Police chief candidates discuss retention, staff morale, Adrian decision, crime rate and goat farming (yes, you read that right) during public forum

QUINCY — The Quincy Police and Fire Commission conducted a 90-minute community forum Thursday night in City Council chambers for the three candidates in line to become Quincy’s next police chief.

A crowd of about 100 people listened to the candidates — Deputy Chief of Operations Shannon Pilkington; Jonathan Lewin, a 28-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department; and Deputy Chief of Administrative Services Adam Yates — answer questions from the public submitted to moderator Carlos Fernandez.

The three candidates return Friday to have an interview with the three-member Board of Fire and Police Commissioners, as well as an interview with a community stakeholder group. Commissioner Barry Cheyne told the people in attendance that he believe a decision for a replacement for retiring chief Rob Copley will be announced Monday.

The questions below were read to the candidates by Fernandez. Some answers given were edited for clarity. Click on the link below to watch the 90-minute forum.

https://www.facebook.com/QuincyILGovernment/videos/749785766432748

What are your plans to build and foster positive growth between the police department and our community — specifically underprivileged or high risk individuals?

PILKINGTON: We did several years ago, especially when I worked at the (Quincy) Housing Authority, start the Neighborhood Watch programs up again. … I think it lacked police involvement. So my goal would be to start the program up again. That way, you have communication with the public, if you don’t know what the problem is, how do you fix it? I don’t live in that area, so how would I know exactly what the problem is? That’s why you have these programs. There’s good programs like Teen Reach. We’ve had officers go to those programs, and we’d like to see them go more frequently. We do the summer programs right now with the Quincy Park District, and we need to keep participating in the program. In Quincy right now, we do a fairly good job with programs like that, but again, we can always do a better job. With the new administration, I think it would give a good jump start to help enthusiasm towards getting these programs back going.

LEWIN: So that’s a great question. Honestly, I’m not from here, so that can be an advantage or it can be a disadvantage, because I would have to learn the communities. I’d have to learn the characteristics of crime. But in Chicago, when we built up community policing in 1993 with Chuck Ramsey, who really was my mentor in a lot of ways, what we recognized was even in the so-called worst parts of the city, even communities that have extremely high crime rates, 99.99 percent of people who live there want to live in safe communities, want to have thriving communities, want to work with and partner with the police. That’s something I would leverage. I would seek out key leaders in those communities, key stakeholders, religious institutions, schools, community groups, the business community, and really foster and build trust. Without trust, without legitimacy, without respect on both sides, both from the police department to the community and the community to the police, There’s always going to be a gap. That would be my No. 1 priority, to bridge that gap.

YATES: Community policing has always been kind of a hallmark in my career. I’ve always felt that it was the one way that we really got out in the community and got things done. It’s hard to recognize there’s kind of two forms of community policing. The first is the officers out on the street. Having the flexibility to do what needs to be done to solve problems in the community, working with the members of the community who are affected by what’s going on in their neighborhoods. The other is to make sure that we are encountering and interacting with individuals in non-enforcement types of situations. I’m a firm believer in giving our officers the freedom to go out and do what they need to do to solve problems, to have conversations and to get things done in the community that are the best for the community. As somebody who enjoys getting back, about six years ago, I started a Quincy Cops Care food drive that has turned into an annual event where we give away 150 to 200 bags of groceries every year. It’s one of the highlights of my year. We’ve been doing a Coffee with a Cop program for a couple of years now. I brought that to Quincy. Unfortunately with COVID, that kind of went away. Ultimately to get around that, I started another program where we go out and cook lunches for underprivileged kids in the community. Community policing is important, it’s necessary, and I have a history of making sure that happens here.

What would be your suggestion to fix the current recruitment and retention problem?

LEWIN: That’s a challenge around the country. It was a challenge in Chicago. It’s really one of the fundamental mental issues that I think needs to be addressed. I got to meet with a group of officers last night, talking a little bit about ways that we can make this department attractive and a place where people want to come to work. Things that would distinguish us from other agencies. And one thing that I thought about is something that I really tried to promote in Chicago, which was listening to police officers, regardless of rank. I didn’t care if it was an officer, sergeant, lieutenant or captain. It didn’t matter. If an officer had a great idea, we would foster that idea, and we would turn it into an outcome. One example of that is I had an officer who had a great idea. I ran into him while I happened to be there giving a talk to the to the officers. He had an idea to create a mobile app on a smartphone that could be not only an officer safety tool but also improve situational awareness. So I ended up detailing him into my command and had him manage this project, which we then rolled out and sent it  department-wide. That’s the kind of innovation that, by listening to your personnel, you can really come up with some great ideas. That’s something we could do that would set us apart maybe from another agency. Make this a destination where people want to go. Also, fostering officers careers, giving them educational opportunities, letting them whenever possible work in the kinds of assignments they want to work in, so that they can thrive in. The last thing that I did when I was in Chicago, I was on our recruitment team. We had the same kind of challenges. So we used social media, we did kind of a revitalized outreach effort, worked with schools, with all of the stakeholders that I talked about earlier, religious institutions, community groups, to really share that the police department is an innovative place where people could really make a difference in our communities. And that also helped out with recruiting efforts.

YATES: The first thing I will do is establish a committee within a police department of officers interested in helping us solve this problem. I know there are a number of officers who have come to me and asked to be part of a recruitment and retention committee to come up with ideas that would work here in Quincy. One of the key things I think we need to think about policing these days is getting to the point that cell phones were 20 years ago as opposed to today. We’re running out of people who want to be cops, and that’s a shame, and I hope that that turns around. But just like cell phone companies ran out of new customers, as police departments, we’ve got to go out and start trying to recruit qualified members of other departments to come here. One key way of doing that is to consider expanding residency for our officers into the state of Missouri. There’s a number of police officers who many of our officers have talked to from Hannibal, Lewis County, Palmyra, who are very interested in coming and working for the Quincy police department. They just don’t want to live in the state of Illinois. We’re right on the river. We have a great resource right across that river we need to utilize.

