Joliet looks for answers on crime

The debate over police reforms in Joliet was briefly overtaken Tuesday by vocal concerns about expanding gun violence.

The Joliet City Council has not discussed a proposed citizens review board for the police department for months, but it has begun to face questions from residents who want something done about shootings in the city.

City officials last week attended a meeting of the Cathedral Area Preservation Association after being invited by residents concerned about gun violence. The meeting filled the First Presbyterian Church of Joliet. Nearly 150 people were in attendance.

Instead of responding to calls to defund police, city officials are beginning to talk about what they can do to put more police on the streets.

“I appreciate the dialog and the interest from my neighbors who want to keep their community safe,” Mayor Bob O’Dekirk, a resident of the Cathedral Area, said at the Tuesday meeting of the City Council.

Gun violence has been on the rise in the U.S. of late.

A few hours before the City Council meeting on the far West Side, an argument among three young men in their upper teens preceded a shooting that left one of them wounded and nearby vehicles and a house struck by bullets.

A few hours after the council meeting, a 37-year-old man was shot and wounded when he was standing on a second-story deck of a building on the East Side of the city.

Earlier in the week, 40-year-old Aaron E. Harris of Joliet was shot and killed in the parking lot outside the Cantigny Post 367 Veterans of Foreign Wars hall located in the center of town.

Harris was killed in a spray of gunfire that also hit several cars in the parking lot. One bullet passed through the wall of a house across the street where Miguel Ibarra was doing paperwork at a kitchen table when he heard the gunshots. The bullet burst through his kitchen wall above Ibarra’s head and penetrated a patio door window.

“It’s a quiet neighborhood,” Ibarra said the next day.

He said he felt fortunate not to be the victim of a stray bullet in the privacy of his own home.

Tuesday’s City Council meeting was the second in two weeks in which the public discussion session at the end of the meeting covered to crime and police.

One speaker was Karl Ferrell, a trustee on the Joliet Township board who has been an advocate for a police review board in Joliet. She criticized comments made at a July 6 meeting by O’Dekirk and Councilman Larry Hug that police were being handcuffed by reform measures.

“What we can’t have is our elected officials sitting here fearmongering people, saying things that aren’t true,” Ferrell said.

The aforementioned July 6 comments were made at a meeting in which Cathedral Area residents raised concerns about drive-by shootings in the neighborhood and invited the council to the neighborhood meeting to talk about crime.

“However, we can all agree the gun violence problems go well beyond policing,” Cathedral Area Preservation Association President Andrew Chemers told the City Council Tuesday.

Chemers’ list of suggestions included more community activities “to make an impression on our kids before they pick up a gun.”

However, he also said the city should build the Neighborhood Oriented Policing Team back to full strength because community policing at is an idea that has the backing of both those advocating police reforms and those seeking more crime control.

Councilwoman Jan Quillman replied that the NOPT squad was first developed in the 1990s during “a very violent time.”

“If nothing is done, people leave,” Chemers said. “They leave for towns and communities that support them.”