(air swooshes) (upbeat music) Welcome to At Issue.

I'm H Wayne Wilson.

Thank you so much for joining us on the program.

The issues we'll talk about today involve county jails, specifically the Peoria County Jail.

Issues of mental health services, we have staffing issues.

We have a new set of laws that are coming into place.

And, we're going to have that conversation with the former sheriff of Peoria County, Brian Asbell.

What's it feel like to have the word former in front of county sheriff?

- Well, H, it's bittersweet.

I'm still trying to figure this all out, not having the former position of sheriff.

But, it's a good feeling for me personally as well as my family, but there's still a lot of work to do.

Still a lot of work to do.

- And, I want to talk later on on the program about your next step in a new career, so to speak, but first, just there's a lot of individual issues I want to address.

But, just in general, what's the status of county jails in Illinois right now?

- You're at a critical phase across the state.

There's 102 sheriffs across the state.

That means there's 102 jails.

And, even though it's at different levels, everyone's having the same problem with primarily staffing.

Staffing has influences so many other problems in a community.

Lack of staffing in a jail creates situations where law enforcement's gonna be off the street longer.

You know, for example, if it used to take half an hour to get someone processed through in processing, booking, what we call it in the jail, it now takes almost three hours just because of shortage of staff at the jail.

You're taking an officer off the street for an extended period of time.

Attrition leads to more attrition too.

We ran into a situation at the Peoria County Jail where we're having officers mandatory overtime sometimes three to four shifts a week.

So, that's 16 hour days.

And, it's just, it's a huge burnout factor.

Not having staff limits you in programs and services that you can provide to the detainees, and that's a whole plethora of other problems.

We're actually seeing where we're going back in time, going to more of a warehouse model versus a rehabilitative model which we were really focused on in years past.

- Let's talk about those staffing levels.

And, the audience should understand there are actually three different areas of the Sheriff's Department.

You have the jail.

You have the patrol officers.

And, you also have the County Courthouse, where you have to staff that as well.

What's the staffing level right now?

- It's just critical.

We're down roughly 40 positions, primarily in the corrections division, but that adds to the problem at the courthouse, because what we use for court security officers, they're actually correctional officers.

So, you're at a dilemma right now, even on a daily basis, whether or not to backfill those positions, because you cannot pull someone from corrections, because you're already short in that arena.

Patrol's roughly, we're down around 10 employees.

And, those will be filled.

I've got no problems with saying that within the next year, Sheriff Watkins will have all those positions filled.

But, the ongoing problem is though, it's recruitment as well as retention for corrections.

And, I'm not alone when I say this.

This is, you know, all the sheriffs across the state are having the same issue.

And, what we're seeing is the jail often has been a springboard to get into the law enforcement profession.

The ultimate goal of the employee is to be on the street, to be in the car, to be the police officer.

And, from a historical perspective, you used to start in the jail to get it on your resume and to work your way out to the street.

You no longer have to do that.

And, what we saw in the last two years, because it's not just us at Peoria County that was having a staffing issue with police officers, it's every agency in the state.

But, they were going directly and recruiting from jails to get more officers on the street.

You're just not getting that backfill of officers in the jails.

And, that's what's creating this void.

- So, the applications to work in the jail are down significantly?

- Significantly.

I mean, let's even go back five years.

Five years on a weekly basis, and we have ongoing applications.

We don't do a two year pool.

But, you would be getting 10 to 15 applications weekly.

There's peaks, I mean, there's spikes, highs and lows with that, but across the board.

Now, you might get that in four months.

And, even when you get those applications in, that doesn't mean the individual's gonna come to do the rest of the testing.

And, that's another complication to all of this.

There's a lot of industries that you have onboarding practices once you get someone hired on, and they're up and running in maybe four weeks, five weeks.

The jail, you're talking six months.

Patrol, that's a year, by the time you go to the academy, then you do all what we call the FTO Program.

There's a long duration before that person, even though they're hired, you can consider them a full time employee because they're with somebody else.

They can't hold a position on their own.

So, that's another complication to this.

- You mentioned the academy.

I'd like to address the issue of training of an officer on the street.

They go to the academy.

You have suggested, and other have suggested that possibly we should transfer that training to the community college level, because there would be a cost savings?

- Well, there's several reasons for this.

And, I was very fortunate to have opportunities to talk to our state legislators about creating a different model, in addition to.

