Roll Call. Weitzel to discuss pros and cons of the SAFE-T Act at January forum

The SAFE-T Act, which stands for Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today Act, as I’m sure you know, was passed by the Illinois legislature in 2022 and upheld as lawful by the Illinois Supreme Court, setting the stage for the bill to become law in 2023. While I opposed many of the bond provisions in the SAFE-T Act, there also are many good pieces of legislation in the overall act itself.

Why am I mentioning this? Because at 7 p.m. Jan. 18, 2024, I will participate in a panel discussion sponsored by the League of Women Voters of the La Grange Area. The discussion will be at the Brookfield Public Library, 3541 Park Ave. in Brookfield. The 90-minute talk also will feature Cook County Public Defender Sharone Mitchell. There will be time to answer questions from the audience.

There is no argument about the act. The Illinois Supreme Court has upheld it, it is the law and we must deal with it. During the public forum, I plan to discuss the SAFE-T Act, how it came to be and its effects on police operations and overall public safety. I strongly advocate for having an independent auditor monitor the SAFE-T Act bond procedure in the court systems in Cook County and throughout the state.

Let me give you some background on my opposition to the SAFE-T Act. Much discussion on this state statute was held while I was still the police chief in Riverside. During that time, I was a long-term member of the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police Legislative Committee and had been on the committee since I was appointed chief in 2008. I initially was opposed to how the law was passed and never before in our legislature had lawmakers conspired to put such an all-encompassing and vital piece of legislation up for a vote in the early morning hours. This 700-page-long bill was passed at 5 a.m. and many state legislators said they had not even read the entire legislation but voted for it anyway, which was inconceivable.

I opposed it, as did the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police. We lobbied to pass trailer bills to clarify and change the statute’s language, which did happen. Two trailer bills were floated and there were some changes to the final legislation that the Illinois Supreme Court upheld.

During the panel discussion in January, along with presenting my opposition to parts of the bill, I plan to discuss some of the good aspects of the criminal reform statute. For example, the mandated body cameras and increased training were excellent ideas. However, typical of Illinois government, no initial funding came with those program initiatives. The training requirement was so massive that police agencies could not get all their officers trained in the initial period allotted by the state statutes. Many small police departments throughout the state could not meet the mandates.

Topics of public safety interest to be discussed during the forum will include the electronic monitoring program, more detention for domestic violence abusers and more diversion programs for mental illness and substance abuse, among other subjects of importance. I plan on touching on the notion that mental health professionals should respond to all calls involving mental health crisis – cases for which the police typically would receive the 911 call.

This is a terrible idea. The police and mental health workers need to respond, have training and get the funding to make these initiatives work. Currently, few police agencies in Illinois do this and there is little funding for that initiative despite overwhelming public support for the program. The complexity of this issue needs to be understood more fully via in-depth discussion and planning. I will explain how it is currently not working, how it can work and how politicians sometimes like to put up political bullet points that sound good for media clips but are almost impossible to implement.

The jury is still out on whether the SAFE-T Act will live up to its billing by its proponents. The only way to truly measure the efficacy of this law would be to have an independent auditor examine all requests to detain violent offenders throughout the state of Illinois, documenting both what the individuals were arrested for and the number of individuals who were released at their initial bond hearing due to a judge ruling that they were not a “public safety risk.”

What is not considered is how many of these individuals never even make it to the bond court in the first place. The provisions in the SAFE-T Act allow police officers on the street to now ticket individuals for actions that were once criminal offenses, book them on misdemeanors or Class 4 felonies and release them immediately from the police station.

Unless police departments keep 100% accurate data, we will never know the number of arrests and releases or the long-term effects on public safety.

The event is free and open to the public. I will answer questions and share my perspective. I hope you will be there. More information can be found at www.LaGrangeAreaLWV.org.

• Tom Weitzel was chief of the Riverside Police Department. Follow him @chiefweitzel.