PILKINGTON: (Yates) stole part of my answer. We work together and have some of the same thoughts. We already talked about establishing a committee. We’re starting to do that. We do need to look at expanding. We did expand into Adams County. Quincy is trying to grow, and I understand that, but we need officers now. We could get officers who already are trained from Missouri. They can take a 40-hour class, take a state test, and we can give them a shortened FTO. They can be on the street in months. The people we’re looking at recruiting for this are probably not gonna live in Quincy. They’re going to live in Missouri. It’s worked in Macomb. Macomb is a great example. They’ve expanded to the counties around them. They’re fully staffed right now. We used to steal officers from them. It’s not a money thing anymore. It’s (about) where people want to live. The newer officers want to live where they want to live, and they want their time off. Increasing their pay is not going to help getting more officers here. There’s a downturn everywhere right now in law enforcement. Champaign is offering $20,000 to $30,000 extra to come there as a bonus, and nobody’s taking it because nobody wants the career any more, and that’s a shame. I know when I started 22 years ago, there were 100, 200 people who applied for the job. Now we’re getting 30 people to show up, and a lot of them don’t pass the background because they don’t qualify. So that’s an issue. That’s why we need to expand our recruiting area where we can draw more people in, and people can live where they want to live.

What, if any, diversity and inclusion and mental health response training have you participated in that specifically focuses on specific issues related to these specific areas? In our community, we have concerns related to each regarding the humane and equal treatment of our community members.

YATES: I’ll focus on mental health and de-escalation, because those are two of the top issues that police officers are dealing with right now. De-escalation training and mental heath training in the state of Illinois is mandatory. Our officers have to take that training once every three years, I believe is the mandate. We offer extensive amounts of training more than that. We recently brought on board two de-escalation instructors to our department to help us facilitate our scenario training so that we can practice what we preach and we can go out, actually get into scenarios and in practice, deescalate situations. As far as mental health goes, that’s another mandate that we cover every year. Officers understand they are the first responders to a mental health crisis. It’s unfortunate, but that’s what it is right now. We have to make sure that officers can recognize those situations. To combat that, what we’ve done is we’ve enlisted Clarity Healthcare, who are on-call mental health providers who our officers to reach out to contact and have come to a scene if there’s someone in mental health crisis in order to provide a service. If it’s not necessary to respond to a scene, they have the ability to follow up with the individual once we submit a mental health form so that they can try to get them the services they need.

PILKINGTON: When I started several years ago, everybody went to jail. There was no mental health service. You just went to jail. And that’s wrong. Law enforcement has learned that we’ve been doing it wrong all these years. Just because someone has a mental illness, do they belong in jail? Most people who commit a crime do have some type of mental health illness. That’s why they committed the crime. We’ve worked really hard in the city, and the city fortunately has given us the money to enlist Clarity Healthcare. That was a program we started five or six years ago. It kind of morphed. At first, we were on call a little bit, and then we got in it deeper and the officers started using them. It does help the officers. We have CIT (Crisis Intervention Team) trained officers who were involved heavily in that program. I’m a CIT officer myself. It’s been several years ago, but we were trained to deal with mental illness. One reason we chose Clarity Healthcare was because the Adams County Jail has Clarity Healthcare. So if we did have to take somebody to jail, we call Clarity. We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. Why get two different companies? They get the help they need while they’re in jail. Mental health is always important to our officers. If we don’t have mentally healthy officers dealing with people on the street, we’re not giving them a good service. We look at it both ways. There’s the mental health of the people we’re dealing with, and the mental health of our officers.

LEWIN: We all go through crisis intervention training, de-escalation training. In Chicago, I was on the training committee. We rolled out something called implicit bias training, which at first was controversial. There were a lot officers who thought that this was not something that they needed, but I went through it. What it is designed to do address any biases that you might have, that you might not even be aware of, because everybody has some. So making officers aware of those biases, and then providing some ways that they could maybe deal with them, and ensure that those biases aren’t reflected in their actions on the street. We always tried to ensure that if someone is having a mental health crisis, a CIT-trained officer is available to respond. That means establishing a baseline and training for all officers in the department, but then providing selected officers so that you always have someone working, even more in front of more than state requirements. Training is one of the most centrally important things that an agency can do to make themselves more effective and to be more comfortable with the public and make the officers safer, make everybody safer. It’s harm reduction. The last thing I’ll talk about that we rolled out in Chicago was called the customer notification program. It’s based on an effort by Dr. David Kennedy. Instead of taking enforcement action and locking people up, many of which are in some kind of mental health crisis. Instead of doing that, get them out of the cycle of violence by intervening and providing social services, which can include access to mental health counseling, access to other social services, education and potentially job training.

January 1, 2023, the Illinois law “Catch and Release” goes into effect. Many of us feel our city and county will have more crime to deal with. Your comments, please.

PILKINGTON: That statement’s true. Look what’s happened in New York City. Imagine somebody coming to the front door, violating the sanctity of your home. The police come and arrest them and release them back. They can come do it again. I don’t know how or why that bill was passed. I know the reasoning behind it was because a lot of the people who couldn’t afford it could not bail out of jail. What’s it going to look like? That’s a good question. I don’t know. I know New York City is struggling with it, and it’s going to be bad for the city of Quincy.  Nobody’s gonna sit in jail. We have a lot of violent offenders in the Adams County Jail now. It’s almost full. And we’re going to release those people out in the community without going to trial? I just think it’s absurd.