I'm not talking about, you know, getting rid of the academy.

Because, there's still a need for that.

But, it never made sense to me where we have someone that we make hires and Western Illinois University is one of the largest law enforcement colleges in the nation.

Let's use them for example.

We send someone to four years of college.

We hire them, and now we send them off to the academy for another 16 weeks.

Forget everything you just learned.

It made sense to me if you could build a curriculum under the same components of the academy in a two year junior college model.

And, this way, we can have individuals going right out of high school, start learning the trade and you've got two years to train them to get all of the articles, and all the legislative intent of the training needs versus a 16 week model at the academy.

You've got two years to put all of these different components, and truly take the time to get them trained right.

And, I said, even with the jails, then you could even lower the age for allowing to be hired into the jails, and you could bring them on a part time basis.

The jail is the best training ground for law enforcement.

You learn how to deescalate.

You learn how to communicate.

You learn how to talk to people.

And, unfortunately, because of recidivism, you're dealing with a lot of the same individuals that are continual in crime in our communities.

You build relationships.

If I had my way, and we have at the Sheriff's Office when I was sheriff, most of our patrol hires unless they came from another agency, they started in the jail.

The whole command staff, including myself, I started in Corrections and worked my way out to the street.

There's so much value to that.

But, that was also another problem why we have a retention problem, because other agencies figured out that algorithm to hire from the jails to make great law enforcement officers.

So, they've really, you know, tuned in the recruitment efforts to get that population of workers.

- And, some people who go through, you know, the testing et cetera, for a jail position, do you have enough of them coming through?

Or, are they just?

- No.

No, and here's the debate.

I believe in standards.

I believe you have to have certain qualities to work in these positions.

These are positions of integrity and community trust.

And, I've said often, you know, "What's the best way to look at future behavior?

It's to understand past behavior."

And, that's the reason why we have, it takes a long time to do a background check for an employee.

You really want to do a deep dive to makes sure you mitigate the risk with the hire.

But, when you're not getting the applicants coming in, you're at this, you know, crossroads whether to lower your standards.

And, you know, we saw what happened earlier this year in, I believe it was Alabama, where a correctional officer helped with an escape of a prisoner.

These are the things that'll go through a sheriff's head, went through my head every night, if you don't make those right hires and you lower your standards, what's the potential harm, not in just the agency, but to the community?

- A bill passed recently, signed last year by the governor, House Bill 3653.

Wide, wide ranging bill.

A lot of good in it.

What were some of the positives that you're taking from that bill?

- Yeah, and I was pretty vocal at that time.

3653 was signed into law, and they call it the Safety Act.

So, it's currently called the Safety Act.

And, a lot of these provisions, they're even went into play immediately, but a lot of them start January 1st of 2023.

But, in there, there was a lot of things we've already had in place.

For example, body worn cameras.

That's something that jointly, us and Peoria City and East Peoria, we went in collectively, in 2018 to have these tools.

'Cause it is about transparency.

But, this is one of the provisions of the Safety Act where all law enforcement of the state must have body worn cameras.

Now, there's gonna be an issue with funding.

It seems this could be another unfunded mandate, and I'm sure that's where a lot of hesitation from law enforcement leadership.

But, there's other parts of this.

It's mandated reporting.

It's when you had individuals that were terminated or were involved in criminal activity or for whatever reason, integrity based issues, when they got, you know, terminated from a law enforcement position, there's a statewide database now.

So, you can do, you know, the adequate background checks to make sure someone's not, you know doing a bad job in one place and just going over to another community.

There was, and I've always been one about rehabilitation.

And, doing more programs and services in jails.

And, there was language in this bill that addressed this, so we were ahead of the curve.

We had a lot of these things in place.

- Let's talk about some of the hesitations you had about the Safety Act.

And, one of those was the, we call it the no cash bail.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The no cash bail is something that I've been outspoken just in my position because I deal with the jail as well as patrol.

And, a lot of these are predictable outcomes.

But, we have to rethink the whole system now.

And, my biggest argument with the no cash bill wasn't the legislative intent.

It was not.

It was the timeline.

And, I say this, because we're going from a model of incarceration to what we call pre-trial release.

These individuals, many, many of the individuals that come to the jail, up to 80% have some form of behavior health issue.

Whether it be a substance abuse, an addiction, or a mental health issues.

My argument against this is we do not have the behavior health structure in place to avoid the jail.

