Police Department Consolidation

Beat Intro
Voiceover
00:00	This is the Beat – a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest 
community policing topics facing our nation.

Interview
Katherine McQuay
00:08	This is Katherine McQuay with the COPS Office. With us today is Chief Brad 
Bloom from Hinsdale, Illinois. Chief Bloom is here today to discuss 
regionalization and consolidation. Chief, as we start, if you could tell us a bit 
about Hinsdale for our listeners not familiar with it.

Chief Brad Bloom
00:26	Sure. Hinsdale is a suburban Chicago community, made up of approximately 
18,000 people. We’re one of the western suburbs of Chicago. It’s a very affluent 
community. It’s a community rich in history. It prides itself on its school systems 
and its love of the past and trying to keep as much contact with the past and their 
roots as they can.
	
Katherine
00:48	We know that Hinsdale has been pursuing shared service agreements with its 
neighbors for a few years now. Can you talk to us about the village’s motivations 
to explore these options?

Brad
00:59	Sure. It started like, the budget crisis started with many police departments back 
in 2008. In 2008 we laid off three police officers, we contracted out our 911 
services, we converted full-time civilian positions to part-time positions, and we 
brought in the use of volunteers. We reduced our budget somewhat significantly 
doing that without cutting our services. But going forward we knew that our 
costs were going to increase. There was growing concern that the cost of public 
safety was becoming too big a portion of the village’s overall budget. One of the 
areas that they had looked at was consolidation and shared services. The four 
communities located in the southeast part of DuPage County, we all had 
contiguous borders, the police chiefs of those communities began to meet and 
talk about ways that we could reduce our costs through shared services and 
consolidation. We’ve been working on it ever since then and the plan has 
migrated to the point where it is today.

Katherine
01:58	How did you determine what services made sense to share?

Brad
02:02	That’s a great question. We looked at functional consolidation first. What I mean 
by functional is certain functions of the organizations. Every police department 
has an investigative unit, every police department has an administrative function. 
Then we also have some smaller functions like crime prevention officers, 
D.A.R.E. officers, evidence custodians, evidence techs. What we determined 
was the only way to save money was to consolidate that major functions. The 
two areas that we looked at was investigations and the administrative side. 

	What happened next was that we put together a report, and the report talked 
about, we covered shared services and functional consolidations. We also talked 
about consolidating the police departments, but we knew this was a monumental 
task and there would probably be a lot of push-back to achieving that. Then one 
of the police chiefs of one of the four communities left somewhat abruptly. We 
decided that Hinsdale, the town I work in, is a very close match with that 
community, both demographically—we share the same school systems—and we 
line up very closely with that community. We thought, “Now is our opportunity 
to pursue consolidation of those police departments.” So we’ve been pursuing 
that consolidation since that time.

Katherine 
03:21	We know that local authority and control is often a big concern for citizens when 
they’re considering consolidating. How have you all and your partner agencies 
worked to address those public concerns?

Brad 
03:35	I think that it is a concern and I think the only way to really address that concern 
is because the communities are different sizes. Clarendon Hills, which is the 
community we’re working with to partner with in consolidation, is about a third 
of our size. I think there’s some concern that they’re going to be Hinsdale-light. I 
think there’s some concern that it’s not going to be an equitable sharing of 
services—that the services are going to be allocated to the bigger community 
where the services are more needed. I think that has to be addressed through the 
governance. Our city councils are very aware of that. They want to make sure 
that, going into this process, that the smaller community has a say and has a 
significant say in determining the direction; how the police department is staffed 
and how the services are allocated.

Katherine 
04:23	We know that the effects of consolidation can be very concerning to officers. What 
are some of the things you’ve done to help your officers approach the move and 
better adjust to the changes?

Brad 
04:34	What we really did right away, I think was key. The city councils met in an 
executive session to decide whether they wanted to pursue consolidation. There 
was a consensus amongst both city councils to pursue it. We knew we needed to 
meet with organized labor in the departments as quickly as possible. We 
immediately met simultaneously with both groups and we assured them that 
there was no plan in place—that they had just decided this was a direction that 
they wanted to pursue and were just at the beginning stages of looking into it.

	The other key thing that I think we did was to assure them that we would get to 
the right number of officers, in the end, through attrition. No one was in danger 
of losing their job. It wasn’t going to be a major change to the work rules or to 
their benefits. I think that put everybody at ease as much as we could. There’s 
still some concerns about what the department is going to look like, which 
supervisors are going to be responsible for which shifts, which chief is going to 
manage both departments, what the identity is of the departments. We have two 
separate cultures and we’re trying to mesh those cultures. 

	My concern in this process is that we don’t sacrifice in quality. I think this is a 
direction we need to go in. I think this is a direction of the future. I’ve told a lot 
of my counterparts and I’ve told many officers in our department, this needs to 
be an area that we pursue today. If we’re facing a huge budgetary shortfall in the 
future, we’re going to have to do this and we’re going to have to do it overnight. 
If we do it overnight and we don’t do it in a measured, careful fashion, we are 
going to sacrifice the quality of services, and that’s something that we want to 
avoid.

	I have some officers that are excited about this as something that’s new and 
innovative, and on the cutting edge and the first to do it. I have other officers 
who are very concerned about the impact this is going to have on the culture of 
the organization. I think the biggest thing that we did right, though, was to tell 
people that the plan is not in place. We’re not bringing them in, and not bringing 
labor in at the 11th hour. We’re bringing them in immediately and we want them 
as a partner in this process. We don’t want to dictate the rules. We’re very 
concerned that if we don’t have the agreement of labor, if it’s a process they’re 
going into kicking and screaming, that I’m going to have 40 officers out there in 
the community building coalitions against this project. They’re a very influential 
group of people. People are very concerned when it comes to public safety 
because it is public safety. We need their support; they need a strong 
understanding of it for it to work. So far, everything is moving forward and it 
seems to be going well. Things seem to be very much on track.

Katherine 
07:23	That was going to be my last question, how do you think it’s going so far, and you 
think, fairly well?

Brad 
07:29	Well, I think overall government moves slowly. What we did initially when we 
started this process is we brought in experts with a labor background, experts 
with intergovernmental agreement backgrounds, and experts dealing with police 
and fire commissions, and we said, “What is the right sequence to do this? What 
is our best strategy to do this?” So we’re trying to do this without making any 
missteps. It’s new and uncharted territory but we think we’re making some 
progress. But government moves slowly. We think we are on track and things are 
looking good.

Katherine 
08:03	Chief Bloom, thank you so much and good luck!

Brad 
08:06	Thank you!

Beat Exit
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