KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:
Here are a few of the things that happen when small police departments don't have enough money. They pay officers the equivalent of fast food wages. They employ officers who might have troubled pasts or have been fired from other departments. And when there are questionable police shootings, rarely is anyone held accountable. Patrick Smith of member station WBEZ reports on some small police departments outside Chicago.
PATRICK SMITH, BYLINE: Two years ago, Robert Collins took over as police chief in the Chicago suburb of Dolton, population 22,000.
ROBERT COLLINS: When I first came aboard, one of my first things to do was look at the history of the department. And I did notice that there were quite a few officer-involved shootings.
SMITH: Indeed, Dolton has had nine police shootings since 2005 - tied for the most in suburban Cook County.
COLLINS: To be honest with you, I don't know how we would explain it to people.
SMITH: One explanation could be who Dolton hires for its police force and how they're trained and monitored once they join the force. Experts say in many budget-strapped towns like Dolton, a lack of resources leads to a lack of accountability for bad actions. There's one officer on the Dolton police force who has killed one man and wounded three others in separate shootings. Before he was hired by Dolton, that officer had already been suspended by one department for shooting and fired by another for misconduct. For most police forces, that background would raise a red flag. But for cash-strapped suburbs like Dolton, it made him affordable.
The Chicago Police Department estimates it costs $140,000 for the first year of hiring a new recruit. That's money many suburbs just don't have, so they'd rather take a fully trained-up officer with some baggage than pay to put someone through the academy. Chief Collins says since he's taken over in Dolton, he's raised the department's standards. But he's quick to acknowledge the struggle between budgeting and policing.
COLLINS: Unfortunately, sometimes there's not a lot of money to hire what you need. You just have to make do with what you have.
TOM DART: As a result of that, you get officers bouncing around the departments. And it's not good. It's not good. I just don't know what the mechanism is to stop that.
SMITH: That's Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, who spends a lot of his time working with distressed suburban police departments. One town just outside of Chicago, the village of Robbins, has almost all part-time police officers. The pay there is 10.50 an hour. That's less than the starting rate at Walmart. The pay for a Robbins cop was $10 an hour in 2008 when a part-time officer accidentally shot an innocent 13-year-old in the back. Nothing happened to the officer involved or to the officer in Dolton who's been involved in five shootings since 2005.
In fact, according to an investigation by WBEZ and the Better Government Association, rarely are there consequences for suburban officers after questionable shootings. Out of more than a hundred shootings since 2005, no officer has been charged with a crime for any of them. No officers have been disciplined in any way or even ordered for retraining. Our investigation found only a handful of instances in which a department even did a review.
DART: Reality is, you know, in a lot of these different towns that you name, they have a hard enough time getting police to patrol the town, let alone to have a separate part of their office set aside that just analyzes police-involved shootings.
SMITH: Peter Moskos spent a couple of years as a cop in Baltimore. He now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He says in suburbs and small departments throughout the country, these issues often get overlooked.
PETER MOSKOS: And so we just don't know because there's no account. And yeah, if there's shady stuff going on, I think it's much more likely to happen in small towns where there's no oversight.
SMITH: In the Chicago suburbs, that means the departments struggling with high crime and low budgets can miss out on opportunities to learn from mistakes and improve training or policies. It means residents who most need help from police often have to deal with poorly trained officers, some who can stay on patrol despite numerous shootings. That Dolton officer who's been involved in all those shootings was recently promoted to detective. For NPR News, I'm Patrick Smith in Chicago.
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