One would think that it takes a great leap of faith for a police department to allow the people it serves to play at cops for three hours a week, particularly if that playing involves expensive equipment and live ammunition. Wouldn’t the potential liability be enormous?
“Doesn’t matter,” said Waukegan Police Chief Scott Burleson, whose department already has given 25 people the run of the place one night every week. “A police department, and especially a large police department like ours, is such a liability nightmare anyway that there’s really nothing we can do to make it worse.”
It looks like Burleson and his officers are trying, though. During the 10-week inaugural run of the Waukegan Citizen Police Academy earlier this year, participants were allowed–even encouraged–to drive squad cars, ask snoopy questions, poke around the station and, honest, fire off live rounds in the station’s firing range.
Everybody lived to tell about it. Now another group is involved in a second round, and applications are being accepted for yet another session early next year.
The academy was created to foster good will and understanding between police and the people they serve by giving everybody on both sides ample opportunity to watch the other in action. The first group of people enrolled in the academy received 30 hours of instruction in virtually all aspects of policing.
The concept of the citizen police academy comes from England, where the London Metropolitan Police started the first such program in 1977. The idea came to this side of the pond in 1985, when Orlando gave it a try. Academies have been spreading ever since.
The 25 citizens chosen for the first academy class were carefully screened by the officers in charge of the program. They were all over 21, had no felony convictions and were considered to be of “good moral character.”
Aside from Jerry Johnson, mayor of North Chicago, all of the students lived or worked in Waukegan. More than 100 applicants had to be put on a waiting list.
First and foremost, the academy was about revealing the truth behind the oft-unkind rumors and assumptions that many people make about police and their work.
Burleson was candid in his opening remarks to students, admitting, for example, that police–his and everybody else’s–have been known to get rough with suspects . . . but only rarely and not nearly as often as many people think. Officers are severely reprimanded for such lapses, he said.
“And then there’s the situation when you see a squad car drive up to an intersection and turn his lights on so he can drive through a red light and then turn them off when he gets to the other side,” Burleson said. “Lots of people think, `Oh, he’s in a hurry to get to the next doughnut shop,’ or something. What that really means is that he’s responding to a crime in progress and doesn’t want to warn the bad guy that he’s coming by using his siren. He wants to get there quietly so he can catch him.”
This and other tidbits of policing wisdom were the staples of the weekly classes.
Topics included officer selection and training, the 911 system, gangs, juvenile law, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, police weapons and use of force, drug enforcement, canine operations, cultural diversity training, community policing, driving-under-the-influence laws and a mock investigation, including crime-scene processing and evidence collection.
“We hope to make this the best gang in town,” Sgt. Lou Tessman, the academy’s chief instructor, said of academy students. “We’re covering a little bit of pretty much everything we do here in the police department.”
In many ways, Waukegan is an ideal city for such a program, Tessman said. A diverse, complex, satellite city and county seat, Waukegan has most of the same strengths and weaknesses as such larger cities as Chicago and Milwaukee but is small enough that anybody with a little curiosity can get to know it well.
“This is a big city, and there are a lot of things going on here,” Burleson told the students. “Waukegan is the ninth-largest city in the fourth-largest state. Sometimes we forget just how big Waukegan is.”
Census figures may put Waukegan’s population at slightly less than 70,000, but because of a combination of growth and the constant presence of outsiders doing business in the city, up to 100,000 people may be in town on any given day, Burleson said.
Guest speakers from outside the police department made many of the presentations at the academy. Jeff Pavletic, deputy Lake County state’s attorney, talked about the criminal justice system, for instance.
“The program adds to the community’s knowledge of how all the branches of law enforcement work together, and I think anything that can educate the community in that way is valuable,” Pavletic said of the academy.
Pavletic’s lecture covered everything his office does, including issuing warrants, trial procedures, civil rights, grand jury procedures and the relationship between the state’s attorney’s office and the police departments of Lake County.
One elected official who made time to go through the academy said the experience provided him with exactly the knowledge he was looking for.
“I wanted to get more insight into how police departments are run because I knew that I was going to have to deal with policing issues as mayor,” said Jerry Johnson, 46, mayor of North Chicago.
“I got everything I went for and then some,” Johnson said. “I would hope that sometime in the future North Chicago could offer an academy of its own.”
Deborah Goldberg, 42, a criminal defense attorney who owns a law practice in Waukegan, is accustomed to the theoretical realm of law, wherein principles are generally put before practical matters. She was amazed to find that many people take the opposite view.
Many of her classmates said they had no problem with laws that give police the right to delve more deeply into everyday life–laws governing such issues as loitering, privacy and self-expression, for instance–if that’s what it takes to make the world a safer place for most people.
“It certainly strengthened my opinion that I’m in an `Us-versus-Them’ profession,” Goldberg said. “But I did get to see the human side of the police. They don’t all have horns and tails. I still don’t believe that the end necessarily justifies the means, though.”
“This will probably become a permanent offering,” Tessman said of the academy. “I’ve enjoyed it, all of the other officers and guests who have participated in the program have enjoyed it, and there’s no question that the demand from potential students is there.”