LEWIN: Earlier I talked about non-enforcement intervention models. Clearly violent offenders who break the law have to go to jail. This could have a disastrous impact on public safety. The way to counter it is people getting involved. It’s great to see so many people here. I believe that people of all political types are reasonable, in most cases, tend to want the same outcomes, which are reducing crime, improving the quality of life, making people feel safe, and being safe in their communities so they can enjoy living. I’m a strong proponent of evidence-based policing, which is you use data to show what works and what doesn’t work. This is going to be a case where, in communities like this, elected officials, police departments, entire criminal justice communities, prosecutors, courts, corrections are going to have to come together and make a reasoned, well-founded argument that this is not an appropriate policy, and that it could have a negative impact on public policy and public safety. Unfortunately, the reverse is probably going to have to happen. We’re going to have to start evaluating and gathering that data, and then immediately making that case so we can prove this is something that’s negative. That would be something I would look forward to partnering with the community to do.

YATES: This particular section of the reform bill is probably one of the most glaring deficiencies that we have up to this point. When the bill originally passed, there were a lot of issues with a lot of the different sections of the bill. In turn, a lot of those issues have been rectified by trailer bills that were passed after the fact. The story that we like to tell about this particular bail bill is that Class B and C misdemeanors are no longer custodial arrests. That means if you commit a Class B or C misdemeanor, if you don’t get put in handcuffs, you don’t get taken away from the scene of the crime. The unfortunate example of that is if someone shows up on your front porch and tries to sell you a vacuum cleaner. You say you don’t want the vacuum cleaner, and they say, “I’m standing here until you buy a vacuum cleaner.” You call the police, and you want them arrested because it’s trespassing. The officer will write them a ticket, turn around, get in the car and leave, because that’s legally all the officers are allowed to do. That’s unacceptable. Now, the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police, which I’m a member of, has been working diligently to try and get changes to this particular bill, this portion of the bill. They continue to work to do that. We have to see these changes come through. I know that some of the legislators who sponsored this bill didn’t initially understand the ramifications of what the bill was going to do once it passed. They’ve been so far amenable to understand and work with law enforcement agencies and leaders, like the Illinois Sheriffs Association and the Illinois Chiefs of Police, to rectify these issues. We have to continue to put pressure on them to get this particular part of the bill rectified.

How would you plan to raise the extremely low morale rate of your current officers, since this is the leading cause of the resignations of officers over the past few years?

LEWIN: Improving officer morale would be an absolute top priority of mine. One way to do that is to listen to the officers. One of the advantages of being an outsider is, I don’t know anybody here. I have not met any officer except two weeks ago when I was here and yesterday. I come in with absolutely no bias. I come in with a brand new perspective. I would be able to use some of my initial energy. Any time you start a new job, you have a period of time where you can make some changes, maybe for the first six months to a year. So I would leverage that and address those concerns and try to do whatever I could to work with the city leadership, work with the union. I have a strong record of working with the unions in Chicago. I would try to improve working conditions, try to reach some agreement if there’s areas where the city and officers don’t agree, and try to see if we can reach some kind of compromises in those areas. One thing, as a small example, I did have to travel to facilities. One of the districts was a very busy district on the west side of the city. I went out there, and sometimes you can sense the morale when you walk into a roll call. I just could tell something wrong. Morale was not great. So my open door policy is that officers can talk to me about anything. And I said, “What are some of the things that make you not happy at work?” One of the biggest things was the roll call room was in total disrepair. Walls need to be painted, the furniture was terrible. So we got that fixed. The officers wanted a workout room. We got that done. So some of the small things can have a huge impact. They can be addressed first and show that you’re making changes and listening to the officers. Those would be some of the things that we’d get worked out right away, and we’d work on long-term planning together to address some of our more chronic issues.

YATES: The initial issue when it comes to morale is manpower. We need to figure out a way to get back to full staff as quickly as we possibly can. That’s only one component, though. There’s been a number of various reasons why the morale is low on the police department. About two months ago, I started a survey where I attended to roll calls and asked officers, “What is causing officer morale to be low? What are the things you’d like to see the department change?” The responses were all across the board. Like Jonathan said, a lot of the stuff is a little, and it’s things that are easy to fix. We need to tackle those things first. The more underlying issues have to do with trust and competence and leadership within the police department. The command staff and administration has done a poor job of communicating, and I say that as a member of the command staff. We need to do a better job of reaching out to officers and getting their input on decisions made that are going to affect them directly. Shannon and I are not out in the street taking the calls for service, but a lot of times, we’re saddled with making good decisions on how officers are going to respond. We need to make sure that we’re going to reach out and get input. Just the other day, we were considering a certain change on how we operated. Before doing anything, we put out a survey and learned that the concern that we thought the officers may have was not even a concern. So we immediately scrapped that idea. It wasn’t right for the officers. Communication is key. Getting back to full staff is key. Re-establishing that trust and confidence with the officers and their leadership is probably the most important thing.

PILKINGTON: The leading cause for officers leaving was not morale, and morale is low, The leading cause was when officers are hitting 50 (years old), they are leaving. Nobody’s staying 30 years any more in law enforcement. We had three retirements. We lost three officers to the State Police because they pay substantially more money, and they have a better retirement. We had an officer leave because of discipline. We had an officer leave because his wife moved to Tennessee, and she was basically the breadwinner so he followed her. We had an officer move to Missouri because he liked working traffic, and we don’t have a traffic unit here. Morale was not an issue with any of those officers leaving. But like Adam stated, we have a morale issue and we have a communication issue, and I recognize that. When you word an e-mail a certain way, it might not be the intent but it’s how it comes over. We need to communicate directly. I don’t work the street. It’s been several years, and we realize that. We learned our lesson really well in the past couple of weeks about communication, and that’s a key for our department at this time.

