In an attempt to preempt crime and reach out to a growing Hispanic population, Mundelein police plan to open a substation in a village apartment complex this spring, underscoring a national trend toward adopting such traditionally urban policing measures in suburbia.
One police officer will be stationed full-time at Whitehall Manor, a 22-year-old apartment complex near Butterfield Road and U.S. Highway 45. The project will also involve educators and social service workers to help Hispanic immigrants adapt to life in the United States.
“Our goal is to empower the people to deal with their community,” Mundelein Police Chief Raymond Rose said Monday. “Rather than having a divided community, we need to start pulling together.”
The complex was chosen because of its large Hispanic population, the apartment residents’ perception of crime and the presence of gangs and crime, Rose said.
“It’s time for us to deal with it,” Rose said. “If we don’t go in there now . . . we’re going to end up losing it.”
On Monday, Rose was unable to provide statistics or other information about the level of crime in the complex.
Gang members live in the complex, and residents are fearful about letting their children play outdoors or in the parking lots, he said.
But residents interviewed at the complex and its general manager disagreed Tuesday.
During the three years he has lived in the complex, Roberto Dominguez, 38, said he has had the tires of his car slashed and eggs thrown on his van, but he has never been afraid for his safety.
“For the people, it’s not a problem,” he said. “It’s only for the property.”
Alfonso Vergara, 35, has lived in the complex for six months with his wife and five children. The violence in the complex is no worse than anywhere else these days, he said.
“I hear more about killings in Chicago,” he said.
The apartment complex was the site, however, of a gruesome murder a year ago, when Carelino Galicia killed Roberta Martinez by stabbing her 44 times. He was convicted of the killing in January.
Joe Seraphine, Whitehall’s general manager, said he is glad to work with the police to provide services to the complex’s approximately 900 residents, half of whom are Hispanic.
But he added, “We don’t have any gangs in here.”
Illegal immigrants are especially afraid to call police for fear they will be deported, said Anita Garza, executive director of La Puerta Abierta, a social service agency that helps Hispanic immigrants and will likely be involved with the Whitehall project. Residents of complexes often are reluctant to complain for fear they will be evicted, she added.
Mundelein’s project offers an example of so-called community policing, a technique that has been used in cities for decades and now is being tried in suburbs.
“What chiefs are trying to do in most towns is say, `Hey, meet this officer.’ And you can only meet them if they are working in a small area,” said Gerald Arenberg, executive director of the National Assocation of Chiefs of Police and a former Cook County sheriff’s deputy.
“We had the Rodney King affair, and not only Rodney King, we had this them-against-us thing,” he said. “But actually we are neighbors. We just have a uniform.”
The effort is working because officers get direct contact with residents in a way they could not when they were simply patrolling communities in their cars, he said.
There has been one problem with the effort: money.
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Many communities cannot afford to establish sub-stations, and some that do cannot maintain them.
Waukegan offers a case in point.
Similar sub-stations were set up at the Genesse Housing complex two years ago, and in the Washington Park complex last year, said Lt. Miguel Juarez, of the Waukegan Police Gang Unit.
The Genesee program lasted about a month. The Washington Park program lasted about two weeks.
“It works except we don’t have the manpower to maintain it year-round,” Juarez said.
Rolling Meadows also has experimented with the concept. The Police Neighborhood Resource Center opened in the East Park complex in 1991, is considered a success by its founders.
The center was set up because traditional policing-stepping up patrols and arrests-were not working, said Timothy Lonergan, Rolling Meadows deputy police chief.
“What it didn’t do was help us look at a culture within our population that needed to be addressed in a different fashion than we were addressing the Anglo culture,” he said.
Before the center opened, 42 percent of all 911 calls came from the complex, Lonergan said. After the first year, that figure fell to 15 percent.