- PNC is proud to support "Business Forward," where community leaders discuss the issues confronting business in Central Illinois.

(bright music) - Welcome to "Business Forward."

I am your host, Matt George.

Joining me tonight, Peoria County sheriff, Chris Watkins.

Welcome, Chris.

- Thank you, thank you for having me.

- Well, I'm glad you're here.

I mean, there's a lot to talk about, so let's just get down to it.

So you grew up around here, right?

- I did, I was born and raised in Peoria.

- [Matt] High school, where'd you go to high school?

- Oh, I went to Limestone High School.

Grade school, I went to District 150 in Pleasant Valley, and then Limestone High School.

- So you can really say that I am that community guy.

- [Chris] My roots are here, yes.

- Yeah, all right.

So now, unique how you got into this position.

You've always been a leader, and we'll talk about that soon, but Sheriff Asbell steps down, there's an election coming up, and you pop into that position, and then now coming up in November running unopposed, is that correct?

- That is correct.

- [Chris] But there was like a, there was a primary.

- There was.

- So do you have to go through the regular kind of campaign cycle when you have that?

- Yes, it starts with announcing, and then getting your petitions signed, and then in the primary, I had an opponent.

It was an internal opponent with the Peoria County Sheriff's Office.

That worked out well for me, and right now there's, well, the deadline was last Monday, so there is no, I am running unopposed this November.

- Unopposed, and that means that there's no one else?

- [Chris] Yes.

- I know what unopposed means, but I'm saying like there's, is it because of you the person, or is it because the job's not wanted, or I mean, what is that?

- Maybe a little bit of both.

I think it's odd that as a sheriff, you have to pick a party to run when- - [Matt] That's what I was getting at.

- Yeah, that's politics, right?

You have to pick a party.

Luckily, I've built relationships on both sides, 'cause we're all Peorians, right?

So I've prided myself in the last 18 years being in law enforcement where it didn't matter what party you are, just having those relationships.

So I hope some of that has to do with it, and they definitely could have picked somebody to run against me.

The Democrats did, but I have friends on both sides, so I hope that, and you know Sheriff Asbell, he is the same way.

He's built those relationships on both sides through the years, so it helped having his endorsement also.

So no, I think that does, and also there's also, some people do not want to be sheriff.

There's a lot that goes on with that.

There's 50 sheriffs in Illinois that are retiring, not running for reelection this cycle.

- I did not know that.

- [Chris] Yeah, and there's 102 counties, so that is a big deal.

- My goodness, so 50% of the counties, basically, there's going to be a new sheriff in town, so to speak.

- Yes.

- So if you go, I like what you just said.

So you go Watkins, Asbell, McCoy, Schofield.

You go back, they're all community people.

- It is, and Peoria is very dynamic, right?

I mean, there's not, it's split down the middle, what your beliefs are, so I mean, you really have to be someone to be sheriff.

You have to be someone, you have to be likable.

You have to, they have to trust you.

You can't probably, you have to be able to listen, and understand both sides of where they're coming from, and I hope that's why I am, I mean, I think that's why I'm sheriff.

- Yeah, and you're the CEO.

- [Chris] I am.

- I mean, that's what it is, and I'm gonna just say a few things that you've done.

I mean, you started as patrol, and then lieutenant, and then you're at the courthouse, and captain, and then you go through all those different things, and you learn something each along the way, right?

- Right, and that's like most CEOs, right?

They usually are not the same division their whole careers.

If you talk to a lot of CAP managers, they bounce around, they travel, and it's the same thing with law enforcement.

If you wanna be a good leader, you need to be able to know there's so many different aspects of being the sheriff.

People sometimes think it's just deputies or the jail, but we do so much other things.

We have process servers where we have three deputies, all they do is go serve papers and evictions.

I mean, there's a lot of evictions, and during COVID a lot of that got paused, so now we're playing catch up.

So we have records clerks, we register sex offenders.

There's a lot of things that don't make the news, but it's things that by statute we have to do.

We're in charge of courthouse security, so we're in charge of keeping the judge and the state's attorney safe, screening points.

We have transport team where we're going out and picking up prisoners throughout the state, throughout the nation.

We have task force members also.

We have task force members with the ATF, Secret Service, US Marshals.

There's a lot that goes on with law enforcement, but that also makes our place a very desirable place to work because we offer all these different options to make you a better police officer.

- So let's talk about task force.

What does that even mean?

