Moving detainees into jail cells is becoming a bigger chore for Buffalo Grove police.
The locks on the jail cells all open and close fine, but the locks on the fingerprinting and mugshot stations only open some of the times, said Lt. Tom Nugent.
“The controls don’t always work correctly,” Nugent said. “The locks are very robust. They’re built to last. The controls — they fail.”
The malfunctioning controls can pose a security risk at the police department. The locks that connect five doors officers use to move people, who have been arrested, through the intake process at the department require extra work to operate, he said.
Since 2014, the department has made the lock system a part of its list of capital improvements. An estimated $40,000 to $50,000 would be needed to install new hardware and software to upgrade the control system, Nugent said.
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Village officials have yet to fund the project, although the 2016 budget included $30,000 for new software, said Village Manager Dane Bragg. But once bids came back for it, village officials realized the budgeted amount was too small, he said.
The work still could happen later this year if Buffalo Grove police can use leftover money from a grant. If not, the village would look to propose a larger amount of money for the project in the 2017 budget, Bragg said.
The upgrade would help strengthen security at the department, Nugent said. The current lock controls, installed when the building opened 27 years ago, ensures if a person arrested overpowered an officer, he or she would still be locked inside the department, he said.
The doors are locked and unlocked by another staff member, who, Nugent said, watches the intake process through closed-circuit TV screens in a separate control room.
Other times when staffers in the control room try to operate the system, the doors will remain locked even though an officer is ready to move a person past the intake area.
When individual switches have had problems, public works employees from the village have worked out temporary solutions, Nugent said. The department also has hired an electrician to address the issue in the past.
Although no injuries or significant problems have yet resulted from a door getting stuck, officers would like to keep the system in reliable order, he said.
“When you take someone’s freedom away from them, that’s where we want everything to work perfectly,” Nugent said. “We can find workarounds, but taking someone into a jail cell is a sensitive process. That kind of stress sometimes causes people to act out or act differently than they normally would.”
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