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Expert: Pension for widow still open for debate Gliniewicz has not filed for benefits By KATIE DAHLSTROM
kdahlstrom@shawmedia.com
Photos by H. Rick Bamman – hbamman@shawmedia.com
ABOVE: Cary police officers attend an afternoon shift roll call Thursday. Twenty-five officers have been participating in the Mental Health First Aid program, training in how they should respond to mental health crisis calls. BELOW: Crystal Lake Police Sgt. Scott Miller wears a Crisis Intervention Team pin after going through a 40-hour course designed to help officers when interacting with the mentally ill.
Officers get mental health training Programs aim to stop situations from getting worse By KATIE DAHLSTROM
STATE
See GLINIEWICZ, page A4
Requests for public works move online
kdahlstrom@shawmedia.com CRYSTAL LAKE – The calls are common at the Crystal Lake Police Department: A man is walking in circles talking to himself. They trigger a response from police, although many times the circumstances leading to the call are more about mental illness than they are about criminal activity. Officers in these instances are trained to recognize they might be looking at a person who needs help more than they need to be handcuffed, Sgt. Scott Miller said. “It’s obvious we need to deal with people with mental health issues in an appropriate manner, and that’s not just putting them in jail,” Miller said. “It’s getting them some help.” As the lives of police and the mentally ill become more entangled, McHenry County police departments are providing more and different kinds of training to their officers. While dozens of officers have gone through a nationally embraced 40hour course designed to improve their responses to people with mental illness, other officers are going through a countywide program that is less time-consuming and cost-intensive. Although it’s difficult to measure how many police calls in McHenry County stem from someone with mental illness, the Virginia-based Treatment Advocacy Center estimates that, in the United States, people with severe mental illness generate no less than one in 10 calls for police service and occupy one in five jail beds. The center contends nearly 8 mil-
FOX LAKE – Despite her recent indictment on felony money laundering charges, the widow of disgraced Fox Lake police Lt. Joseph Gliniewicz could still be awarded a pension, a police pension expert said. Melodie Gliniewicz, 51, has yet to submit an application for the pension to the Fox Lake Police Pension Board, but Illinois Public Pension Fund Association President James McNamee said it’s unclear what effect a Lake County grand jury’s decision to indict her would have on her application. “This is such an unusual case, and it has such unusual dynamics that this is going to be a whole new thing,” McNamee said. “It’s interesting and stressful at the same time because this is so different. Everything was a fraud.” Gliniewicz’s Sept. 1 shooting death was first pursued as a homicide, but Lake County Major Crimes Task Force in-
vestigators two months later announced that the veteran policeman had staged his suicide after embezzling from the Fox Lake Police Explorer Post 300 for years. The alleged embezzlement was discovered when the investigation into his death found inconsistencies in financial documents and revealed that Melodie Gliniewicz had been involved, officials said. Detectives Melodie determined the Gliniewicz police explorer money was used at businesses such as Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, Fox Lake Theatre, and for more than 400 other restaurant charges. Lake County prosecutors also said the account funded a trip to Hawaii in August 2014 that cost $5,683. Authorities claimed that four months later, Melodie Gliniewicz wrote a check to that account from
By CAITLIN SWIECA
cswieca@shawmedia.com
‘‘
It’s obvious we need to deal with people with mental health issues in an appropriate manner, and that’s not just putting them in jail. It’s getting them some help.”
other 400,000 being incarcerated. To prevent unnecessary incarceration or altercations, officers from the county’s various departments go through Crisis Intervention Team training, known as CIT. The training helps officers cope and increase safety for the people in crisis, officers and bystanders involved in the calls. In Crystal Lake, 14 officers have gone through CIT training, the last one in 2013. While Miller said he would Scott Miller like to have more officers armed with Crystal Lake police sergeant the 40-hour specialty, it’s not feasible because of financial and time constraints. lion Americans have severe mental “They are dispersed through all illness. About half of them go without ranks and files,” Miller said. “The idea treatment, which the agency reported leads to 216,000 being homeless and anSee TRAINING, page A4
LOCAL NEWS
Saving lives
Harvard police sergeant, officer use Narcan to combat suspected heroin overdose / A3 SPORTS
ALGONQUIN – When Information Systems Director Kevin Crook was considering the best way to bring Algonquin Village Public Works’ request system online, he drew inspiration from an old cliche: “A picture is worth a thousand words.” “If a resident doesn’t know how to explain [a problem] but he can take a picture, record a video, whatever, and it uploads to our server, that in itself saves us a ton of time,” Crook said. “We don’t have to rely on bad data. We just look at the picture, and we reclassify it.” That line of thinking led Crook to recommend SeeClickFix, a company that provides an app allowing residents of municipalities to send public works requests directly from the site of the problem. The Village Board agreed to try the app, which staff integrated with their internal Cityworks system. Nine months after launching the app, Crook provided an update to the Village Board that said
Photo provided
This screen shot from the “Algonquin Fix It” app is an example of how McHenry County public works requests are adjusting to the digital age.
624 incidents, which translated to $2.56 million in repairs, had been tracked through the “Algonquin Fix It” app. Algonquin is one of several McHenry County municipalities that have moved their
See REQUESTS, page A4
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