The Brookfield Police Department is changing where it houses people overnight who have been arrested before they are placed in custody of Cook County.
At its Aug. 26 committee of the whole meeting, the village board considered an intergovernmental agreement with the city of Berwyn for its police department to provide secure lockup and transportation services for people arrested in Brookfield who must be housed overnight. Trustees will vote on and likely pass the agreement at the board’s next meeting on Sept. 9.
According to a memo from the meeting written by Police Chief Michael Kuruvilla, Brookfield would be able to make use of Berwyn’s “more expansive lockup facility” with 11 jail cells, including some with constant video monitoring and protection conforming to statewide regulations that Brookfield’s and North Riverside’s lockup facilities lack.
Berwyn also employs dedicated “lockup keepers” certified by the Illinois Department of Corrections whose sole job is to perform intake, processing and monitoring duties for people who have been arrested.
Under the agreement, Berwyn police would handle transporting arrestees from Brookfield to their lockup facility and from the facility to either the Maywood Courthouse or the George N. Leighton Criminal Courthouse in Chicago, where arrestees are transferred to the custody of the Cook County Sheriff’s Office. Only if an arrestee requires medical intervention would a Brookfield officer be called in to take over custody of them at the hospital before Berwyn police transport the arrestee back to the lockup facility.
Brookfield would owe Berwyn $125 per day per arrestee it houses overnight at the Berwyn Police Department and $50 each time Berwyn transports a Brookfield arrestee anywhere, invoiced monthly. The daily charge includes the price of meals for prisoners.
According to a draft of the intergovernmental agreement, the partnership with Berwyn would last for three years. The agreement will automatically renew itself for another three-year term unless Brookfield or Berwyn pulls out within 60 days of the renewal.
Since 2018, Brookfield has housed arrestees at the North Riverside Police Department as a member of West Central Consolidated Communications (WC3), a dispatch agency based in North Riverside that also provides services to police in Brookfield, Riverside and McCook.
“It has worked out well until this point,” Kuruvilla told trustees at the meeting. “It’s not the ideal setup, but it’s what we’re all able to do, or what we’ve been able to do with what we have.”
Kuruvilla said that, due to the small number of people the four WC3 communities arrest each day, North Riverside’s lockup facility does not have 24-hour monitoring state-certified lockup keepers.
Instead, when Brookfield houses arrestees in North Riverside, police must follow what Kuruvilla described as “best practice,” where officers must check arrestees in-person every half hour while checking video footage every 15 minutes in-between.
While North Riverside officers can conduct one of the in-person checks each hour, Brookfield officers must complete the other, requiring an officer to drive to the North Riverside Police Department at least once per hour for the entire duration an arrestee is housed there. Each check could take up to half an hour, Kuruvilla wrote in the memo.
“This requirement removes one of my staff from being available for calls for service or otherwise protecting this community for sometimes significant stretches of time if an arrest occurs during daytime hours, which then results in checks to be conducted over the course of sometimes twelve or more hours,” he wrote.
In rare cases where an arrestee becomes “volatile,” Kuruvilla said, a Brookfield officer could be called in to monitor that person constantly until the Cook County Sheriff takes custody of them, requiring even more resources from the police department. Under the new agreement, Berwyn’s certified lockup keepers could monitor the arrestee instead.
“It seems like a pretty viable option for us for a more secure and, hopefully, more efficient process moving forward,” Kuruvilla said.
He said now is a good time for Brookfield to switch to using Berwyn’s lockup facility due to recent criminal justice changes in Illinois.
“With cite and release and a lot of the bail reform, there’s actually much [fewer] people that we actually do house than what we have been housing historically,” Kuruvilla said. In 2022 and 2023, Brookfield needed to house only “between 22 and 27” arrestees overnight each year on average, he said.
At the meeting, Village President Michael Garvey spoke supportively of the potential partnership with Berwyn.
“When Chief [Kuruvilla] first approached me about it, it almost seemed too good to be true. I’m like, ‘Why would Berwyn want to do this?’ But I understand that they built a facility this big, and as Chief pointed out the changes in the law, they’re detaining and holding less people,” he said. “To justify the existence of the facility, they’ve reached out to other departments at a time when we basically needed help, and other departments are moving toward this.”
