- It has come to my attention that today - January 31st, 2012 - Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle is announcing that 80% of Cook County suburbs responded affirmatively to a survey asking if they would annex unincorporated areas, where the County would pay the suburban police a contracted fee for police service there instead of paying Sheriff's Police.
Sheriff's officials have been shown signed documents that purport to show 80% of Cook County suburbs support this back-door plan to eliminate 232 Sheriff's Police patrol officer positions that currently cost $19 million a year. This tiny fraction of the massive $4 billion County budget is the latest sacrificial lamb to Preckwinkle's reckless disregard for our Department's tradition of providing dedicated public service to the citizens of Cook County.
AFSCME and our membership must immediately and in the strongest possible way address Preckwinkle's back-door plan to summarily eliminate 232 dedicated career police officers from our ranks. Preckwinkle has apparently had private sector consultants working on this plan, poring over maps and statistics, for the last 6 months. Preckwinkle apparently believes she can set her plan in motion within six months, and can wholly eliminate the Sheriff's Police from her budget by the end of 2012.
County government is for the most part, bloated, inefficient and redundant with much local government, and as more and more unincorporated Cook County becomes annexed to the 'burbs, the overarching need for the Sheriff's Police becomes less and less. That's just economic reality.