West Cook News

The Oak Park village board recently approved an addition to a fairly regular ordinance within the village.

During a Dec. 5 village board meeting, discussed a regularly approved ordinance that allows the village police department to overhire officers. This ordinance allows for the hiring of a new officer when there is a vacancy related to a retirement, resignation, or long-term injury that leaves a vacancy on the force. The department only hires when they can make things work within the budget one way or another. The village has approved this every year since 2017 except for 2022.

"This is sometimes a common practice in police departments, police agencies, to ensure full strength of the positions that you already have on the force," Oak Park Village Manager Kevin Jackson said at the meeting. "So it's not necessarily hiring additional officers. It's to account for the vacancies that you have and to be able to achieve full strength is as much as you can by over hiring because typically you have and especially now we have more vacancies that are than are desirable." 

This year, the department was asking for the same authority within their community service officers force, based not on vacancies but on the success of their program. Community service officers are not sworn police officers and do not have authority or weapons, but can respond to calls from animal control or traffic enforcement. There was some board pushback from Trustee Susan Buchanan about adding more police officers as the goal from the George Floyd protests and BLM was to shrink sworn officer departments.

The purpose of the ability to expand the CSOs is to be able to immediately grow that program should the department and board approve of it. The department will continue to bring back reports from those officers and the community to the board for their recommendations on increasing, decreasing, or any other changes to the program. The overhiring ability would allow for immediate changes to occur, without any official amendments to the budget or having to wait until the next fiscal year. The board passed the ordinance with a majority vote.