By Marwa Eltagouri and Dennis Sullivan
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — The possible closure of the key police training facility in the Chicago region would leave departments across Cook and Will counties struggling to find new ways of providing necessary training to their officers.
North East Multi-Regional Training will be forced to close mid-November if the state doesn’t pay its share of the costs, said Philip Brankin, the unit’s executive director. The state-funded agency is responsible for training law enforcement personnel across 321 police agencies in the greater Chicago area.
The unit will have to close if it doesn’t receive its third-quarter payment from the state, which doesn’t look likely, Brankin said. He is still waiting on July’s first-quarter payment and October’s second-quarter payment. He predicts the closure will be temporary, lasting only until the budget stalemate ends. The training unit has 15 full-time unit employees, including Brankin.
“We don’t know how we can continue past November,” Brankin said. “It wouldn’t be a total, final closing, but a temporary one. I can’t even explain how bad it is.”
Illinois lawmakers recently approved a bill mandating additional law enforcement training — part of a response to fatal police encounters in cities such as Ferguson, Missouri, New York City and Baltimore.
Orland Park Police Lt. Joe Mitchell said NEMRT’s shutdown “is gonna be catastrophic for us,” adding the department had 16,000 training hours in 2014 and anticipated a similar number in 2015.
“It’s devastating for us,” said Mitchell, who oversees departmental training and is particularly concerned with the rise in mental health-related issues.
“People are in need,” Mitchell said, noting related calls have gone “from two to 24 to 71" since the shuttering of the Tinley Park Mental Health Center.
“It’s falling on us in law enforcement to handle things,” he said noting a recent tragic outcome involving a WWII veteran in Park Forest.
“We are seeing more and more people in mental crisis,” Mitchell said. “Good quality training is the answer to a lot of these issues.”
It also can head off legal difficulties, Mitchell added.
“We’ve got milliseconds to decide, where attorneys have years to analyze our decision.”
Tinley Park Police Chief Steve Neubauer, who said his department holds a monthly in-house training session, termed NEMRT “very, very critical and important to all police departments.
“We don’t have the expertise to train officers in all subjects,” Neubauer said, adding NEMRT trains individual officers on specialized issues, offers general training to larger groups and has necessary updates at little or no cost to police departments beyond their annual fee.
That, Neubauer said, allows the department to focus on serving and protecting the public. “Our mission is to put seats in police cars.”
About 100 classes were canceled for September and October due to lack of funding. These classes, some of which specialize in dealing with the mentally ill, proper use of force and sex crime investigations, are crucial for in-service police officers during a time of heightened tension between police and the communities they serve, Brankin said.
The training facility is one of 14 state-funded mobile units across the state, which together provided training to more than 57,000 officers in 2014. The Northern Illinois unit provides about 750 classes each year for 20,000 officers from police agencies in Cook, DuPage, Kane, Kendall, Will, Lake and McHenry counties, Brankin said.
The estimated $16 million allocated annually by the state for training comes from fines paid on traffic tickets and other convictions. But the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board can’t access the funds until Gov. Bruce Rauner signs off on a budget.
About 44 percent of the training facility’s budget comes from the state. Municipalities cover the rest by paying tuition for their officers, as well as receiving their regular salary while they attend the training programs, Brankin said.
Thomas Fleming, Executive Director of Training and Education, Cook County Sheriff’s Office, said the anticipated closing “already affected us a couple of months ago.
“They started canceling classes at the end of August,” he said, noting those classes included three 40-hour Crisis Intervention classes for which the department had signed 150 sheriff’s officers and 30 suburban patrol officers.
“The sheriff said it was important, so we paid $20,000 out of our own budget” for the first class.
Over in Joliet, Will County Sheriff’s Office Training Unit Supervisor Steve Formenti said the shutdown directly impacted in-service training because it prevented nine individuals from being trained as trainers “so the field training officers will have to keep training people without a break.”
There have been complaints, he said. “I’m trying to keep it (training) going.”
Among the most-recently canceled classes, for example, was one on autism. Brankin said officers need better training in how to identify, approach and work with people suffering from mental illness.
Often, people suffering from mental illness will end up in jail for a petty offense, when they should instead be placed into a medical system where they can get the help they need, police officials said.
Fleming agreed, saying the NEMRT Crisis Intervention class “gives officers great experience, makes them more aware.”
Recalling a scenario involving an individual holding a baseball bat, Fleming said, “Basically it tells me, ‘take a little step back and evaluate what’s going on. ... Slow down and back up; maybe deal with the person using some different technique.”
“The sheriff said it was important, so we paid $20,000 out of our own budget,” for the first class.
Fleming, who previously headed the Park Forest police department, said the sheriff’s office will be teaching a bare-bones version of Crisis Intervention in-house, at a cost of $12,000 for each of the two remaining classes.
He said the sheriff’s office, the second largest law enforcement agency in the state, is big enough to be able to continue its in-service training. But many small agencies depend on NEMRT for in-service training.
But Brankin reiterates how crucial his organization is to police training.
“If we can’t get this resolved, if this budget impasse continues, it will be detrimental,” Brankin said. “It’s crucial that these officers get training. This isn’t a partisan issue, it’s a citizen issue.”
Mitchell, however, likens it to an unfunded mandate. “They demand that we have the training and then shut down the training for us.”
Fleming, who represents Cook County Sheriff’ Tom Dart on the NEMRT board, hopes the organization’s administrative staff will remain in place. Even so, the temporary shutdown means “it will take several months to just get the ‘machine’ back up and going again.”
Fleming and Neubauer agree NEMRT’s closing hits smaller agencies particularly hard because they might lack the resources to supply their own training.
“Without these mobile training units, smaller downstate departments wouldn’t go to any training,” Neubauer said.
Neubauer said the NEMRT closure also hurts larger police departments that are “struggling to get officers to fill police cars.”
“We sure hope that they (the state politicians) can work through this and figure this out,” Formenti said.
Fleming agreed. “You can’t let NEMRT go dark,” he said.
Copyright 2015 the Chicago Tribune