The 3-year-old girl stared with a sullen face at her father, a scruffy, long-haired man about to be led from his dingy, smoke-filled apartment to be charged for allegedly possessing a marijuana pipe, endangering a child and allowing several teenagers to drink in his home on Troy Lane.
The child looked on as police corralled underage drinkers in the kitchen after pulling them from a closet, the officers working around her two young siblings in the apartment strewn with many more half-empty beer bottles than children’s toys.
It was 3 a.m. in Lombard, and for the first time all night the usually unblinking eye of Joelyn Kott’s video camera paused. The camera slumped from her shoulder momentarily as Kott watched the little girl from just a few feet away.
“My heart is breaking,” she said.
Kott, Lombard’s communications and marketing director, has spent many recent nights filming police work for a show she said may be changing the way Lombard thinks about local cable television.
“On the Street,” which began airing this year on Lombard Cable Television 6, may be the first area example of a local program that gives viewers a look at their hometown police officers in the on-the-fly style made popular by some real-life police shows on network TV. Kott said Lombard’s cable provider, MediaOne, has no similar programs running on any of its 84 franchises in the Chicago area.
The show’s 30 minutes are a significant change from the rebroadcasts of council meetings and scrolling village and library news that typify local cable material. The program offers a glimpse of Lombard’s very own doing their work at all times of day and night, from mundane tasks like writing speeding tickets to on-the-job humor that arose from the arrest of a 62-year-old, switchblade-carrying waitress who allegedly was drunk behind the wheel.
The show appears to be catching on, if those in and around Kott’s filming on a recent night are any indication. As she filmed police calming a woman who had been followed by her ex-husband to a grocery, one checkout clerk noticed Kott and explained the event to a co-worker.
Even the handcuffed teens in William Wolters’ Troy Lane apartment knew what the video camera meant. “I think we’re going to be on Channel 6,” one said.
Soon, Kott was off on another call, riding shotgun with Lombard Police Sgt. David Kundrot, an 11-year veteran of the beat. Kott, the daughter of a retired police officer and the wife of a Geneva police detective, rolled tape as police combed downtown Lombard for a burglary suspect who had fled from a store owner responding to an alarm at his business.
“With the other shows that we do, we know who the guests are, we know what they’re going to say and what we’re going to be doing,” Kott said as Kundrot’s car crept through the still streets. “But with this, everything is unplanned. We never know what we’re going to get or what we’ll be dealing with.”
Police were unable to find the burglar, discovering only a broken window and a footprint. Kundrot was surprised to hear that the owner of the business had spoken to the suspect and allowed him to leave after the burglar claimed to have been inside the store as a good citizen to investigate the break-in.
Getting police footage is just the beginning of the work Kott and partner Greg Rowe do for the show, and it takes about eight sessions riding along with police with at least one single-person camera crew to get the needed amount of tape. After compiling all the video of officers from roll calls to late-night bookings, it takes six hours or more of editing at a MediaOne facility in Oak Park to produce one episode.
Rowe narrates portions of the program. Inappropriate language is censored and the faces of those who are not charged with crimes are scrambled.
The idea for “On the Street” came from Lombard Deputy Chief Dane Cuny, who jokingly suggested it to Kott late last year as a way for the village to get to know its Police Department. He said the program is becoming popular because it’s real, showing police work as sometimes tense and unglamorous.
Calls about the program from Lombard residents are almost always positive, Kott said, with just a few complaints from those who think the show presents the village as unsafe. Cuny said his officers are among its biggest fans.
“I think by far the majority here wants the public to see what they do,” he said. “So they can see what it’s like to be an officer out on the street, with people in your face and the other things you handle.”
Kott and Rowe are halfway through production of their third program.
