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Every week, ordinary citizen and Freelance Reporter Linda Hansen attends the Evanston Police Department’s Deployment Meetings and takes notes on the various agenda topics. Below is her report for the week.
In the Squad Room
 It’s no secret that there is graffiti in Evanston. My garage was tagged when I first moved here and when I lived in Chicago, I knew what IUK meant when I saw, to my horror, those letters spray-painted on the back of my kitchen door in a Belmont Harbor apartment I rented. But what I didn’t expect – as I’ve sat like a student at one of the Evanston Police Department’s weekly Deployment Meetings – was to hear a sort of scholarly discussion on the interpretation of graffiti in a cultural context.
Here’s what I learned: Police categorize tagging as graffiti that features three or four letters usually identifying a tagger or the tagger's group. Taggers are vandals who seek notoriety by evading capture. They get recognition from other taggers by getting their symbols out there and seen. Then, of course, there’s gang graffiti that most people hear about and have seen.
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 Case in point: The subject was raised as a result of a complaint about graffiti on a building in the area of Greenleaf St. and Dodge Ave. that displayed the letters “SGD” and a pitchfork. This gang symbol represents the Spanish Gangster Disciples along with the pitchfork symbol. Gang graffiti is about marking gang turf and intimidation.
What I learned from the intelligence officer at the Deployment Meeting was that the Evanston Police Department studies and analyzes graffiti whether it’s gang-related or the work of taggers. Gang-related issues between rivals are always a concern and when graffiti appears, trouble isn’t far behind. It’s one reason that the Evanston Police Department deploys resources wherever graffiti appears to prevent further incidents of graffiti and or violence that can result from it.
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Deployment Meeting –Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Prior to This Week
- Inclement weather contributed again to another low crime week in Evanston with a total two armed robbery incidents, one involving an iPhone and the other involving the theft of a backpack. There were 15 vehicle accidents since the last Deployment, none of them involving serious injury to drivers or passengers. Squad cars were involved in two of them.
- Critical Reach alerts: Evanston Police have been alerted to criminal events in neighboring communities, including the installation of an ATM skimming device at a Bank of America location in Morton Grove, several burglaries of storage facilities in the area and attempted ruse burglaries involving thieves posing as construction workers.
- Formerly dry Evanston now is one of US 14 cities to have a Starbucks Evenings location. It’s the one at 1734 Sherman and not only do they carefully check IDs, they log the number of patrons who order wine or beer and aren’t served due to lack of proper identification.
- In a change from 2013, all patrol units are presently involved in DDACTS (Data Driven Approaches to Crime and Traffic Safety) initiatives. The use of a sophisticated real-time database highlighting frequent accident sites and the involvement of all patrol personnel is being deployed with the goal of reducing vehicle-based crime.
Looking Ahead
- Four-year veteran EPD Officer Sean O’Brien, who captured national attention when he pulled a 7 year-old child from the Des Plaines River last March, will be named Officer of the Month by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.
- On Thursday, January 16th personnel in the EPD will attended A.L.I.C.E training, which stands for Alert-Lockdown-Inform-Counter-Evacuate which is designed to prevent and respond to school shootings, sponsored by Districts 65 and 202.
- Targeted patrol activities will center around Mission 1 and Mission 2 hotspots as well as the Downtown (Beat 73), Fifth Ward (Beat 77) and Howard Street (Beats 71 and 72) areas.
- Concerns for an emerging robbery pattern on the south end of the city are being addressed along with re-evaluting all hot spot locations. This is done to have the most accurate and up to date allocation of police resources directed into a specific area.
 What would you like to know about what the Evanston Police Department is doing to fight crime? Let us know if you have specific questions or concerns about issues in your neighborhood. Submissions are always welcome at police@cityofevanston.org or by calling the community strategies bureau at (847) 866-5019.
If you’d like to receive Evanston’s Daily Crime Report by email, you can subscribe here.
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 The next 12-week Citizen Police Academy will be starting Wednesday, March 5. If you’d like to learn more about the Evanston Police Department, take an active role in Community Oriented Policing and join the ranks of 800 graduates since 1995, please visit www.cityofevanston.org/cpa .
There is no cost to anyone who lives or works in Evanston.
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