And, we're better off here in Peoria than so many counties in the state.

And, it's different up in, you know, Cook County and the collar counties, they have a lot more resources.

They have a lot more agencies on the behavior health side, mental health.

They have, you know, places to put people.

That's not a luxury downstate.

And again, Peoria is ahead of the curve compared to a lot of the counties around us.

- But, you lost some mental health services during the pandemic.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

And, that was, you know, the evidence to my argument.

Our medical centers, our behavior health centers, our addiction centers are having the same staffing crisis as just about every profession out there right now.

So, if you're at the stroke of midnight on January 1st of 2023, you're gonna put these individuals back out into the community.

They need help.

And, I've said too many times, "You've asked law enforcement to wear too many hats."

So, the argument, I agree with.

We should not be dealing with the jails have become defacto mental health centers.

That was legislative decisions back in the 80s and the early 90s when they shut down so many state facilities.

But, what happened then, these individuals, once there's a criminal act, what usually goes hand in hand with either addictions or, you know, mental health crisises, they end up in jail.

And, now we're flipping the switch backwards to put them, but we don't have the structure in place.

I've said this too many times, where Soldier Field.

If you want to rebuild Soldier Field, you don't tear it down where it currently exists and build a new one up.

It's gonna take three years, but instead, you build the new stadium, I'll say Arlington Heights.

I think that's where they're talking about right now.

You build that up, you get it operational, then you start dismantling the other system.

And that was my chief compliant with the no cash bail.

The other part of this is practical application.

It's always different when it's personal, meaning, if it's you, your family, a loved one, a friend, that's a victim of a crime, there's a sense that you want a pound of flesh.

You want the individual that was responsible that put harm on you or your family.

And, I'm not just talking the serious felonies such as, you know, homicide, sexual assaults.

How about the vandalism to the vehicle?

How about, you know, there's so many other crimes, you know, financial crimes.

You want your pound of flesh, versus the individual, they're not gonna be in custody.

- You want a sense of safety.

- The community does, but it also gives us a chance to get people, the jail has been, and we've demonstrated this.

We've shown in the last, you know, five to 10 years of the programs and services we've put in place, when people hit rock bottom, you have a chance to build a relationship.

Everyone goes to church in the jail.

Whether it's just to occupy time, but you have an opportunity.

And, if you're dealing with someone that has an addictive behavior, it has you a time to get them leveled back, back on their medications.

And, a buzzword we always used, continuity of care.

We build a system instead of just releasing them and kicking them out and giving them a bus pass to go home, we're looking if they need inpatient, if they need housing, if they need, what service do they need?

Hopefully, to stop the recidivism.

You're gonna miss that, I believe, with the pre-trial release.

- With so many inmates having mental health issues, there is a new program in four communities in the state, Peoria being one of them, where, I think, simply put, it might be the co-responder program.

- [Brian Asbell] Yep.

- How well do you think that's going to work?

- In theory, I'm behind this 100%.

It should work, but if you only have one of these on the street at any given time, what the practical application side will show, the number of the volume of calls of these nature coming in versus those that you can manage, you're not gonna touch a lot of them.

And, that's these times is what people, it's time.

Time is the thing that's that most important component when you're dealing with these type of crisis calls.

And now, you have two officers.

You know, you have a social worker or someone trained in mental health as long as law enforcement.

But, we've been fortunate.

We've already had a program in place here in Central Illinois my whole career, so over, you know, 27 years, there's been what they call ERS, Emergency Response Services.

And, that was run through the Human Service Center which is now under Unity Place umbrella.

But, this is the same concept that we've already had where we get to a call of service, and they determine that it's more of a mental health crisis versus a criminal crisis.

Once we get the scene safe, we call an ERS, and they take it from there.

This new co-responder model, again, from what I understand, because I don't know all the, you know, the policy related to this.

But, it sounds like they're gonna be either riding together or in short order coming together.

So, in theory, it's something that we've already had in place, so more money for that?

Absolutely.

If we can get funding, not just for Peoria County, but all the agencies across the state to have more social workers available.

- Let me ask you about mental health of officers.

There is a law that goes into effect January 1st.

And, it will be a psychological examination of patrol officers.

- Mm-hmm (affirmative).

- From my perspective, patrol officers have an extremely difficult job in that they see some of the bad stuff every day./ - Mm-hmm (affirmative).

- What might happen when they have a psychological examination?

- That's the issue.