- So task force is, so you have obviously, your federal agencies, all the acronyms, FBI, CIA, all these, well, what they like to do is they're not very successful unless they have their local law enforcement involved, because we are the ones boots on the ground.

We know who the players are in the community, so it's very beneficial for them to have a local law enforcement official that's tied into their task force.

So what they do is they come to us and say, "Hey, do you have anybody?"

And Sheriff McCoy, Sheriff Schofield, they started a lot of this also, and I plan on continuing.

I've actually grown it.

We just added an ATF task force, because we had a gun violence problem in Peoria County.

So these are tied in with federal agents.

They get credentialed through the federal.

It's a good resume builder too, but it also, it makes it, instead of taking all of our cases state, we can now take cases federal, and look at the big picture of crime, not just the small picture.

- I think what's neat about your job, and I guess just being with the Sheriff's Department in general is if you think about what you just said, most people just think, "He's a cop."

It's not right.

I mean, it's true, but there's so many different avenues that you could go down.

I'm looking at your resume, so to speak, or your timeline of when you started, what, 18, 19 years ago?

- [Chris] Yes.

- And you look at it, and you've done 20 different things.

- Yeah, I've been very fortunate.

- [Matt] I mean, that's cool.

- A lot of it has to do with timing too, right?

When the position opens up, are you available?

So it's, I pride myself on my hard work ethic, but a lot of it's timing also.

- I had this argument one time someone said, "You know it's timing and luck."

It's not luck.

It's 18, 19 years of really doing the right thing, and that as, you get rewarded for it is my point, so I think you've done a good job.

Does the Sheriff's Department have like a SWAT team?

- We do, we have two.

So I was part of both of those.

We have a regional one, which is called CERT, Central Illinois Emergency Response Team that has deputies and officers from Pekin, Tazewell, Woodford, surrounding counties, so we have an agreement where if any critical incident happens in our surrounding counties, we all are in agreement to send our officers and deputies to there to manage it.

We kind of manage the most of the team.

My deputy chief, he actually runs the team.

We keep all the equipment at our place.

Then we also have one called ILEAS.

It's a weapons of mass destruction team, so this is a statewide team.

There's three teams.

So unfortunately, you have to have this, right?

You have to have, we get intel that someone has a bomb, pipe bomb, or even a weapon of mass destruction, this team goes.

They're highly trained.

They can work in low oxygen environments.

They test for radiation.

It is the worst of the worst, but we have to train for that.

So yeah, there's three teams in Illinois, and we manage one of the teams.

- So I was just thinking this when you used the word training.

Every one of those positions you had requires different training.

So really, you are about as well-rounded, once you hit 20 years of service, and you do as many things as you've done, you've trained just about every aspect of what you could.

Is that correct?

- Yes, it's good, because as sheriff, all those decisions come flowing at you every day.

I mean, so if you don't have any knowledge of the ILEAS team, the SWAT team, or these task forces, you can make the wrong decision, which, our decisions, if you make the wrong one, usually impacts numerous people, you know?

- Yeah, and another is one is the airport.

- Yeah, we have about 10 service contracts that people don't even know about.

We do 24/7 security at the airport.

We have four SROs in different school districts.

- [Matt] Like Dunlap?

- Dunlap, yeah, then we have community policing, which I did in West Peoria when I'm beginning.

As a 21, 22 year old, you really don't know how to talk to people, so being a community officer, you're going to those city council meetings, you're explaining to 'em what's going on, and really that gives you those.

That's why you see a lot of community officers, they're promoted.

They're detectives because they learn how to talk to people, and that's 90% of our job is deescalating, and just developing those relationships by speaking to people.

- With Asbell stepping away and you going in, you said, "We'll continue to do some of the projects that he was working on.

I'll continue those in the future."

So you really have to take over, because you can't just say, "Well, here's my agenda," right?

And you probably were part of some of those projects, or a big part of anyway.

- Yes.

- But as sheriff, and I'll just say CEO, you now have to look at the strategic plan, or what initiatives that you see as sheriff, and what platforms or whatever you wanna call it as you move forward.

Is that correct?

- Correct, I have a list of things I wanna do, and I've had to remind myself you can't get all of them done in one month.

I'm sitting four weeks as sheriff right now, and I already, I mean, I've been working 12 hour days because, but I keep reminding myself you have to just chip away at your list.

A lot of things have been put on hold because of COVID for the last couple years.

