Evanston Police Department’s Community Policing Unit hosted its second City Beat meeting Wednesday night, offering the eight Evanston residents in attendance insight on citywide crime trends.
City Beat meetings are held on the third Wednesday of each month and are designed to help attendees meet their ward officers, learn preventative strategies to keep their community safe and share solutions to deter crime in Evanston. EPD began hosting the meetings in October.
Sgt. Tosha Wilson said the CPU wants Evanston residents to know what’s going on all across the city, not just in their immediate vicinity.
CPU also hopes Evanston residents will appreciate the transparency of these meetings, Wilson said. The information presented is intended to give residents an understanding of how EPD’s resources are allocated and why it might take time for them to address certain requests if there are other, more urgent matters at hand, she said.
Officers Adam Howard and Julio Puma spoke about common crimes in the city, such as bike, package and motor vehicle thefts.
They said motor vehicle thefts become a larger problem when it gets colder outside; people tend to leave cars unattended to let them warm up, sometimes with their keys in the car.
The officers listed four things for residents to keep in mind for November — staying alert for package thefts, following the “9 o’clock routine,” driving sober and carrying flashlights at night. The “9 o’clock routine” is EPD’s name for a national safety campaign to remind people to lock their homes and cars so they aren’t vulnerable to burglaries.
Evanston resident Cheryl Kennedy said she attended the meeting after graduating from the Community Police Academy on Tuesday. The CPA is a 12-week program that gives participants the chance to learn how EPD works through weekly classes.
Kennedy is the secretary of her homeowners association and said she plans to include information from the meeting in the HOA newsletter she sends out.
“What’s really important to me is to be able to not just learn, but to also share that information with my neighbors so that we’re all diligent and aware of what’s going on,” Kennedy said.
Evanston resident Kristi Rowe, who is treasurer of the same HOA, said the meeting was “informative” for her. She said she also plans to tell her neighbors the tips she learned about how to prevent crime in their neighborhood.
Kennedy appreciates that EPD looks to hire officers who are “community-minded” and “protector-minded,” especially in light of recent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in Evanston, she said.
Wilson said ICE’s presence in Evanston was a concern people brought up at the first City Beat meeting on Oct. 15.
At the Wednesday meeting, an attendee asked if Ring, which is sometimes used to provide evidence of crimes, had any connection with the surveillance technology company Flock Safety. The city previously had a contract with Flock for its license plate readers. However, the city terminated the contract after public outcry and an audit from the Illinois Secretary of State’s office alleging Flock violated state law by allowing U.S. Customs and Border Protection to access data from license plate cameras in Illinois.
Cmdr. Ryan Glew assured the resident that, regardless of Ring’s relationship with Flock, EPD’s Flock program is as “dead as Julius Caesar.” Still, Glew suggested people look into their Ring settings to see if Flock has any access to their video footage if they are concerned.
CPU rounded off its meeting with an officer spotlight of detective Cortez Maxwell. For Maxwell, EPD’s investment in community policing drew him to the unit.
“That’s what policing is all about, the community policing aspect,” Maxwell said. “At the end of the day, the foundation is community policing… we get things solved by community. If you’ve got good relationships, they tell you things.”
When he first arrived at EPD, Maxwell said, he noticed how interested the Evanston community was in being involved with the police department.
Wilson said the department hopes people become accustomed to attending meetings and learning about what’s going on in Evanston, especially Northwestern students who may not leave campus often.
“We want you to know our faces when you see us. You can call us by name,” Wilson said. “It just makes community policing a whole lot easier when the police know the community, and vice versa.”
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