Three suburban townships are paying off-duty Cook County sheriff`s police officers $11.50 an hour for overtime work to provide extra police protection because of what township officials say is too long a response time from the regular sheriff`s patrol.
County Commissioner Richard Siebel and several township supervisors charge that buying the expensive extra police protection would be unnecessary if Sheriff Richard Elrod would realign personnel in his office to increase the number of uniformed sheriff`s police.
The townships of Northfield, Norwood Park and Worth have contracts with the Cook County Board to use the uniformed off-duty police officers in marked and unmarked cars at night and on weekends to combat burglaries and vandalism and for traffic control.
The Schaumburg Township Board is considering restarting the program if residents agree to pay an extra tax for the service similar to taxes now levied in Northfield and Norwood Park Townships, said Schaumburg Supervisor Vern Laubenstein. In Worth Township the so-called rehire or call-back program is paid for entirely from federal revenue sharing funds.
Siebel and others say residents of the townships have to pay for police protection on three different fronts.
”These residents are already paying property taxes, and unincorporated residents are also paying $750,000 a year in county vehicle stickers,” Siebel said. ”To have to pay an extra tax for police protection they should be getting in the first place is triple-taxation,” he said.
”This extra tax also is levied throughout the entire township, so residents of the municipalities within that particular township are affected, too.
”The vehicle sticker revenues should be earmarked for police protection of unincorporated areas instead of just going into the general revenue fund,” he said. ”There are 160,000 people in the unincorporated areas, which makes it the second largest area in the county besides Chicago.”
Siebel, who plans to introduce an ordinance to specify that the vehicle sticker funds be used for police protection, called for Elrod to transfer personnel from other parts of his office into the patrol division.
However, Elrod said Siebel`s suggestion is illegal, because the county budget ordinance requires the sheriff to keep personnel in specific budgeted positions.
”I would be allowed to move personnel if they gave me a more general budget in which they would say, `Here`s so many men, now put them where you want,” ` Elrod said. ”But now they give me specific numbers of policemen, correctional officers and courtroom deputies, and I can`t move them back and forth.
”Furthermore, this would cost the county more money because a policeman starts at $18,000, a correctional officer at $16,000 and a deputy at $13,200. A general budget would give me more flexibility, but it has never been discussed, and one reason is the additional cost. On the other hand, I also need all the courtroom personnel and correctional officers I have and couldn`t shift any to the police department.
”I have asked the county board for at least five or six additional policemen each year since I`ve been in office, and I haven`t received many. We have a good response time and have a mutual assistance pact with nearby municipalities to respond to each other`s emergencies.”
According to Edmund Dobbs, chief of the sheriff`s police, longer response times are the result of irregular annexation patterns and rapid growth in unincorporated areas. ”Some of the areas are small pockets completely surrounded by municipalities, and we don`t have the manpower to put a squad car in there full time,” Dobbs said.
”It just isn`t economical, so the closest squad car will be out somewhere else. We have these pockets all over the county because the municipalities annex areas but leave these small areas because they don`t want them for one reason or another.
”Another problem is that a large unincorporated area can go from a big farm requiring little police manpower to an apartment project of 4,000 people or shopping center in no time. Meanwhile, we aren`t given any more men to handle it,” he said.
County Board President George Dunne pointed out that the county`s unincorporated areas are decreasing in size every year because of annexations. ”We lose about 10 percent a year. We give the sheriff the tools to do the job. As far as I`m concerned he has enough officers. Everybody would like more police protection, but right now we are going to have to find more tax revenues just to keep the programs we have. I don`t know of any programs that can be cut.”
Laubenstein called protection from on-duty sheriff`s police ”woefully inadequate” and said the ”political reality of the county board is that you have 10 commissioners from the city and 7 from the suburbs. How are you going to get the votes for more money for the suburbs? Some of our residents said it sometimes takes two hours to respond because you have one car covering two or three townships.”
In addition to paying the off-duty sheriff`s police officers` salaries of $11.50 an hour, which the officers keep, residents of unincorporated areas must pay the county $2.72 an hour to cover the cost of gasoline, oil and insurance on the squad cars.
In contrast, five townships in Du Page County hire sheriff`s deputies for extra police protection at a cost of about $25 a hour, but so far feel the price is worth it. Most of the Du Page townships use revenue sharing funds to finance the costs but plan to ask for special tax levies if those funds are cut off, as expected.
In Cook County the hire-back program dates at least to 1972 when Norwood Park Township started the practice. Hire-back police work in regular county police cars and are dispatched by the sheriff`s office like on-duty police.
Worth currently pays $24,000 annually for the service. The cost is $29,999 for Norwood Park and $45,000 for Northfield. The number of police officers range from one in Norwood Park to six in Worth with hours varying from five to seven a day.
”I don`t know how many of our residents know they are paying three times for this service. I would think there would be a way to get more police in the unincorporated areas,” said Gregg Goslin, Northfield Township supervisor.
”We use the extra officers to maintain a high visibility against burglaries and vandalism.”
Anthony Martorelli, Norwood Park Township supervisor, said the extra police have cut the response time down from as much as an hour to less than a minute for his unincorporated area of 1,500 people.
”If Congress does away with revenue sharing we will have to decide whether to raise taxes to pay for this,” said Worth Township Supervisor Joseph McCarthy. ”If I lived in an unincorporated area, I would feel I couldn`t do without it because the protection is spread pretty thin without it. We have the second largest township in the county, going all the way from 87th Street on the north and Ashland Avenue on the east to the Will County line on the west and south.”