I mean, Sheriff Asbell had picked the worst four years ever to be sheriff, and he did a fantastic job.

So now I have to get some of these programs that were on pause to start again, like our reentry program.

I mean, he was the pioneer for jail reentry.

What that is, while someone's in jail, we work with them.

We have programs to make them when they get out a more positive member of society.

So he developed a great program.

Unfortunately COVID, we couldn't let outside people in the jail, 'cause we were trying to limit the risk, 'cause we were a pretty hot spot.

- You were.

- So I now have started that back up.

We're going, go live date is October 1st to get our reentry program going.

So I talked about that in my campaign, but I want actions, I want my actions to show it.

Anybody, you know politicians, they'll say something, it never gets done, but I'm already hitting the ground running.

Recruitment and retention was another really big, big thing for us nationwide.

In the last four weeks, I've already hired four COs and deputies, and I got eight more in the pipeline, so I mean, I'm excited.

I really think we'll hit the staffing issue by the end of the year, I think we'll be okay, not perfect, but we'll be all right.

- And when you're talking staffing, again I think people think of cops, so they think of people on the street.

It's way more than that, right?

- Right, we have 180 employees.

Right now, we're down about 40 of them, and that's with Records Department, everything.

Like I said, the Sheriff's Office is a big office.

We have a $19 million budget, so there's a lot of responsibility, a lot of personnel.

So we're down 20 COs, correction officers, and we're down about six deputies, but I'm chipping away.

By the end of the year, I think I'll cut those in half almost.

- So I wanna talk about the jail for a second.

So if someone in Peoria gets arrested by Peoria Police, they come out, and they go to the jail at Peoria County?

- Correct, any law enforcement agency in Peoria County takes 'em out to our county jail.

- [Matt] And what about Tazewell?

- They have their own jail.

- Okay, all right.

So how many people in your jail actually are employed there?

How many on a shift as an example?

- About 20.

- Okay, and so if you're down 10%, just as an example, I mean, you're talking pretty big amount of people, a gap.

- And we can't just be low, so what we're doing is forcing that people on the first shift to second shift, the second shift to third shift, and attrition leads to more attrition, right?

When you're forcing these people to work 16 hours a day, and that's why staffing is so critical, and that's why now you're seeing other jails, they're like, "I would rather just pay another county, and ship my inmates over there, and just pay, because then I don't have to deal with the staffing."

We're not to that point, and I know we're not going to get to that point, but some smaller counties are to that point.

- And it's not just working the long hours, 'cause some people will take it.

- [Chris] Correct.

- But it's messing with their shifts too, so it's more than that.

It's hey, my kid, we both coach baseball.

You're a real person.

You're not just the sheriff, right?

So you have a family, and you're a baseball coach, or soccer coach, or whatever, and "Wait a minute, you just changed my shift to second shift?

I have four games I have to do," and it bothers people.

- It does.

I mean, you lose marriages over this, and I take that personally, I really do, and they'll get to the point where they're gonna pick their relationship over their job, which they should.

Family comes first, right?

So no, that's something that we take in mind.

That's why I try to incentivize.

We've doubled overtime, so now if, it used to be like time and a half.

Now we'll pay double time for them to come over and try to volunteer for that shift so someone that is gonna get forced, they're not missing their kid's birthday or baseball game.

- You gotta have each other's back.

- Yeah, yeah we do.

- [Matt] Interesting.

- They do a good job of it though, they do.

- Yeah, good.

So when looking at major issues right now facing the Sheriff's Office, take what we just talked about off the table, what are the top three in your mind that you're looking at?

And I'm not saying they need to be bad issues, just issues that you know, "I want to step in and improve as sheriff."

- Well, recruitment intention is definitely number one.

Besides that, just morale.

In law enforcement, morale always goes up and down, so it's one of those things that you're always battling, because it's shift work.

The newer generation does not wanna work shifts, so you have to make it where they want to come to work at midnight on a Friday night, right?

So those are things.

Social media is one of the big things I'm working on.

Cops, you'll see cops really don't wanna be shown on social media, but their families like seeing them, so I really, we're looking at hiring a social media content person to up our social media game.

I've been doing a lot of it myself, and I just can't do it all myself.

So I wanna show how honorable our profession is, and if you look at our Facebook page, we're swearing in junior deputies.

We're doing these little things that it's great PR, and it makes an impact in the community also.

But our employees will start doing tweet alongs and ride alongs where it shows people the type of calls we go on, 'cause a lot of people have no idea.

