The Woodfield Gardens apartment complex is almost a town unto itself.
Wedged up against Illinois Highway 53 and Algonquin Road, the 19-building complex houses 2,500 residents, including 650 children. Its manager, Michelle Washington, even calls herself the complex mayor and refers to the maintenance crew as the public works department.
It also has special police protection needs, which the new Rolling Meadows Community Policing Center, 2150 Plum Grove Rd., is designed to meet.
Recently, for instance, the four-month-old center coordinated a bike safety seminar at the complex’s recreation center at the request of Woodfield Gardens officials, who saw children riding carelessly around the parking lot. There also are plans to hold a child ID day.
These efforts are part of Rolling Meadows’ community policing program, which makes partners of residents and brings police closer to the neighborhoods they serve.
“That is what we want,” said officer Mark Mrozek, coordinator of the Plum Grove Road center. “This concept will probably take years for residents to grasp, but we want to create a dialogue and get people moved from in front of the TV and involved in the community. The purpose of this office is to get people to help us help them.”
“When people see a police car, they associate it with a problem,” Washington said. “Here, the police are working with management, and we see it as a good thing because they are willing to address our concerns.”
The new office sits between Papa John’s Pizza and Robert William Hair Design in the Plum Grove Shopping Center, the same strip mall where a Plum Grove Liquors store clerk was killed during a robbery two years ago.
Though officials say there is no major crime problem in the area, the mere presence of police there has deterred robbery in the strip mall, business owners said.
“It makes us feel a lot safer with them right next door,” said Rob Poynton, manager of Papa John’s Pizza. “There had been a couple of robberies at the liquor store here in the mall, but I haven’t heard anything happening in the shopping center since they moved in.”
With a staff of volunteers as well as police officers, the Plum Grove center is one of three “zone offices” to open in Rolling Meadows.
The second office is inside Harris Bank, 3255 Kirchoff Rd., in the downtown area. There, policing needs include patrolling businesses and serving some of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, where elderly homeowners live and repair fraud runs high.
The heralded Police Neighborhood Resource Center, which opened seven years ago in the East Park Apartments, was the first of the substations. The southeast side center, also housing a health clinic with social service workers, has dramatically reduced crime and gang activity in the cluster of apartment complexes surrounding it.
The coverage area of the Plum Grove center also includes a few commercial centers, many condominiums and the “Gold Coast” of Rolling Meadows, where homes costing up to $500,000 sit back from wooded, winding roads.
There, problems of property crimes and speeding traffic are major concerns.
“I live right across the street (from the center) in a town home community,” said Bartlett High School teacher Carol Thompson, a resident of Meadow Edge Town Homes, who decided to volunteer at the center.
She said many residents there are single, working women, who are concerned that the subdivision could be the target of burglaries during the day.
“We have talked about starting a Neighborhood Watch but to have the police right across the street is terrific,” Thompson said.
Residents can also get bike licenses, city vehicle stickers and information on other city services at the community policing office, open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday.
