Harvey Mayor Christopher Clark is shaking up the city’s Police Department by reassigning sergeants to patrol duty.
The controversial move is the latest attempt by Clark to address violence in the city of nearly 25,000 residents. Harvey has the highest violent crime rate among south suburban communities, according to FBI data.
“It is a very difficult decision, but we feel very secure in our decision and the staff is 100% on board,” Clark said in a news release.
Through a representative, Clark declined a request to answer questions about the shake-up and referred to the news release.
Clark framed the move as a way to increase police patrols of streets and trimming fat from a bloated administration.
“Right now in our Police Department we have just as many supervisors as we have actual patrol officers,” Clark recently told the city council, according to video shared on a city social media page.
“At the end of the day we have more people staying in the building than out on the street,” Clark told aldermen.
Ald. Marshun Tolbert asked Clark whether the city could hire more patrol officers rather than redeploy employees who had attained the rank of sergeant.
“How would you suggest we do that?” Clark asked.
“I don’t know,” Tolbert said. “I’m not the administrator, that’s your job.”
“If it’s my job, then hopefully you’ll just let me manage and do my job, which is what I’m trying to do,” Clark said.
The city is negotiating a new contract with union patrol officers, and attorneys for the city said Harvey could legally eliminate the sergeant positions, Clark said. The department has four commanders and is considering creating lieutenant positions.
“We were already top heavy,” Clark said.
The union representing Harvey police sergeants is fighting the move.
“The union has a right to negotiate the impact, and from my understanding they have already made that request,” Clark said.
Having more officers may help Harvey hold the line on overtime costs for police, which have topped $300,000 this year to date, Clark said. The change will add four officers to patrol shifts, he said.
Ald. Tracy Key said he was concerned that former sergeants demoted to patrol officers might leave the force, and that the council should have more input on restructuring decisions.
“We could lose police officers,” Key said. “That’s a serious concern. I just wish this was something we could discuss as a team. When you make decisions of this magnitude, it would be more professional and more of a team environment if we were more equally involved.”
The Harvey City Council voted 4-3 May 24 to approve the change, which took effect Tuesday. Clark voted in favor with council members Shirley Drewenski, Quinton Crudup and Dominique Randle-El, a former police union leader. Council members Tolbert, Key and Tyrone Rogers dissented.
Harvey’s Police Department has been the subject of multiple investigations, Clark told the council.
“This department is in great need of change,” Clark said. “We are changing in a big way.”
It’s hard to tell whether Clark is changing the department for the better. Harvey police officers said they were demoralized after Clark promoted three early career patrol officers to the rank of commander last year. All three either supported Clark’s mayoral campaign or worked on his personal protective detail.
“He’s lost the support of the Police Department now, and when you’ve lost the Police Department, you’ve lost the city,” a Harvey police officer told the Daily Southtown at the time.
Midway through his first four-year term, Clark has disappointed many who expected to see a sharper contrast to his predecessor, former Mayor Eric Kellogg. Critics say Clark’s handling of the Police Department and its leadership echo accusations of political favoritism that haunted Kellogg.
Harvey has had four different police chiefs in the past 25 months. Gregory Thomas was replaced in May 2019 by Eddie Winters, a 25-year Chicago Police Department veteran and former state representative who set out to reform the beleaguered department.
Winters shook up the top-heavy department by reassigning its five deputy chiefs, but he lasted just eight months on the job. Robert Collins took over as chief in early 2020 and resigned a year later.
Earlier this year Clark tabbed Elvin Boone, a longtime sergeant with the Chicago Police Department, to be the new police chief.
The entryway to the police chief’s office in Harvey appears to be a revolving door.
Reasons for repeated reorganizations of the city’s public safety employees reflect years of financial mismanagement by city leaders. Harvey made history in 2018 as the first Illinois municipality to have its share of state revenue garnished by court order for repeated failure to make required payments to police and fire pension funds.
In April 2018, when a Cook County judge denied the city’s request to order Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza to stop withholding revenues the city received from the state, Harvey laid off 40 employees of its Police and Fire departments.
The Harvey Police Pension Fund won a multimillion dollar judgment against the city in 2015 and claimed the city was more than $7 million delinquent in its payments.
Corruption allegations added to the woes of forced layoffs, top brass shake-ups, low morale and fiscal mismanagement. Federal agents raided the Harvey City Hall and Police Department in March 2019. Six people were charged, including three relatives of Kellogg.
A brother and a cousin of the former mayor were accused of allegedly extorting cash payoffs from a Harvey strip club to protect its prostitution activities. Two Harvey police officers, including another brother of Kellogg’s, were charged with falsifying a police report to protect a father and son, both felons, from possibly facing weapons charges.
Violent crime in Harvey spiked after the mass layoffs. Harvey endured 19 homicides in 2019, more than any in a single year in a suburban Cook County municipality since at least 2012.
Ted Slowik is a columnist for the Daily Southtown.