The Elgin Community College police force will be training on the use of the chemical Narcan, which reportedly can save the life of a person who has overdosed on heroin, Chief Emad Eassa told board members at a recent meeting. Unfortunately, Eassa said, Narcan is expensive and has a limited shelf life.
“It’s not cheap. But you can’t put a price on saving somebody’s life,” Eassa said.
The college’s force also will train in how to deal with an outbreak of contagious disease, he said. The ECC community got a taste of that sort of situation this winter when one student was diagnosed with measles.
With drugs, disease and disruptive visitors to deal with, the Elgin Community College has its own uniformed college police force whose duties range from showing a campus visitor where to find the main banquet room to enforcing the new ban on smoking on college campuses to wrestling with a trespasser who’s high on drugs.
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And just in case worse comes to worst, each of the force’s 18 officers carries a handgun on his or her hip, though members say proudly that they have never drawn a gun on anyone since the department was founded in 2000. They have two interrogation rooms and even two holding cells where a prisoner can be handcuffed to a concrete bench.
Eassa, who retired after working in drug investigations with the Illinois State Police and then headed the Kane County Forest Preserve District Police, has been chief of the force since 2008. He said most of the 18 sworn officers are, like him, retirees from city, state or village police departments. That way they don’t have to be trained from scratch and have the wisdom that comes from experience, he said. “We represent a combined 500 years of municipal and community college police experience.”
In fact, he said, Officer Bill Powell is a former Aurora police chief, and Officer Dave Jannusch was deputy chief in the St. Charles department.
Working with students in what is usually a low-key, low-crime environment, he said, “We want to recruit people who aren’t really gung ho or aggressive. Communication is our best tool. Most of us have children who are college age.”
After spending 41 of his 59 years in law enforcement, Eassa himself is perhaps an example of such peaceful communication. “I’m a first-generation Palestinian-American, and a Muslim,” he says with a relaxed smile. “My parents came to America during the Mideast wars in the 1940s and 1950s. But I grew up in a neighborhood of Chicago where all my friends were Jewish, and I still keep in touch with a lot of them today.”
He said the officers carry handguns but do not carry either chemical Mace or electric Tasers. Eassa explained that with officers often working in enclosed hallways or classrooms, with many innocent students and employees nearby, releasing a cloud of choking Mace likely would affect many bystanders. Many students have conditions such as asthma that could make such an event life-threatening, he added.
However, the officers’ work has twice led to violent confrontations. Deputy Chief Tami Haukedahl, one of two women on the force, recalled how one day three years ago someone reported a man behaving oddly in the ECC Visual and Performing Arts Center. As she and another officer approached, the man went into a fighting stance. They invited him to come to their office and talk about why he was there. But the man grabbed her and the other officer and bit them on their arms. It finally took five officers to wrestle the man into submission on the ground, and he continued to fight against paramedics as he was taken away in an ambulance with one officer riding along.
The man was found to be high drugs and also mentally ill, she said.
In the second case, about five years ago, the chief said, a teenager with mental issues and “looked like he could be playing defensive end for the Chicago Bears” assaulted a female staff member. Again it took five officers to wrestle him into submission.
Eassa said a more typical case was one recent complaint from a female student that a man in a car seemed to be eyeing her in a suspicious way and seemed always to be in the parking lot at the same times she was. Officers questioned the man. They discovered he was a student who happened to have classes on the same times and nights as the girl. “We like it when they end that way, but we encourage students to report anything suspicious,” Eassa said. “Better to be safe than sorry.”
Eassa said 97 people have been banned from the campus for various bad behavior since 2008, including five in all of 2014 and seven so far just this year. Just in the last few weeks, he said, one man was found “so drunk he couldn’t stand up.” The man was banned from campus. And after the prohibition on smoking was extended to outdoor areas of the campus on the day Spring Break ended, an officer saw someone smoking. The officer approached the person and took him to the police office for questioning. They discovered he had not only marijuana in one of his pockets, but a warrant out for his arrest from another county. That man was banned, too.
A person who has been banned and returns to campus could be charged with trespassing.
Eassa said all those who have been banned have been non-students. Students who cause similarly serious problems are referred to the dean of students office, where a disciplinary procedure can result in them being expelled from the student body.
However, Eassa said the police force takes a tolerant approach to homeless people, allowing them to enjoy the warmth or coolness of the campus’s buildings so long as they aren’t causing trouble.
The department has two Ford Expedition sport-utility vehicles but Eassa told the ECC Board of Trustees last week that he wants to add two more officers and buy a third SUV that can patrol the Public Safety Training Center campus being built miles to the west, along Plank Road in Burlington.
Officers man podiums at several strategic places around the campus to answer people’s questions or take calls for help.
A different sort of podium figured in one of the force’s most awkward moments in the past year. During one board of trustees meeting, a woman speaking during the “comments from the audience” time continued to speak after a timer had announced that her time had expired. As she continued to talk for several more minutes, despite pleas from Board Chair Donna Redmer, President David Sam signaled to a campus policeman at the back of the room to come down and remove the speaker from the podium.
As the officer approached, the president of the college’s faculty union, Professor Luis Martinez, came running out of the audience and interposed himself between the speaker and the officer. Martinez announced that although he had great respect for the college’s police officers, he would defend the woman’s right to speak as long as she wanted to.
It looked for awhile as if the officer and the professor could get into a shoving match or worse. But they kept their hands off each other, the woman soon came to the end of her remarks and all the people involved stood down peacefully.
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