- [Matt] No clue.

- And right now, I don't want our social media just to be, "Hey, so and so got arrested for this."

That's fine, and that's being transparent, and the public should know that, but I also want, "Hey, this officer's playing basketball with somebody," or whatever, just showing a positive light on our career field.

- You know, it's a unique time for Peoria and Peoria County, because relatively new police chief, and now new sheriff in you.

Do you two talk, do you have to communicate and collaborate?

I would think so.

- Yes, we talk almost on the daily.

We were together last night until 9:30, me, the police chief, and our state's attorney, because we had an event at the Gateway Building as protecting places of worship.

So no, we sit there and talk all night, we collaborate.

He's going through the same issues that I'm going through, right?

So most people are, and just having that collaboration, I was talking to the Sangamon County sheriff today, because they're very comparable to our county population wise and everything.

You don't have to reinvent the wheel sometimes.

It's just being able to communicate, and putting your ego to side, and say, "Hey, I'm dealing with this issue.

What are you doing?"

So yeah, no, we have a great relationship.

His whole command staff, we kind of went up through the ranks together, most of his command staff, so we talk daily.

We bounce ideas off each other.

We joke around, I'm gonna steal this officer, he's gonna steal this officer, 'cause that's what we do.

- But it's refreshing, and what's unique is, what triggered me to think of him is, and Peoria Police was, he's being very transparent right now on social media, and it's not all just, "Here, we conducted this stop."

There's some of that, but there's also, "Here's what we're doing for social service agencies.

Here's what we're doing for the community, and neighborhood associations," and all these different things.

I saw you on the news this past week with the junior deputy giving a badge and all that.

I mean, that stuff is important right now.

That's community.

- It is, and he does a very good job of it.

He has his own PIO, which is fantastic, because you have to get that out there.

There's just so many different aspects to this job, and that's one thing is I wanna put out their information.

Say one of your loved ones that gets arrested.

They made a mistake.

They're a good person, they made a mistake.

A lot of people don't know what to do, or they get the phone call, "So and so's in jail."

What do you do?

So that's stuff that we're gonna work on getting out there.

If your loved one gets arrested, this is what you do, this is where you go, this is what you pay attention to.

So it's just information.

- You were also in the Air Force.

I just wanted to bring that up because when you come outta high school, am I right in saying that you came outta high school and went straight to the Air Force?

- I did.

- Okay, so this leads to back to being a sheriff and CEO is, did you learn discipline, and grit, and all that coming?

Because it had to be really eyeopening going from high school.

- I loved it.

So yeah, after three months, I graduated high school, my mom said, "You can go to college, pay for it yourself, or go in the military."

So I did some searching between the Marines and the Air Force, and I picked the Air Force, and lived in England and New Mexico on my own.

Just living on your own at 18 years old and having responsibility, getting up at 4:00 AM, just having that structure, I feel like of most 18 year olds that's very good, right?

Sports, I think sports are so important for our youth, because there's studies showing that if you're involved in sports and having that structure and discipline, your rates of success growing up go through the roof.

- Yeah, yeah, that's pretty cool stuff.

So you're preparing right now for the SAFE-T Act, right?

What is that?

- It's a huge bill, it's a huge act.

Legislators passed it early last year.

The good thing is it was passed short enough with different timeframes that now we have a task force that we get to report back to more issues with it, so we're trying to prepare for this.

So legislators, when they make a law, sometimes the infrastructure's not there, and that's why everyone's scrambling right now to get that infrastructure in place.

One of the big deals that, a lot of the bill is okay.

We already have body cameras.

We're already ahead of the game on that stuff, but the no cash bills, right now you're hearing that's a hot topic.

Everybody's talking about it.

There's a lot of unknown with that, but there is still an infrastructure with pretrial release, and actually, that's what Sheriff Asbell is doing now is he's gonna be a supervisor for pretrial release, so once again, that is great for us and our community is to have that person to relay information to with the chief judge, myself, and just having that collaboration so then he can report back to legislators on the issues that we're seeing after January 1st with that.

- So what does no cash bail mean?

- So right now we have a bail system, so if you're charged with a felony, even a misdemeanor, you get some type of bail after a judge sees you, on the seriousness of the offense, but there's some type of bail.

Well, after January 1st, it'll be no cash bail.

Right now, California and New York, they have a similar system, but there's certain offenses that are bailable offenses.

