A recent review of homeless-related calls for police service in La Grange raised no red flags, officials said, despite some residents’ concerns that the location of a program that provides daytime services to homeless people poses safety risks in their neighborhood.
At a village board meeting last week, Police Chief Michael Holub said that after analyzing calls for service between January and August, police narrowed down the number of possible homeless-related calls to 74 incidents. Of those, only 30 to 35 actually involved a homeless person and about 40 percent of those calls were linked to one man who has lived in the area his whole life, Holub said.
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“When we first talked about this it was little difficult for me to give you a definitive answer on the number of calls because homelessness is not a crime,” he said. “It’s not a crime category. It’s not a police response category. And things involving people that are displaced or in need of services are spread over a wide spectrum of our calls.”
Holub said police set wide parameters to identify homeless-related incidents, looking at specific locations — including the La Grange Public Library and the Emmanuel Episcopal Church, where day services are provided — as well as calls about panhandling, shoplifting, disturbances and more.
“Unless we see an increase we probably won’t change anything that we’re doing,” Holub said in an interview. “People just didn’t believe what we’re telling them.”
The review of calls was prompted by a petition circulated last winter that cited “increase in homeless services and the homeless clients they have attracted to the La Grange area,” as cause for safety concerns in recent years.
In March, Village Board President Thomas Livingston said trustees would consider setting aside funding for a new police officer whose primary responsibility would be enforcing the village’s anti-loitering law and that the police department would begin to track data related to homeless crimes.
“I’d like to thank all parties for their engagement and their patience as we look at this issue particularly as it relates to the compassionate treatment of those less fortunate along with the comfort and safety of our residents,” Livingston said at the meeting. “I think we’re still a work in progress here in terms of a resolution.”
While Holub said police didn’t find anything “striking” about the nature of the calls, Caroline Dillon, a La Grange resident who helped start the petition, said she wasn’t comforted by the data.
Her concern and that of other residents, Dillon said, is the location of the program run by BEDS Plus Care, which added the daytime program at Emmanuel church in 2011.
“I have little kids and I moved to the suburbs because I want them to ride their bikes around the block and draw chalk on the sidewalk,” said Dillon, who lives in the 200 block of South Catherine Avenue. The church is located on the corner of West Elm and South Catherine avenues.
She added that as recently as about two weeks ago, she was walking toward Cossitt Avenue Elementary to meet her kids for lunch and came across a woman cradling a baby doll and talking to it.
“I’m 46. I know how to handle that. My kids don’t,” Dillon said. “I appreciate that they need services … I’m just asking you not to put their needs and their rights above the people and the kids who live on that block and around the neighborhood.”
Tina Rounds, executive director at BEDS Plus, said the nonprofit agency has been searching for a new permanent location in the area that isn’t in a residential neighborhood but that it could take two years for them to move.
“We’re working on that and we do have some progress but nothing official yet,” Rounds said.
She added that the nonprofit, which hopes to offer housing in the future, is not looking for a temporary location and that a task force committee of BEDS Plus board members and residents determined that was not the way to go.
“You can’t move an agency like that overnight,” Rounds said. “We’ve got a long history here. We have the right to operate here. We’re not doing anything wrong.”