Representatives from two state organizations have teamed up to tour the state and talk about ways to improve police and community relations. Their latest stop was in Rockford Tuesday night.
Robert Moore of the Illinois NAACP and Ed Wojcicki of the Association of Police Chiefs want community and police relations to improve, especially among black Americans.
They presented specific principles at this week's community meeting. Principles outline mutual action steps that hinge on getting officers and residents to understand behavior better.
“We're doing a proactive situation. We can get proactive and we don't have to clean up the mess if that comes along down the path,” said Moore, a former law enforcement officer and U.S. Marshal in the Winnebago County area.
Moore said the focus of their presentations, or so-called World Café, balance on training for police and community members. “Get the information, [don’t] bring [your] personal information, you know, instances to the process. We can't get bogged down, that's all we would be listening to if we allowed that to happen,” he said.
The partners said this is the first time a law enforcement agency and civil rights organization has collaborated in such a way.
Ed Wojcicki is the executive director of the Illinois Association of Police Chiefs. He said they hope to consolidate definitive action steps proposed by attendees in their statewide meetings in the future. He said he and Moore are aware of historic mistrust in the Rockford area, but said there’s still commonalities to be acknowledged.
“We do know that Rockford has had its share of contentious incidents between police and people in the community, and that they’ve been highly publicized," he said. “I'll just tell you what I believe. I can't solve the big macro issues here. But what we can do is to help people understand one another, help people understand what their aspirations are,” said Wojcicki, noting that each party wants safer streets.
Attendees talked about miscommunications and solutions like how to file a complaint with the department and how to sign up to be an officer to address diversity in the workforce.
“We can't solve all problems. We're here as a tool,” said President Rhonda Greer of Rockford’s NAACP branch.
Greer said relations can improve if questions are asked and answered, like what procedures and policies are in place for a particular occurrence.
“And how if you have a problem, how to follow the procedures, everything has procedures. And we just want the community to know that these preset procedures are important,” she said.
Civilians and officers sat side by side at round tables at Rockford Art Museum filling out worksheets meant to encourage concrete recommendations for changes and next steps. Tommie Billingslea of Rockford said he was encouraged to see discussion about de-escalation policies because he said mental health can be a factor in tense interactions, like traffic stops.
“I like the fact that I'm getting de-escalation training, teaching the community de-escalation on how to deal with police officers,” said Billingslea.
Police Chief Danieal O’Shea attended. He said his department adopted these specific principles shortly after they were published in 2018. He said Rockford officers also receive annual training that encourage engagement and include implicit bias courses.
O’Shea said comments made about mistrust at Tuesday’s meeting come as no surprise.
“It's things that we hear. And sometimes people won't follow through, us included. We're not perfect. We're trying to work with the community to eliminate the mistrust. We want mutual trust, not mistrust,” he said.
He says rebuilding mutual trust is a "long, hard road" but progress has been made.
“We have 100 different community events a year. But sometimes there's only two people there. Sometimes there's 300 people there,” said the chief about engagement. “I would love for every one of them to have 300 people. We have 300 police officers in a city of 150,000 people. I've said it before, as I say it all the time, 300 police officers are not going to solve the problems of Rockford,” he said.
The World Café meeting comes at a time when the City Of Rockford released updated crime data visualizations. O’Shea said data shows violent crime is down 16%.
“Robberies, I believe, are down about 20%; burglaries, around about the same. So we're succeeding, but the only way we're succeeding is because the community is coming out working with us providing information to us,” he said.
Chief O’Shea said numbers don’t quantify overall feelings of safety in Rockford.
“It's tough, because there's a lot of violent crimes still around. A lot of gunfire. And every day, you hear gunfire in your neighborhood, it doesn't matter what the numbers are. If you hear gunfire every day, you're not feeling safe. And our goal is to knock it down to where we feel safe. And we can work on quality of life issues after that,” he said.