We are gonna be truly a no cash bail system, so a good example would be right now if somebody's arrested for residential burglary, right?

They'll go, they'll get arrested, they'll get booked in.

The next day, they'll go see a judge, and the judge will look at their criminal history, look to see if this is first offense, if this is a repeat offender, and they'll judge.

They'll decide to kick 'em loose, like on a notice to appear where they get a court date, or if there's PC, and it's a good case, they'll get some type of bond, so then they'll have a chance to bond out, and that kind of gives them some weight to show up to the next court date, right?

If not, they're gonna keep that money, so that's kind of the leverage on bail bond, and everyone has different perspectives of that.

Well, now it's you're gonna be innocent until proven guilty, unless we think that you're going to be a threat or danger to society or a specific person, so we get that also.

So there's a lot of unknowns.

We really don't know.

So right now our jail population is 315.

We have 315 people in there.

I just ran the report yesterday.

We have 140 people, inmates that have some type of cash bail.

So what's gonna happen is around the first, they'll see a judge, and a judge will have to decide if they're gonna detain them or release them.

- [Matt] Wow.

- So some of them will get released, they will, and hopefully it works out where they show up to the next court date, and they get, but you'll see, there's a lot of people that are worried that these people are gonna re-offend, and there's just a lot of unknown.

So I just plan on being very transparent, and I think that's the best thing is, "Hey, okay, this is what happened.

This person missed their court date.

They re-offended, they committed another crime.

Please hold this person until their trial."

So it's interesting.

- It is interesting, and when you won the primary, one of the things you said is you are going to really focus on community and transparency, and that's one piece of it.

It's the unknown.

- It's being professional about it, right?

I don't need to sit there and rant and rave, and say they were wrong, or this isn't working out.

It's just, I'm gonna present the facts.

Hey, this is the fact that this isn't working, or this is working.

Let's tweak this.

So the good thing is we're ahead of the game.

We have a great judicial system in Peoria County.

Judge Gorman is phenomenal, state's attorney Hoos.

We just, we meet almost now every couple weeks about this, so it's great.

- Perfect.

So what's next for you?

I mean, when you, on a typical day, do you just not even know what you're doing?

Do you have a schedule, or do you just, because you don't know what's gonna hit you, right?

How do you plan?

- My calendar is filled up very quickly as sheriff, I'll tell you, but it's great.

- Thanks for the time being here.

- I plan on doing this for a long time, so right now I'm establishing the relationships, the people, the groups that I don't know, just meeting with them, letting 'em know what I'm about.

Last couple years, I've developed a system, a class called Situational Awareness, so we are really, I don't wanna let that go.

So we just met with CEFCU this week.

It's all about teaching people to be aware.

We're all very complacent.

We're on our phones all the time.

Cops sometimes are sometimes the worst, so it's one of those things where I'm really gonna pride myself, so I'm gonna, people are gonna see me out in the community teaching these type of classes.

ICC we're doing, FamilyCore.

We have about five of 'em already set the next two months.

- You're on the board of FamilyCore.

- [Chris] I am.

- Oh, you still are.

- Yes, at least for a while, yeah.

- Yeah, good.

So what does community mean to you?

- It's what we live every day.

It's our neighbors, it's our teachers, it's our schools, it's our law enforcement, it's everybody.

I mean, I sometimes take crime too personal.

When I find out somebody gets their house broken into, I'm like, "What could have we have done to prevent that?"

And a lot of it's not preventable, but like the gun violence, that's not just a police problem.

It's a community problem.

You've heard our mayor say that, and there's no easy fix.

Every community's going through this.

Every city's going through this, so just being transparent, people knowing their police officers, knowing their sheriff, so yeah, there's a lot to this, that's for sure, but I've hit the ground running.

I've been proud of what I've been doing.

- What do you do on you're off time?

- Well, we talked about, I love coaching, I do.

I don't know how good I am, but I love it.

It's kind of an out from work, but it's also youth.

I just feel like that's our future.

I wanna set these kids up for success, and I want them to know there's repercussions.

I want them to know that not everybody gets a medal, and the competition makes the best out of all of us, having competition.

- It does.

Well, I appreciate you coming on.

This was a fast 30 minutes.

Chris Watkins, the new sheriff in town, thank you.

Keep caring.

I'm Matt George, and this is another episode of "Business Forward."

(bright music) - Thank you for tuning into "Business Forward," brought to you by PNC.