Judge Robert Adrian’s decision in the Drew Clinton sexual assault case has led to further reluctance for advisors to report their victimization to law enforcement. What strategies or innovations do you think could be leveraged to encourage survivors to report crimes of a sexual violence to police? 

YATES: One of the key components to encouraging sexual assault victims as they come forward is to make sure that they understand that they’re going to be believed and that they’re going to be taken seriously. We have worked extensively with Blessing Hospital and QUANADA in order to set up victim advocates for those individuals who go and either report sexual assault just out in the public or end up making reports if possible. There have been several improvements to sexual assault legislation that allows for third-party reporting now so that a victim does not have to come and make the report themselves. It gives us a lot more freedom to get collect the information that we need to collect up front, which is key to any investigation. The longer someone waits to make a report, the less likely it is that a successful investigation and prosecution is going to result. To your point, the decision that Judge Adrian made was devastating to victims of sexual assault. As one of those situations that is already difficult, it was, from a law enforcement perspective, tragic. We have to do better, as law enforcement, as prosecutors, as hospital staff to make sure that anyone who comes forward as a victim is treated with respect and is heard, and that prosecutions and investigations are done completely and thoroughly.

PILKINGTON: When that happened, I knew the facts of the case, and I was just dumbfounded when Judge Adrian released that young man for what he did to her, and she’s going to suffer the rest of her life. He did not do her justice. We’ve got to keep the trust with the victims. Our officers did their job in that case. As I’ve said, we do have special advocates. We work with Blessing Hospital with sexual assault victims. You can also report sexual assaults, and you don’t have to be in Adams County. You can live in McDonough County and call here, and we would take that report. If they were sexually assaulted in Florida, we take your report and send it to the appropriate agency. So the nice thing is by law, you have to take the report, whether it happens in your jurisdiction or not. At the time, that’s when that victim felt comfortable reporting that crime. I guarantee you, from what Adrian is going through, this is not going to happen again in Adams County. It was not an Adams County State’s Attorney Office problem. This was not a Quincy Police Department problem. It was a problem created by a judge.

LEWIN: I agree with everything that needs to be said. I’m not familiar with this specific case, but it sounds egregious. It sounds terrible. It’s kind of shocking, besides what I’ve heard, that that was the outcome of the case. Victim advocacy is critically important, making sure that the victims understand the process about what’s going to happen. For a lot of them, they don’t understand even what the process is going to look like. Kind of demystifying that, making them as comfortable as possible, trying to involve every component of the ecosystem that has to get involved here from, of course, the prosecution, the hospital, police, social services, to try to come up with innovative ways that we can reduce fear as much as possible. One small example might be, if the prosecutors and courts would agree, not require them to physically come in court. Maybe doing a video testimony. Some of those kinds of strategies. I was on a state task force that worked with the Illinois State Police to come up with strategies to reduce the backlog in the processing of sexual assault evidence, which can then help build confidence and trust in the whole process, which can be lead quicker case resolution, although in the case just described, the resolution does not sound like a good one. It would be a comprehensive process that would we would come up with innovative ways to try to reduce fear, to try to build confidence in the process and try to make the process as transparent as possible.

This administration eliminated a proactive unit called the Street Crimes Unit, which dealt with crimes of the day and was a resource for community police. Would you consider establishing a similar unit? if so, please explain.

PILKINGTON: I was a part of that decision with Chief (Rob) Copley. The issue we were having was a manpower shortage. We had a shortage of investigations to investigate the larger crimes that officers don’t have time. Also we had Officer (Nick) Eddy, who does all our computer and phone work. He wasn’t having time to do all the phones because he was taking part in investigations. I know that when we did get rid of the unit, our drug arrests did not go down, but it’s hard to indicate what happened because COVID hit. Our goal was to see that next year what the ramifications were. My goal is to bring back a similar unit with a sergeant and two officers assigned to it. The old unit did not have a sergeant assigned to the unit. It needed more direction and more accountability. To do, that we’re at 73 officers right now. We need at least to get to 76 to revitalize that unit. We used be at 77. The unit would be assigned to the investigation section. They would be in uniforms sometimes, plain clothes sometimes. It’s just the flavor of the day. Like all the gun crimes you have right now, they will concentrate on it. If there’s nothing going on with a street crime, we would then have them assigned to investigations or assigned to patrol. We have put together a group of officers that are well versed in dealing with gang members and gun cases.

LEWIN: I wouldn’t make any sort of policy commitments until I got the job. I would never want to come here without looking at all the evidence that I talked about earlier, strong evidence-based policing. I would talk to the community, talk to the officers, find out what’s going to work in this community. In Chicago, as you can imagine, 4 million calls for service a year, 22 police districts. Quincy does not have the same volume of crime, of course. It doesn’t have the same violent crime rate. Chicago has tried just about every approach to violence reduction that you can imagine. I’ve been involved with many of them. Based on my experience and my view of the data, task forces that are dedicated to specific things like violent crime reduction don’t typically have the kind of impact that you want. What we found is that by focusing instead on community policing and keeping officers in the same area and getting them familiar with their beats and not having these specialized strike forces that kind of come in and deal with only certain types of crime, you can have a much more sustainable impact on crime reduction in all categories. I’m not saying that would be the sort of approach here, but in Chicago, that’s something that has worked very well. It allows the officers to become experienced with dealing with multiple facets of crime, of disorder, rather than just focusing on one type of crime. Of course, I would be completely open minded to things that are unique to communities here. 

