One day after Country Club Hills officials received a report that said 10 part-time police officers hired last year aren’t qualified to do police work, the city council voted Thursday night to make eight of them community service officers instead.
One officer recently was fired and another resigned, Mayor Dwight Welch said.
The officers are to turn in their guns and badges, effective immediately. They will remain part-time employees and will be paid the same as they were as police officers.
“The council felt it was fair because they have families and didn’t create the program,” Welch said.
One of the officers, Derrick Singleton, is the husband of Ald. Cynthia Singleton (1st Ward), who was the only alderman to vote against the measure.
As community service officers, the employees will have to go through background, polygraph and physical fitness tests, a process that could take six to eight weeks, Welch said. They also will have to be approved and interviewed by the city’s police and fire commission, which wasn’t the case when they were hired as police officers.
They will be on duty as community service officers in the interim.
Welch, who was the city’s public safety director when the hirings took place, said it wouldn’t have been fair to fire the officers.
“You don’t knee-jerk in the government or the private sector,” he said. “You knee-jerk, and you’ve got problems.”
The report, by Lansing consulting firm REM Management, said the part-time officers do not understand their roles and don’t know whether they are prepared to perform police work.
It said background investigations of the officers were incomplete, the officers are not properly trained, and that three of the officers said their favorite part of the job is “the fact they can now carry a firearm.”
“The Country Club Hills part-time officer program, as it exists, is a failure due to the lack of proper management by the (former) chief of police,” the report said.
The report recommended that the city council end the part-time police program. Welch said after Thursday’s meeting the city will look into hiring REM to develop a new part-time police program and review the entire police department.
The report was issued about two weeks after the SouthtownStar revealed that many of the part-time officers have questionable backgrounds. They have been arrested for everything from theft to driving a stolen car.
Many of the officers’ job applications did not list their brushes with the law, the SouthtownStar analysis found. They also bypassed the city’s police and fire commission, which tests, interviews and investigates all full-time police officer and firefighter candidates.
Instead, former city inspector general and police chief Regina Evans’ husband, Ronald Evans, initialed documents saying he investigated some of their backgrounds — long after they were selected and trained, according to police documents.
Payroll records show the officers, who carry guns and drive city cars, have made about $336,000 since June 2010.
According to the report, Evans, who went on sick leave in August, did not respond to REM Management. She created the program and controlled all aspects of the hiring process with little or no help from anyone else.
Welch said he was not involved in the hiring process, but records show he, Evans and city treasurer Michael Gleason signed a document for a federal grant that covered the hiring of three of the officers.
The report states that there was no record regarding the job description, selection, testing and interviewing of the officers.
Documentation of the polygraph tests for five of the 10 part-time officers was missing, the report states. No application records were provided for three officers.
Part-time officer Sean Girard Charles, 32, of Somonauk, had been fired from his prior three jobs and this was never investigated, the report stated. It says that the admission of drug use by several officers in their polygraph tests is “troubling.”
Most of the officers have not been provided with training for “pursuit driving, use of force, and juvenile training,” among other city or department policies, the report says. Their lack of training could put the city in legal jeopardy, the report said.
