Hanover Park says new strategies paid off with drop in crime

Hanover Park residents won’t soon forget when their hometown dominated headlines for all the wrong reasons in 2009.

Four murders in a two-week span and a spate of gang violence forced children indoors and prompted many in the community of about 40,000 people to pack school gymnasiums demanding answers.

While leaders pray their village never endures such a dark period again, they also acknowledge the change that has occurred because of it.

“We sort of got a mandate to look at how we do things,” Hanover Park Police Chief David Webb said. “And knock on wood, things seem to be working.”

Hanover Park in 2010 recorded its lowest crime figures since it started keeping track, according to a report of major crimes — murder, criminal sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault/battery, burglary, theft, motor vehicle theft and arson — released Thursday. Village officials are required to track the offenses, categorized as Part I crimes, and report them to the FBI.

There were 587 such crimes last year in Hanover Park, an 11 percent decrease from 2009. The figures include no murders and a decline in aggravated assault/batteries from 49 in 2009 to just 24 last year.

Webb said the department already was at work implementing strategies aimed at heightening community policing before the killings, but the spate of violence forced police to implement them more quickly.

“We were having to work too hard at a lot of our investigations,” said Webb, promoted to chief in 2009 after former Chief Ron Moser was named village manager. “People weren’t coming forward, and we weren’t getting as much intelligence as we should have been.”

Information is much more abundant now, a shift largely attributed to the department’s ART program, or Area Response Teams. The initiative features teams of four officers and a sergeant assigned to geographical beats for one year, allowing them to know their areas and its residents while growing a vested interest in what goes on there.

The department holds staff meetings every two weeks to discuss hot spots of activity, and officers are expected to come back with progress reports.

Police invite the residents and businesses within each beat to widely publicized quarterly meetings, where issues from gangbangers loitering on a corner to overgrown yards are discussed. And officers meet with about 75 block captains who signed up to lead the revitalized Neighborhood Watch program, previously scrapped due to budget cuts.

“Under the chief’s leadership, there’s a mindset in this organization about not just being reactionary in the traditional sense,” said Lt. Andy Johnson, head of the investigations division. “We’re looking for ways that we can take the information we can get from our environment, our residents, from our crime stats, from trends and use it to do a better job at suppressing and even preventing criminal activity.”

The result is a sense of ownership among officers — 70 percent of them recently rebid for their same beat assignments — and growing trust from the community.

“We’re seeing residents not just more comfortable reporting crimes that have already occurred, but with suspicious activity,” Johnson said.

Despite an 18-month stretch without gang violence since the 2009 slayings, officials say targeting gangs remains a top priority.

Strategies include the Safe Home program, in which officers and a social worker meet with the parents of a child showing early signs of gang affiliation in an attempt to stop the recruitment process.

The department also has taken a zero-tolerance enforcement approach with not just gang violence, but minor offenses such as a parking violation or code issue at a house known to be a gang hangout.

“If (gang members) move and violate any kind of statute, we’re trying to plant that seed in their mind that they’re going to get caught and prosecuted,” Johnson said.

It also helped that the village board agreed to add five sworn officers to the once understaffed department. There are plans to hire four more by May 1.

Looking back, Webb said even with the violence of 2009 Hanover Park, has enjoyed a low crime rate in recent years, especially compared to the 1970s and ’80s when there were routinely 1,500 annual Part I crimes.

And it’s a low rate compared to many of its neighbors, according to 2008 Illinois State Police statistics. Hanover Park’s rate was 1,768 Part I crimes per 100,000 residents compared to 1,785 in Hoffman Estates; 2,407 in Streamwood; and 4,470 in Schaumburg.

Though the murders damaged Hanover Park’s image and threatened residents’ sense of safety, they also served as a catalyst to a trend officials hope continues.

“Had it not all occurred, we wouldn’t have gotten here this fast,” Webb said.

Rate: Some say murders served as a catalyst to turn things around