And, I'll use myself for an example, but you're absolutely right, H, that PTSD and mental health issues come from a variety.

You don't have to be in a firefight.

You don't have to be in combat, but if you're dealing with crisis day in and day out, it's repeated crisis that take a toll on the mentality of a lot of these officers.

So, saying that the legislative intent, absolutely, 100% behind.

We want well officers.

We want, you know, officers with the right mindsets working these critical incidents on the street.

However, my question is, what happens if now you do the psych exams for all your employees and it comes back they do have mild PTSD?

They do have something a mental health issue.

When I was sitting as the sheriff, that was going to be a huge decision.

Now, what do I do with this employee?

Does it cross the threshold?

Do you put them back on the street because you're so short of staff?

But, who is it?

Mr. Murphy and his law, they could be involved in a critical incident the very next day and look at the liability there where you put an officer that was known to have some type of mental crisis through this test process and you put him back on the street and they're involved in something.

We live in a litigious society.

You're gonna get sued regardless, but what if now it's half your staff?

If you have a high percentage of your staff that fall under this umbrella, because it's highly predictable, those that have been in the profession, myself included.

I failed psych exams before.

I failed them.

And, that this, and they'll say when I talked to the psychologist when we did this, a high percentage of people in the profession over five years are likely to fail.

I don't think I'm a bad person.

I thought I was a pretty good cop.

I thought I was a decent sheriff.

I thought I did a good job for the community, but when you had these tests, and remind you, they're subjective too.

They're subjective, you could be, you know, on this list.

- Let me turn to a particular individual, Ronda Guyton.

Ronda's struggling with cancer.

- Yeah.

- But, she was a woman who had a tough childhood who made good.

What's it feel like to have a Ronda Guyton working for you?

- When you're in leadership, the best leaders surround themself with people smarter than themselves.

I've said that from day one.

And, it's not just Ronda, but was my whole command staff.

I was, you know, the luckiest sheriff in the state.

Ronda just brought a whole different perspective to the game, just her life experiences.

She gave me strength.

She did.

The battles she had and just, and we're not just talking about her current fight with cancer.

But, even before that, you know, how she was raised and being in a household that was dealt with mental health issues, poverty, all these things.

She brought a whole different perspective.

And, she also opened my eyes and my heart up to a whole part of our community that I never had a relationship with before.

And, it was great.

And, we did a lot of wonderful things.

And, the one thing I'll say about Ronda is, again, she made me a better person.

She made me a better sheriff.

She made me a better husband.

- And, I'd like to talk about how your wife feels.

But, we know how your wife feels about you retiring from this job.

But, two questions in three minutes.

Number one, Chris Watkins.

You're helping him, at least temporarily.

- Yeah, with the transition.

Yeah.

- He's bringing new blood.

Is that?

- [Brian Asbell] Energy.

- Okay.

- Yeah, he has new energy.

And, I'll be the first to admit, these last two years have taken a toll on me.

I'll use the movie Forrest Gump where Forrest is running through the desert and finally he stops after three years and says, "I'm tired, and I just want to go home."

That's where I was here in the last month.

We've dealt with so many hardships over the last two years, but Chris is, he's someone that as long as he stays in office, he's got a minimum of 10 more years to do.

And, he's someone that I've mentored since he started.

He had the same progression.

He started in the jail.

He went to patrol.

He worked in investigations.

- And, I don't mean to shortchange you on that discussion, but I do want to find out, what's next for Brian Asbell?

I think it's already started, but.

- Yeah.

Talking about, we were just talking about some of the issues with the no cash bail and the new legislation, but there's a new division with the state that's under the judicial branch.

And, it's called Office of Statewide Pretrial Services.

So, I have accepted a position working as a regional chief.

So, I'll be overseeing 21 different counties, dealing with the pretrial, trying to answer a lot of these questions, but more so having input in how this program is developed.

We all want safe communities.

- And, with that, one final thought.

You're no longer on call.

- No, I'm not.

- [H Wayne Wilson] Okay, with that, thank you for your service, over 27 years.

I appreciate it.

And, we say thank you to Brian Asbell, former Peoria County Sheriff.

- It's been truly an honor, H, truly.

- And, next time, we'll turn our attention to, yes, once again, we're going to be talking about COVID.

The Peoria City County Health Department administrator and an OSF Medical Group chief nursing officer will talk about what we should be doing while the pandemic continues.

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