YATES: Yes, I would more than consider it. I would do it as soon as we were able to. Going back to when the decision was made to disband the Street Crimes Unit, we had looked at statistics and data, calls for service and enforcement actions extensively before coming to a conclusion that potential the units needed to be disbanded and we needed to add personnel to our investigative section. We then put out a request to any officer who wanted to come forward with information or thoughts or concerns with the disbanding of the unit, and we listened to those. Ultimately, the decision was made, and at the time, I think it was the right decision to disband the units. Like Shannon said, there were supervision issues. There were concerns about the fact that, like John said, the unit had been around since the 1980s. It was time to do something new. In my mind, the initial plan was to disband the unit, give it a year, see what we need and then come up with a new unit. It’s been very clear since we’ve disbanded the unit we need something that we can assign specific investigations to that is basically a medium between the patrol officers and investigators. The Street Crimes Unit is always very popular. It would be a tremendous morale booster for officers to have the opportunity to work that type of crime. We would have to do it differently than we did it before. I envision it as a four-officer unit with one sergeant and three officers. They would work some type of a modified 10-hour shift.  They would all work together. They would vary their days throughout the week to be effective. The issue is that we have to go back to full manpower. If we had a Street Crimes Unit right now, they would all be working in patrol, and they will be ineffective. So we have to get our manpower back up — again, going back to recruitment and retention and how important that is. As soon as we get to the point where we can sacrifice the officers from patrol shifts to put this unit back together, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Why is it that more African Americans are being pulled over more than any other people on the north end of town?

LEWIN: That is a question I cannot answer. But what I would commit to is that would be an issue that I would examine. I would begin to use the data, I would use the evidence. And if there was something that was happening that reflected biased policing, and I’m not saying there is, that would immediately be addressed.

YATES: I’m not sure what more I can add to what Mr. Lewin said, other than is that was an issue and it was brought to our attention, you said right now that it needs to be looked into, we need to figure out if it is an issue. If it is, we need to figure out why it’s happening, and we need to rectify it. I’m not aware of any statistics that specifically indicate that. Ithe f that’s an issue, I would invite whoever to please come up and speak with us. Let us know what the concern is, what the perception is. Perception is reality in policing, if you perceive that you’re unsafe, even if you’re safe, and you are unsafe in your mind, we need to try to rectify that. This is one of those issues that we welcome being brought to us so we can look into. We can either rectify a problem that may be going on, or we can determine that there isn’t a problem and explain to the concerned citizen, exactly what we found out and hopefully ease their concerns.

PILKINGTON: Without getting into much of where we allocate our manpower, because we don’t want everybody to know where our manpower is and how it’s allocated, we have almost doubled the officers working west of 18th Street. I can tell you that because of the higher crime areas. Your chances of being stopped are greater in your higher crime areas, because we have more offices in that area. We would have to look at the stats, look at the racial profiling stats to determine if it is an issue, and again, communicate with the public. As Adam said, perception is reality. There might be an issue, or they think there’s an issue but it’s not. Maybe the percentage is not there. I’m not saying that’s not the case, but I know that there’s a larger African American community in the north end of town. They’re more likely they might be stopped because we do have more officers working in that area.

How do you plan to stop the escalating crime rate in Quincy?

YATES: I’m going to refer back to the 2021 crime report that the department puts out in their annual report. On that report, if you look at the various numbers, crime is significantly reduced. Now, I think those numbers are artificial in the fact that COVID-19 had a lot to do with people not being out and about. People not going to bars, not going to restaurants. Officers pulling back on enforcement because of the desire to not have contact with individuals to try to keep both officers and individuals from getting sick. The numbers are clear that the overall crime rate is reduced in Quincy. If there are statistics that are out there that I’m not aware of, we would take a look at that. We’d have to see exactly what type of amount we’re talking about, and then we would address those specific issues on a case-by-case basis. I looked at the numbers just recently from that report, and in most cases, crime has actually reduced. I think the drug problem in Quincy is prevalent and has been for a long time. I would like to see more substance abuse counseling, more services, more use of drug court, which is a popular service that the state’s attorney’s office utilizes. Those types of issues, while are technically enforceable, aren’t always solved by the police. Those issues are solved by intervention, rehabilitation and working one-on-one with the addict. So those specific issues are ongoing, have been for a long time and certainly need to be addressed, both from a law enforcement standpoint and a social services standard.

PILKINGTON: It might not be a true indicator, but because of COVID, our crime has not gone as far as certain crimes. But I would say our drug use and our violent crimes as far as shootings have gone up. We have a large heroin and meth problem, and we’re seeing a lot of heroin overdoses because they’re spiking it with the fentanyl. Now they’re actually putting fentanyl in methamphetamine, and we’re seeing methamphetamine intoxications now that we’ve never seen before. When I worked on the Street Crimes Unit for seven years, we were No. 1 in the nation for meth labs that we had taken down and meth arrests. Not one methamphetamine overdose that I can remember we were at. So that’s our issue right now, a lot of fentanyl in the drugs. We’ve had a lot of spike lately as far as gunfire. One issue we’ve ran into lately are these ghost guns. You can order them on the Internet. You order the lower, the upper. You order the parts. You buy it as a kit. You put it in a jig, and you use a thumb drive. You learned how to do it. You drill the holes in the proper places and you put the gun together. Then it becomes a gun that’s illegal. We’ve gotten two ghost guns now in the last two or three months from a 12-year-old and a 13-year-old. One had a 30-round magazine. They’re kids. They’re not thinking what’s going to happen when they shoot a round out of this gun. We’ve had several shootings where people are shooting each other. It’s not random. They’re targeting people. Houses are getting hit. Cars are getting hit. We’re using Narcan two, three times a week. We had a subject that we had to Narcan three times in a row in like two or three weeks. It is out of hand. I’ve got a quick story. We had an officer get stuck with a needle (dealing with) someone on a drug overdose. So the next day, I had to go find the subject to get them to do a blood test to see if my officer could be affected with anything. I’m talking to her. I looked at her and thought, “I know you.” She was an ER nurse, and now she’s addicted to heroin. It’s just sad. That’s one of the major problems right now in the city.

