After two years of planning and testing, and then a recent setback that led to revisions and more planning, a community policing program that was supposed to be launched in Arlington Heights this summer has been scaled back to an “experiment” that won’t get under way until October.
Police don’t view the setback as all that dramatic, noting that various aspects of community policing have been used in the village for years.
But the chance to start a comprehensive, villagewide program was knocked down after the municipality decided late last year, for financial reasons, against trying to hire nine new officers over the next three years.
The additional officers would have helped free up police to spend more time in the community helping to solve neighborhood problems and concentrating on crime prevention, rather than responding only to emergency calls, the traditional form of policing.
Instead, the department has shuffled its officers so that it can bring two additional officers to an experimental community policing district that will roughly encompass the middle third of the village, said Deputy Chief Ronald McClaskey.
The district, bounded by Palatine Road to the north and Sigwalt Street and Northwest Highway to the south, contains the village offices, downtown and a mix of businesses, housing and new construction.
“We’ll get a sampling of everything,” McClaskey said. “We need to see what the resource demand will be, and this way we’ll be able to project what the needs will be for the rest of the community.”
The experiment could run six months to a year, McClaskey said. Then the village would decide whether to expand the program.
To find out what the attitudes and priorities are among residents in the community policing district, police will hand out 1,200 surveys starting late next month, McClaskey said.
“You plug along every day thinking you’re addressing what’s important, but every once in a while you want to see what people are really concerned about,” McClaskey said.
A sign of trouble: No one is likely to love getting a traffic ticket, but few are likely to deal with it by scrawling profanities and satanic symbols in red ink on the citation.
Even fewer would then personally deliver the ticket to the police station.
But authorities say that is what Nicholas Bakakos, 19, recently did.
The Schaumburg teenager had been stopped as many as two dozen times in recent months by Hoffman Estates police, mostly for driving a car with window tinting that was too dark, according to court records. He had racked up a total of about 30 traffic violations since January, police said.
But rather than go to court or pay the fines in the most recent incidents, Bakakos marked up one of the citations with profanities and symbols such as the number 666, according to court records. Bakakos then hand-delivered the defaced citation to the Hoffman Estates Police Department, according to his attorneys. Bakakos also blew off his scheduled hearing in Traffic Court in May, court officials said.
Associate Judge Sam L. Amirante, who viewed the profanities and symbols as a veiled threat to police, charged Bakakos with indirect contempt of court and issued a warrant for Bakakos’ arrest. The teen was apprehended and spent two days in jail.
“I didn’t think what I did was illegal,” a contrite Bakakos said this week at the Rolling Meadows courthouse, where he appeared before Amirante to answer the contempt charge. At his side was the pricey defense team of Thomas Breen and Todd Pugh.
As a preemptive move, Bakakos had sent the court a letter of apology, which the judge read aloud.
“Never did I intend to threaten or cause alarm to anyone,” Bakakos stated in the letter, adding, “I handled myself in a completely inappropriate manner.”
The change in attitude apparently impressed the judge, who decided Bakakos’ actions were more immature than menacing. He dismissed the contempt charge.
The judge also said he dismissed the three traffic citations from April for which Bakakos initially had been summoned to court because the prosecutor for Hoffman Estates was not at the hearing.
Child-safety effort: The Hoffman Estates Police Department is upgrading a program it began several years ago by giving child car seats to residents who cannot afford them.
The department previously had loaned the safety seats to parents, asking that they be returned when the children outgrew them. But this year, Hoffman Estates bought 65 car seats that will be given to needy parents.
The department bought the seats for $2,000 out of a $10,000 donation it received from the Safeco Insurance Co. of America in Hoffman Estates.
Officers will install the safety seats, and parents who receive the seats also will be taught the right way to use them. For more information, call Sgt. Mike McCarthy at 847-882-1818.
