We won’t know until after press time whether Oak Park’s village board chose to prove its faith in a more robust role for the Citizen Police Oversight Committee by assigning the body to investigate the police response to the large gathering of teens in downtown Oak Park on Halloween evening.
We hope they will but it’s certain there will be a thorough review of just what unfolded on a somewhat chaotic Halloween in Oak Park.
No one is questioning that a police response was necessary that evening. The crowd was large, seemed unexpected. There was a shot fired at Lake and Forest which passed through the window of an apartment unit. There were fights that broke out among the teens seemingly both in the downtown and then along Lake Street as officers from Oak Park and multiple other jurisdictions – Oak Park had put out a call for assistance – worked to move the crowd down Lake and toward Austin Boulevard.
Four immediate questions need to be answered:
How did Oak Park police manage a command structure so that its leaders were in control of the actions of other departments on the scene?
How is it possible that pepper balls were allowed to be deployed against the teens by River Forest police at two locations along Lake Street?
Why did it take days for the Oak Park police to identify which department had deployed the chemical agents when its own officers were present when the incidents transpired?