LEWIN: Obviously one crime is one crime too many. If crime is going down, that’s great, but to somebody who’s been a victim of a robbery, for example, telling that person that oh, well, robberies are down 8 percent year to date this year versus last year, that doesn’t help them. Regardless of what the trends look like. I’m happy to hear that they are going down. That’s outstanding. But we won’t rest until there’s zero crime. Maybe it’s an impossible goal, but obviously crime can always be reduced, no matter how low it is. This is a comprehensive issue that requires a comprehensive approach. There’s a great body of research, and it’s a report from New York that came out in 2018 that talks about decades of research and data that shows that enforcement activity with narcotics crime does not work. It doesn’t reduce crime. You need to focus on harm reduction model, where you reduce the supply and reduce the demand. You provide some of those interventional services that I talked about earlier, to try to educate people, to provide treatment options for them to work collaboratively with all the stakeholders to address the problem. I would come up with a comprehensive plan to address root causes of violence. When somebody calls 911, it’s too late. It means every component of the entire system has failed. A 911 call means everything has failed. Nobody should ever have to call 911. It should not happen. We haven’t been proactive enough. We haven’t worked as a community, as a collaborative criminal justice system, to prevent that crime from happening in the first place. Community involvement is really the key to this partnership. One thing I learned last night that I was kind of surprised about is the department is you guys don’t have a dedicated crime analyst. That’s something that I brought in to Chicago. Now every police district has one. That’s something that I would work on here. Because if you don’t have somebody focusing on understanding all of the characteristics of the problems, you can’t develop, and then monitor and manage, effective intervention strategy.

How much does your experience as a patrol officer prepare you for the position of chief?

PILKINGTON: That’s one thing I pride myself on. I was a police officer, I’m still a police officer, but I worked the street. I know some of the deputy chiefs in the past had very little time on the street. I worked my way up through the department, and I’ve worked every in every level of the department. So I know what is needed and how the Quincy Police Department works. Again, I have been out of touch, and I haven’t rode with these officers. If I was chief, I’d started riding  with the officers again, just to kind of touch back to reality. It’s been seven years for me. I don’t know how to turn the computer on the car. I know how much it costs. I know how much a squad car costs, but I don’t know how to use everything in it. That is a great advantage with me. I’ve been there. I’ve done everything but investigations in the Quincy Police Department.

LEWIN: I have not been a police officer rank since 1996. I made sergeant in 1996. In all of my roles, no matter what rank I had, I always worked the street. Command staff was required to work and is still required to work the street. Every weekend, I was the on-call incident  commander, responding with police officers to major incidents from hostage barricade situations to the SWAT incidents to unfortunately having to deal with police officers who were in crisis themselves. When you think about a huge department with a lot of things happening, you kind of have experienced more in a very short period of time than you would in another department. I’m not saying that’s a good thing. I’m not saying that makes one department better than another. But what I will say is anything that you can possibly imagine that could have happened, I probably experienced it in one way or another in Chicago just because of 12,500 sworn officers, 365 square miles in the city, millions of calls for service every year. I never wanted to lose touch with the street. That’s one reason I want to come back to a police department. I miss it. I miss being in touch with people. I miss working with people. I miss working with officers. Those experiences would form my approach and decision making and leadership.

YATES: I think the question is a fantastic question. Police officers, when it comes to morale, need to know that their leaders understand what they’re doing every day. Police work is hard.  Our officers are out there giving everything they have to this community. I worked patrol for three years before going to the Street Crimes Unit, worked street crimes for two years. I loved everything about my five years of investigations, but I missed the street. And when I went back and was promoted to sergeant, I was a patrol sergeant for eight years. It was the best job that I’ve had, because of the fact that you got to be out on the street with the officers doing the work. I understood when I went to the administrative services sergeant position that I was giving up some of my ability to go back out on the street, but I felt it was important. I felt the support that the officers needed to ensure that they had the tools and the training that they need to get the job done was important. And I felt like I could provide that service to them. When I was promoted to deputy chief, one of the advantages to being a deputy chief is that I’m now a salaried employee, exempt from overtime. I could go back to work as much as I want. So what I would do, usually on holiday weekends, is go down to the police department, grab a squad car and go out on patrol, work four or five hours with the officers, stopped cars, kind of getting that feel back for the street. Then I would go in and find one of our young officers, and I would do ride-alongs with them. I would talk to them, communicate with them, find out how things are going, make them understand that, as leaders, we’re making decisions that are directly affecting what our officers are doing out on patrol. The Quincy Police Department is primarily a patrol and investigative type of police department. We don’t have a ton of specialty units. So the officers who are out there working have to know that their leaders understand the tough job that they do. I’ve made it a point to make sure that I consistently understand the tough job that they do by riding along or just going on patrol myself. As chief of police, I would intend to do the same thing, taking time to go out, be on the street with the officers, show up to their calls, back them up and make sure that they know that they have a chief who’s out there and knows what job they are doing, knows how difficult it is. So that when we make decisions, those decisions are the right decisions for the officers who are out there on the street.

What process would you go through to choose your deputy chief? Would you consider input from members of the department?

