The Oak Park Police Department has implemented a little more than a quarter of the recommendations a study published in 2022 said would help move the department toward equitable, fair and impartial policing.
The BerryDunn Community Safety study came amid national discussions around the 2020 death of George Floyd, a Black man killed by white officer Derek Chauvin. The case motived police departments, including Oak Park’s, around the country to examine practices.
The study listed 42 recommendations, falling broadly under six themes:
- Staffing (recruiting, hiring and retention)
- Personnel development
- Policies and procedures
- Impartial policing and transparency
- Technology utilization
- Training
At the May 7 meeting, Police Chief Shatonya Johnson told the village board that the police department has implemented 26% of the BerryDunn recommendations thus far.
Michele Weinzetl, a senior manager and law enforcement consultant at BerryDunn, said the consulting firm has also already conducted on-site training for police and village executive staff that included information on implementing these recommendations, change management, critical thinking and problem solving.
Since the study was published in November 2022, there’s been a gap between then and this second phase of implementation. Johnson said the police have met with Weinzetl every other week for about the past year to discuss the recommendations.
“During that time, to their credit, the police department did not stand still,” Weinzetl said. “They were already looking at and working on different recommendations.”
In this second phase of implementation, the village will retain support from BerryDunn, who will help provide leadership training for police and village executive staff and develop a five-year strategic plan.
In this phase, the six themes from the original report were collapsed into four to focus on first:
- Community safety
- Staffing, training and personnel development
- Operations and call for service response
- Community engagement, impartial policing and transparency
After this five-year strategic plan, Johnson said the police intend to create a new one about every three years. The plans will include short-, mid- and long-term goals for the department.
“Strategic plans, they are supposed to be a guiding document,” Weinzetl said at the board meeting. “They are considered fluid, something that really is expected to be revisited and adjusted over time.”
Johnson said the department expects to complete 35% of the BerryDunn recommendations in 2024. Part of the reason they can’t complete more this year is because of a lack of an RMS, or records management system, required to meet some of the technology recommendations in the BerryDunn report. The department expects to hear proposals from vendors for a new RMS in June and hopes to implement it by the end of 2024.
Among the goals the department is working on is creating strategies that emphasize constitutional policing. That includes researching best practices in policing and developing a new policy for the department regarding proactive policing.
“We police constitutionally,” Johnson said. “We do it, definitely, from a lens of procedural justice, which means fairness, allowing our community to have a voice and actually police the way that the community wants to be policed.”
Another goal focuses on staffing, training and personnel development, and includes establishing a plan for recruiting, hiring and retaining personnel.
That’s critical because nearly 30% of the budgeted officer positions are now vacant, and more could be leaving soon.
The Oak Park Police Department is now down 35 officers, Johnson said, three more than in early February. By the end of 2024, she said she’s hoping the department has around 95 officers. The OPPD is budgeted for 118 officers.
“We do have a couple of officers preparing to transition to other police departments as well as a couple that will be retiring in the next couple of months,” she said. “I anticipate a dip before we actually see an increase.”
Another goal is investigating how an alternative response plan can be implemented for calls that can be handled by non-sworn officers. Sworn officers have a gun and arrest power. Non-sworn officers have neither, such as a community service officer, criminal analyst or other non-sworn personnel in a police department.
Village staff presented a model for a pilot program for alternative response to calls for service to the village board at the April 30 board meeting. But trustees sent the plans back for review to evaluate concerns about dividing the response for mental health cries and low-level emergency calls between village-employed mental health professionals and Thrive Counseling Center.
A goal associated with community engagement, impartial policing and transparency is to establish a practice for sharing information. Objectives include establishing what information police share with stakeholders and the public and developing a citizen dashboard for impartial police data to increase transparency.
The full strategic plan can be viewed on the village’s website.
“We are working on a lot of those recommendations at the same time, and some of them overlap,” Johnson said.
The village board will get periodic updates on the plan’s implementation, according to Village Manager Kevin Jackson.