The fellow comfortably slapping high-fives with students in the halls of Highland Park High School was a sign of the times. During the last school year, Detective Steven Mueller of the Highland Park Police Department operated a small office at the high school, as police reached out to establish rapport with community youth.
The outreach was a stitch in time. Among the 1,500 students of Highland Park High, there have been few urban-style woes such as gang warfare, Mueller said. His liaison program wasn’t born of a reactive concern, “it was more proactive.”
But as the rumbling of social problems creeps in over the horizon, police departments across Lake County are finding themselves called upon to expand their roles into areas once foreign–that is, into social work.
“We’re not social workers, but we do have a lot of social work,” said Waukegan Police Department Deputy Chief McGill Juarez. “Law enforcement is evolving. Twenty years ago, you went out, you arrested them, you locked them up, and that was it. . . . Thirty years ago, you didn’t have to go to the police academy.” Police work now is “becoming more and more professionalized,” Juarez said, but it also is meeting new challenges.
In February, Waukegan began setting aside a five-hour period each Wednesday night for a crisis-intervention worker, Michael DiMarco. He would to go to the police department and conduct individual counseling sessions with people encountered by officers on their calls.
“Sometimes people use it (to) test out what counseling can offer,” said DiMarco, whose eight cases or so per month for the police department typically involve people who had never before had any kind of professional counseling. They include rebellious adolescents, couples involved in domestic violence, relatives of suicide victims, mental health patients who have stopped taking their medication.
DiMarco and two other counselors are on 24-hour call for crises encountered not only by the Waukegan department but by those in Round Lake Beach and Gurnee. The social services effort of which DiMarco is a part first began working with Lake County law enforcement in 1984-85 at Round Lake Beach.
Juvenile problems are particularly well suited to such counseling, according to David Hahn, who directs the three-community program in conjunction with Forest Hospital in Des Plaines. “We live in a time when I guess people believe that jails will solve the problem of crime. But with juveniles, that’s not true. At age 18, they’re back on the streets. . . . It’s been proven time and time again that preventive programs are more beneficial. It’s better to be proactive than reactive.”
Wednesdays are busy nights on the law enforcement counseling circuit. At the Grayslake Police Department, therapist Scott Stolarick comes in for two or three hours. The office set up for him is “a softer setting” than regulation police accommodations. “There’s a couch like you might find in a living room,” said Operations Cmdr. Matthew McCutcheon of Grayslake. The counseling service is offered without charge to the community at a cost of about $8,600 a year out of a total police department budget of approximately $2.2 million, according to McCutcheon.
The aim in Grayslake is to enhance community order and perhaps reduce police calls, McCutcheon said, but police outreach has an added relevance in a bedroom suburb. “The type of community that we provide law enforcement services for is primarily residential. . . . We have families, and that’s where we have to focus our efforts.”
Gang graffiti has begun appearing in Grayslake, and several active gang members have been found to live there. Most gang activity still involves outsiders passing through, McCutcheon said, but the 21 Grayslake police officers are forced to take note. “By definition, gangs exist to commit crimes,” he said. “If you have gangs, you’re going to have crime.”
Gangs also have been noticed by officer Fred Kliora of the Mundelein Police Department, who runs one of Mundelein’s two innovative Police Neighborhood Resource Centers. Kliora’s office, occupying a rehabbed apartment in the 2,000-occupant Whitehall Manor complex, where most residents are emigrants from Mexico, has had to deal with such problems as an automobile torched in a gang dispute. In past years, there also was repeated domestic violence, though this has been greatly reduced by police attention, Kliora said. Using an eclectic approach designed by Police Chief Ray Rose, Mundelein also makes use of a social worker, Victoria Fonseca, at its Oak Creek Plaza resource center.
“Over the past several years, it seems that police officers have been required to take on more social work responsibilities,” said James Rollin, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who focuses on how law enforcement issues overlap social problems. This can overburden the simpler role traditionally reserved for police officers in which “their only alternatives are to arrest or not to arrest,” he said. Often “they don’t have the training to solve long-term problems,” said Rollin, a police officer for 20 years.
One solution to this problem is for a police department to hire a full-time police social worker, serving in a rare specialty invented a generation ago by UIC professor Harvey Treger. He did extensive research on communities of 50,000 or less, launching pilot programs in police social work throughout the Chicago suburbs, which today probably have the world’s greatest concentration of the specialty. But the concentration is mostly outside Lake County and its booming new communities, where prevailing law enforcement philosophy tends to regard police social workers as frills.
Maria Rodriguez-Hallissey, president of the Chicago-area Association of Police Social Workers, said the association has a membership of about 60, yet the association’s current roster lists only one member working in Lake County. This is Jerry Zachar, a former clergyman who is the full-time police social worker at the Deerfield Police Department. “Here in Deerfield, we’ve had a long tradition of social workers working with the police department,” Zachar pointed out, recalling how former chief Richard Brandt helped found the tradition a quarter century ago, encouraging officers and social workers to take canoe trips with young people.
Handling much the same mix of cases as part-time counselors in other departments, Zachar also is able to conduct more intensive victim advocacy and day-to-day chores. On domestic violence cases, he works closely with A Safe Place, Lake County’s shelter for battered spouses. He has dealt with such tragedies as a woman who stood watching as her sister was killed by a passing train. “You are amazed at how many resources people do have within themselves to cope with situations,” Zachar said.
“Even though we may live in an affluent community,” he said, “the stresses people have in this community are a lot greater than a lot of people think.” Domestic violence is “a major problem here,” though victims may conceal their affliction. “In a way, they become more isolated because there’s a tremendous pride . . . so people stay locked into those situations a lot longer.”
Secret or not, the problems often wind up knocking at the same old door: “You just don’t see what goes on behind closed doors,” Zachar muses, “but the police department does.”
