said BPD’s speeding enforcement will focus “especially on 31st Street, Washington Avenue, Ogden Avenue, Prairie Avenue and Maple Avenue, where most of our speed-related crashes occur.”
