Campton Hills police force set to serve

It's just minutes shy of midnight on Halloween, and Greg Anderson's squad car is nestled between a row of pine trees and a couple of houses along Bolcum Road in Campton Hills.

The police chief's been told drivers tend to "fly over the hill" here, so he's decided to check it out himself.

He rolls down the driver's side window of the 2001 Crown Victoria, slides his eyeglasses down the bridge of his nose and aims a handheld radar at the hilltop.

A few seconds pass before headlights appear.

The radar -- designed to make a buzzing sound that increases in pitch along with the speed it's picking up -- moans as a car passes.

"Fifty," Anderson reads aloud from the radar screen.

No speeding there.

The vehicles keep coming: 42, 46, 47, 50 mph. Over a half-hour, the fastest Anderson clocks someone going is 53 mph, but he opts to not write a ticket.

He's by no means disappointed.

"No news is good news," the chief says.

"When it's slow like this," he adds later, "it can be the measure of a good police officer. When you're busy, you never have the chance to just look around" for suspicious activity.

Anderson expects there to be plenty of nights like this in Campton Hills, where on Wednesday he and two other officers conducted his department's first ever patrol of the newly incorporated village.

The transition of service, from the Kane County Sheriff's Department to the village force, was supposed to happen at 11 p.m. But Anderson saw no point in waiting around, so his officers hit the streets just before 10:30 p.m.

The department typically will run three shifts over each 24-hour period: 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., 3 to 11 p.m. and 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. At least one officer will be on duty at all times.

For midnight patrol officer Brian Sawyer, the first shift was a chance to get more familiar with village roads, which he's been driving since he first interviewed for a full-time position.

Confident, yet keeping his eyes on a dash-mounted global positioning system, Sawyer rolled slowly through the Fox Mill and Prairie Lakes subdivisions, then headed over to a downtown shopping center to check out storefronts and parked cars.

Nothing suspicious.

"I'm hoping it stays quiet," Sawyer says over the country music playing softly on his radio. "I'm trying to get the lay of the land."

Much of the night's activity centered on checking various construction sites for vandalism or theft.

Looking out his window at farm houses and fields, Sawyer, who recently returned from training Iraqi police in Baghdad, said he could get used to the relative quiet of Campton Hills.

"It's a nice community," he says. "It's got the potential to really grow, and I think five years from now we probably won't recognize it, to be honest with you."

"One of the things that intrigued me" about the job, he added later, "is being a part of history here in the village. It's exciting."

Sawyer remained upbeat early in the shift, which was probably a good thing; the department didn't receive a single call for service until the next day.