Recently, I read that the village of Brookfield Police Department has decided to end its contract with the North Riverside Police Department for prisoner housing. The Landmark’s editorial also covered the same topic and stated that the municipality must look for ways to consolidate services, which I agree with.
Prisoner booking, which is the processing of prisoners and the holding of these individuals until they appear in court after an arrest, should solely be the responsibility of the Cook County Sheriff’s Police. Cook County is one of the only counties where the sheriffs do not handle prisoners from municipal police departments. Police departments in neighboring counties, such as Cook, Will, and DuPage, bring their detainees directly to the County lockup after booking for housing. Some agencies bring their prisoners directly to the sheriff’s police for processing and housing.
I pushed the Cook County Sheriff’s Police to handle the housing of prisoners my entire tenure as police chief and received no traction from the Sheriff’s Office. Almost all my municipal police chief partners wanted the same thing. Still, we ran into roadblocks, including Sheriff Dart’s Office, Cook County President Toni Periwinkle’s Office, and even our local county officials. They never wanted the increased prisoner population, expenses, liability, or the headache of managing this population. But think about this: the Cook County Jail is designed for that, and officials already do that at the facility. Their reasoning for not doing this was simply ridiculous, and it negatively impacted every other municipal police department in Cook County.
If you want to know how it impacts municipal policing to book, transport, and house prisoners — this is worse. When an officer makes an arrest currently, they have to bring the arrestee into the local police facility, type up criminal charges, identify the individual, most likely through fingerprints, book them into custody, arrange for their housing at the local municipality, watch them overnight so there are no medical or suicide issues, and then physically transport them either to the Maybrook Court House in Maywood or, at times, to the main courthouse at 26th and California.
This all requires pulling officers off the street to do the job. That means you are shortening the shifts and, therefore, fewer officers are patrolling during that time. Municipalities are paying overtime somewhere, whether to the transport officers or the officers covering the street while an officer handles the prisoners. Additionally, municipal police departments are not set up as lock-up facilities. They are not set up as lock-up keepers.
The liability of local municipalities to house prisoners is enormous, as is the responsibility and the overall strain on resources. No resident wants their local police officer spending vast amounts of time out of the village they are patrolling to manage prisoner transport and bond hearings. It costs additional money, the liability is extreme, and the possibility of officers getting injured on prisoner transport is high. If officers are getting injured on these transports, you can bet that taxpayers are paying for it through high worker compensation costs.
If there’s any doubt about my commitment to efficient police services, I urge you to read the op-ed I wrote in Wednesday Journal in 2022. In that piece, I advocated for the merger of small municipal police departments, a move that would significantly improve efficiency. This commitment to efficiency is at the core of my advocacy for consolidating prisoner management services under the Cook County Sheriff’s Police.
Tom Weitzel retired from the Riverside Police Department in May 2021 after 37 years in law enforcement, 13 of which were as chief of police. His opinions are his own.
