On June 7, Bernadette McLain of Forest Park was driving north on Des Plaines Avenue. But when she turned right on Jackson Boulevard, she encountered a funeral procession traveling west down the same road.
Suddenly, McLain said, a big black SUV was speeding toward her, traveling the wrong direction into her lane. Farther down the road, two other cars in the funeral procession did the same, swerving out of their lane toward McLain’s car before getting back into the procession’s line of cars.
“I was shook,” McLain said. “I was very scared.”
Her experience is not unusual in Forest Park and surrounding areas, where funeral processions — typically solemn, stately occurrences — occasionally evolve to include speeding cars, vehicles that weave in and out of traffic, and participants who hang out of car windows. Despite the grief that participants harbor, and the American right to assemble, the behavior can create dangerous situations for pedestrians or other drivers, officials and residents say.
Forest Park held a town hall meeting mid-June to address what some say are dangerous funeral processions, and to announce the creation of a task force to discuss how to prevent them. Government officials, police, funeral home directors and residents gathered at Howard Mohr Community Center to explore ways to keep people safe during processions that critics say get out of hand.
“It’s been a topic long before I was elected,” La Shawn Ford told the Review. He’s been a state representative for the 8th District since 2007 and co-hosted the town hall. Ford said raucous behavior during funerals likely stems from participants being allowed to run red lights and stop signs.
“You get to be in a situation where you don’t have to follow the law,” Ford said.
Ford blames readily available drugs.
“Those breaking the law are, many times, those who are drinking, popping pills, smoking marijuana and things like that,” Ford said. “They don’t understand the level of danger that they’re causing because they’re not in their right frame of mind.”
To prevent hazardous funeral processions, Ford and Forest Park Mayor Rory Hoskins will co-chair a new task force, which they announced at the town hall. The task force will likely start in August.
“The town hall was a starting point of getting several parties in the room together and bringing up the issues,” said Rachell Entler, Forest Park’s village administrator.
Cook County has had a task force in the past to deal with dangerous funeral processions, the Review reported. Though former Cook County Commissioner Richard Boykin helped start the Cook County Funeral and Cemetery Violence Taskforce in March 2018, when he lost his re-election to Commissioner Brandon Johnson that November, the taskforce dissolved.
Ford said he hopes the task force will come up with recommendations to take to Springfield by the legislature’s lame duck session in January. He said state legislation is likely the solution for such funeral processions because they often travel through several municipalities, from a funeral home in one area to a cemetery in the likes of Forest Park, Maywood or Hillside.
“This crosses jurisdictions,” Ford said.
A look at the problem and solutions
While McLain avoided the swerving cars in the funeral procession she drove past, previous local encounters with processions haven’t been as uneventful.
Last June, four people were wounded from gunfire during a funeral procession traveling through Oak Park for Jamal Goings, a 33-year-old from Chicago who was reportedly connected to the Gangster Disciples.
Ford said he’s heard people say that those who commit violent crimes shouldn’t have a funeral procession. He added that others want to limit the number of cars in a procession.
But funeral processions that become dangerous aren’t always gang related. And funerals cannot be made illegal, especially when everyone has their own ways of grieving, officials said.
So, they are looking at other possible solutions.
At the town hall meeting, officials discussed finding funding to install more cameras at intersections so that hazardous drivers can be ticketed retroactively for breaking the law.
Forest Park uses photo enforcement for funerals now, according to Entler. The Forest Park Police Department reviews video from intersection cameras and issues citations to drivers who break the law.
But while there are cameras at intersections on Roosevelt Road, they aren’t on every street that funeral processions use.
For example, when McLain encountered the procession on Jackson Boulevard, she said she laid on her horn, then called the Forest Park Police Department when she got home.
“They just said, ‘We’re doing what we can with cameras,’” McLain said. But she added that police told her there are no cameras on Jackson Boulevard.
A review of next year’s state budget, which Gov. J.B. Pritzker approved in early June, showed that Forest Park was appropriated hundreds of thousands of dollars for a reconstruction project on Jackson Boulevard, according to Hoskins.
“We may be able to use some of that money potentially for cameras as part of infrastructure,” Entler said.
To address the limited number of cameras, funeral directors, who lead processions, could take the streets where cameras are located. But they don’t always prefer to.
According to Entler, while village officials and residents at the town hall expressed the desire to limit funeral processions to busy Roosevelt Road, funeral directors said they prefer more residential streets like Jackson Boulevard, since there aren’t as many traffic lights that can break up a procession.
Forest Park has no legislation requiring processions to take certain streets, and processions don’t need a permit to travel through municipalities, Entler said.
The Forest Park Police Department also prefers processions to use Roosevelt Road so they can activate the Opticom system that controls traffic lights for emergency vehicles, allowing cars to get through town as quickly as possible, Entler said.
These measures are preferable to pulling over offenders, according to officials.
“The police at the town hall said, ‘It’s almost best that we don’t engage in the process and pull over a car during a procession. It could just cause more problems,’” Ford said. “So, if we can have some type of rules that funeral homes have to follow and that families have to be following as well, then that’s going to be best.”