A total of 21 Skokie citizens and seven police officers recently participated in the third and final part of a Skokie Police Department program on procedural justice, a workshop intended to foster better understanding between community members and law enforcement officials, organizers say.
Sponsored by the Center For Public Safety and Justice in partnership with the U.S. Department of Justice COPS Office, the program is available to any law enforcement department, officials said.
“The ultimate goal of the community workshop is to lay the foundation for building mutual trust, enhancing the community’s perspective of police legitimacy and lessening the ‘us vs. them’ attitude that can exist between law enforcement and the communities they serve,” the organizers say.
Before the June 16 event, previous Skokie workshops on procedural justice were held for supervisors in August 2016 and for frontline officers in August 2017, Skokie police Chief Tony Scarpelli said.
“The strategy in rolling it out was to first bring it out to command staff and supervisory staff,” Scarpelli said. “A lot of this has been our operational philosophy for years, but it’s good to refresh and train.”
The three-hour final piece in June included conversations, activities and video discussions with the idea of “mutual learning,” organizers said.
Scarpelli said that those in attendance were broken into groups of four that included three citizens and an officer. The citizens were selected by invitation as a cross-section of the community, he said.
Skokie is one of the most diverse communities in the state and so the department made sure participating citizens reflected varied ethnicities, ages and genders, he said.
“We actually had a round table discussion about how we could come up with a broad-based group of people to participate,” Scarpelli said. “We reached out to different communities.”
Organizers will deliver a report on the workshop to the Skokie department, but Scarpelli said he got a peek at the written feedback that citizens left. It was overwhelmingly positive, he said, and in keeping with the high marks the department regularly receives when the village disseminates its independent citizen survey on all aspects of village life every three years.
The main pillars of procedural justice revolve around fairness in processes, transparency in actions, opportunity for voice, and impartiality in decision making, Scarpelli said.
Among many exercise topics was a focus on citizen expectations and perceptions about police when they’re called to a scene and vice versa.
One citizen commented that he saw four squad cars down the block and he asked an officer what was going on, Scarpelli recounted. He expected the officer to explain, but instead, the citizen reported, he was told that everything was fine and he should go back inside.
The officer at the workshop chimed in and said that if there is an immediate situation at hand, it may not be the time to stop for an update.
Scarpelli said the workshop resulted in this kind of mutual understanding where each party learned what the other was perceiving. Skokie police try to be as transparent as possible, he said, which is why the department’s website includes information for the public.
Once Skokie police learned the program was available, Scarpelli said they contacted the Department of Justice and set up dates. It is federally funded so there is no cost to the village.
But he said it is definitely worthwhile.
“Of critical importance is to be serving the community appropriately and to make sure we’re doing that in the best way possible with professionalism and best practices,” the police chief said.