LEWIN: So you’re asking me a really dangerous question to consider. I’m surrounded by the two deputy chiefs. Coming in as an outsider, and I’ve had some outside superintendents come to Chicago while I was on the command staff, I would do what they did, which was to talk to people in the department, talk to the community, talk to stakeholders, talk to my boss, talk to elected officials, talk to police officers and interview the current candidates, Just make sure that all of our visions are aligned. If I got the position, they may not want to work for me. So it has to be a two-way street, There has to be a desire on both sides to want to work together. I would not make a change for the sake of making a change. if change wasn’t needed, I wouldn’t make change. I would approach it objectively and use all available information.

YATES: The police officers understand that the deputy chief of operations and administration have a significant impact on how they do the jobs. Mayor Troup has made it clear that he wants to talk to the new police chief about the deputy chief of administration’s position. That’s going to need to be the first thing that happens. The new chief is going to have to sit down with the mayor and is going to have to understand what maybe the mayor’s vision is. Explain the position and whether it needs to continue or whether it needs to be eliminated. We need to get that hurdle figured out first thing. If things were to stay status quo, my process would be to solicit letters from everyone within the police department who would be interested in a deputy chief position. The deputy positions are challenging. They’re very rewarding, but it is a lot of work, and it’s a lot of stress. It’s important that as chief of police, you put the right people in the right seats on the bus to make sure that we all are headed where we need to go. My opinion is that, as chief, you need to have deputy chiefs who not only are willing to work hard for the officers and make the right decisions, but they also have to have a bit of a contrary view to the chief so that we make sure that questions are being asked, that the chief doesn’t just pick somebody who’s going to say yes to everything without asking, “Why are we doing this? What’s the benefit? What’s the potential downside with doing something like this.” I’ve talked to Shannon about this. I told him he would submit a letter just like anybody else. We would make sure that we have vision, that we have goals, and that we work together as a team, but that we complement each other. So the process would be letters from anyone on the department, because the deputy chief position is unique in that it be a patrol officer through a lieutenant. So it gives us the opportunity to pick the people who have the skills, the abilities and the ambition to move us forward.

PILKINGTON: Like Adam said, Mayor Troup did talk about getting rid of the deputy oof administration, and that’s a conversation that the new chief’s going to have with the mayor. I felt really good to the day after lunch with the mayor. He explained he’s willing to listen about what that position does, and I think once you hear what that position does, I think it’s a valid position the police department. We went from three captains in the 1980s and one civilian in planning and research to two deputy chiefs, and the planning research officer went away. So the two deputy chief positions are replacing four sworn officers. I’m busy all day, every day. It’s hard to keep up. I can’t see a department with one deputy chief. My process of selecting s deputy chief of administrations would be to have them send of letters. I actually kind of like the forum we’ve had last night with the union, where the union members will ask questions and we get to see how the your candidate would interact with the officers. They go through the selection process like you would do in any other position. You want to appoint somebody to that position that you see the future leader of the Quincy Police Department. For some time,  I’ve thought about not fitting in for chief. I’m getting close to retirement. Do I want any more of a headache? But Chief Copley saw something in me to make me deputy chief, as young as I was with a sergeant rank, and I feel that I owe it to the position to put in for this position. Like Adam said, you want a deputy chief who doesn’t always agree with you. You try to talk to Rob Copley and disagree with him, and see what happens. He respects what I have to say. He doesn’t always agree to it, but that’s the position. You can’t be afraid and the deputy chief to tell the chief what you think.

First day on the job. First day you’ve got to show up. What do you do?

YATES: No more patrol hats. Our officers hate wearing patrol hats. It’s been a morale issue for decades. Day one as chief, a memo goes out. No more having to wear a patrol hats. You can wear them if you want to, but you don’t have to. This goes back to decision making and policy enforcement. Procedures are very important in a police department. It’s important that we follow rules. It’s also important that when the rules aren’t followed that we hold our officers accountable. For a long time, we’ve kind of had a standing rule that you wore your patrol hat when you were on a traffic stop or you were directing traffic. When I first came on, you were supposed to wear your patrol hat anytime you were out of the car. Chief Copley relaxed that rule a little bit but felt it was still important. And I do think that you understand that the patrol hat does signify a police officer as a police officer. It’s a very distinctly shaped hat. It helps you stand out in a crowd, if there’s a bunch of people and someone sees you at a distance. But the hats are not popular. And at times, it’s impractical. What we’ve kind of gotten to the point on the department is the sergeants would let the officers know if they happen to find them without a hat on, but no actual discipline or any type of rule enforcement was ever done. My policy is that if you have a policy that you’re not going to enforce, then you’re going to need to start enforcing it or you need to just get rid of the policy. In this case, I think the hat issue is such that there’s really no practical fact that makes you a better police officer if you’re wearing a hat or not wearing a hat. So I think for morale and to improve just the overall job satisfaction, getting rid of patrol hats so the officers don’t have to worry about getting talked to by their sergeant any further is the first thing, the easiest thing, that I would do on day one.

PILKINGTON: I would meet with the mayor and see what direction that we’re gonna go with the department, because I realized that the police department is Quincy’s police department, but it’s part of the city. I want to work with the mayor, not to be in an adversarial position, to get done what we need to get done between the departments in the city. As Adam said, the officers hate the hats.  They want to be able to have tattoos being shown. We’ve looked at several policies on that. They would also like to wear beards. I don’t like it, but doesn’t mean I have to throw one myself. So there’s little things, little changes we can do to make the officers a little bit happier without costing a dime, without really having to make a policy change. Somebody officers can’t grow very good beards. But the first thing I would do is get my agenda together and meet with the mayor and see what direction and try to work out a better relationship between the police department and the city administration.

LEWIN: The same thing that Shannon said. The first thing would be meeting with the mayor and find out what the immediate priorities are. Hopefully do that first thing in the morning and then come to the department and meet with as many people as I could day one and find out if there are only priorities that we could address immediately. It sounds like hats are one. It’s interesting how themes emerge in law enforcement and are universal around the country. Chicago had the exact same issue with hats. Officers hated them. We’ve had some superintendents who came in and were very strict about it. We’ve had others bring in baseball caps. We’ve had others eliminate hats entirely except for very special circumstances like parades. It sounds like that would be some low-hanging fruit that could be done day one. As long as there were no other issues involved with that, there probably be some other things based on those conversation that I talked about that we could do immediately that could have an impact right away on improving morale. That could set the stage that is was going to be an open administration, that we were going to be innovative, that we were going to listen to officers and we were going to explore new ideas and that we were going to make changes when we could. That could make improvements in morale and address some of those potential recruitment efforts that we talked about earlier, making officers happier, more productive.

They say you can tell a lot about a person by what they do to decompress. So what do you guys do in your off time? What kind of a person are you? What do you do to relax? I think it will tell us a lot about who you are and what kind of person you are.

PILKINGTON: I have a friend who owns an automotive shop. When he leaves work, he likes to shoot. When I leave work, I like to work on cars. We have a goat farm. We’re goat farmers. To decompress, I work on a farm. We raise dairy goats. and my daughter shows them. That’s something that we do as a family. They’re a lot of work, and a lot of FFA projects we do with with the goats. So I’m always working around the house. Getting ready to build a corn crib gazebo that we bought. We kind of have the farm thing going on. My daughter is 16 years old, so we still have a sporting events that we go. Love to watch her play softball. Love to watch her show ghosts. We attend the county fairs. My wife grew up on a farm. I never did. And the first time I helped birth goats, I didn’t … what am I doing here? Now it’s been several years. I’m getting used to it now. I’m able to do most of the medical to them. I can’t help birth goats any more because I passed out one time. So that’s what we do. I like to work on cars and work on a farm. Instead of a truck payment, I have a tractor payment.

LEWIN: No goat farmers in Chicago. I love to travel — a little less often than if I were in this position. It would have to be reduced, of course, because there wouldn’t be time. But love to travel. I love reading historical fiction. I love music. All types, country and western music. I like working out. Interesting question.

YATES: I’m a closet Rockstar in my very limited free time. I’m a musician, and in a couple of days here locally, Spirit Knob Winery, May 1, 2 to 5 p.m. I play in a trio called Prospect Road. I play keyboard, sing, play harmonica. I also play in a band called Pepper Spray. Call that exactly why you would think it would be. When we were discussing the name, the conversation came up about using tasers on people. And I said that if someone was resisting, I would prefer to  use of pepper spray, because it was a lot less paperwork. One of the members said, “That would be a perfect band name.” We’ve been around for 10-15 years now. One of the great advantages to doing that is it’s just a great release for me. It really takes me away from the job, It puts me into a whole other world of entertaining people. I really get a kick out of that. It also gives me an opportunity to give back. Just this last weekend, our band donated several hours to play the Dream Big Color Run for QHS. We get to participate in a lot of benefits. It gives you an opportunity to donate time, bring people pleasure. It just really is a great way to get away from the job and kind of clear your head and realize there’s a whole other world out there other than police work. Being a closet Rockstar was never good enough to actually make any money at it. So that’s why I do it.

Why do you want this job?

LEWIN: Well, as I mentioned earlier, this is really my passion. In my position now, we’re primarily a support agency. We get to work with police departments, even fire and emergency management around the country. I get to do a lot of traveling and workshops and conferences. But my heart is really in policing truly. I really feel like you can do the most good there. I feel like you can have the greatest impact on using national best practices, leveraging all those experiences that others around the country have had, and bringing those best practices to a community like this, to make people safer. That’s my passion. That’s what I want to do. That’s what attracted me to this role.

YATES: This police department is my police department. This town is my town. I grew up here. Quincy’s been my home. Quincy will continue to be my home. I could not be more proud to be a Quincy police officer. From the time I started on this department, I’ve been leading. I was fortunate enough to get promoted in 2010, and I was able to lead officers formally. I have come up through the ranks, I understand the needs of the community. I have established relationships in the community, and I have the qualities and the skills and the abilities, But also I have the drive to lead this police department. I’ve always said that if you want to see change, then you have to be part of the solution. You have to affect change from within, and I’ve been doing that. There’s a significant need for change at the top of the Quincy Police Department. I’ve been doing things to prepare myself. I was recently certified chief-eligible by the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police, and I’ve gone back to school to make sure that I had everything that I needed to be successful when Rob Copley retired. That time is now. My passion, and my love is for policing and policing the city of Quincy. I look forward to leading this agency.

PILKINGTON: I spent my whole adult life here with the Quincy Police Department. I can’t imagine doing anything different. You know, I looked at maybe retiring in three years, just because it wears on you. But then again, you’re like, man, look what we’ve done here. And as an officer, I remember saying, “We should change that. Why can’t we change that?” Now I can change that. I can fix that. We make decisions every day that affect this police department, and I’m not afraid to make those hard decisions. I care about the city of Quincy. I’m a good steward of the city’s money. This year, the mayor has blessed us with a good budget, which is awesome, but I think we have some lean years coming up. We need someone who is fiscally conservative to run the police department, to put the money where it’s needed, and try not to cut personnel. Not saying that’s never going to happen. Luckily in the city of Quincy, we’ve never laid a police officer off. We came close several times. So again, I see myself as a good steward for the city’s money and a good steward for the city of Quincy. When I was in college, I knew I just didn’t want a police officer. I joined the Army to help me a police officer, to be a leader, and I’ve shown that. I’m a graduate of Northwestern University. I’ve done everything I can at this point to be the leader I am today. I want to see this place succeed. I want to see a good department in the future. I want to leave it in a good place when I leave.