‘Better than you found us’: DeKalb Police Chief Gene Lowery bids farewell

Gene Lowery likes to tell a story about the day he was a boy in grade school, crying as he pushed his secondhand bicycle down the street.

He’d had a bad encounter with his father earlier that day, and now the chain had fallen off the bicycle and he didn’t know how to put it back on. He was a couple of doors down from his house when a man who Lowery didn’t really know approached him.

“He just wanted to know what was wrong. He helped me; he put my chain back on,” Lowery said. “That encounter had such an impact on my life and how I think about things for people who are disadvantaged that I will never forget it. So I always say we can do so much in fragments of time, we just have to do it.”

For Lowery, fragments of time turned into a 40-year law enforcement career. Now 62, he will retire as DeKalb’s police chief after seven years on the job. He started as a patrolman with the force in his hometown of Ottawa, Illinois, in 1979, a decade later joining the McHenry County Sheriff’s Office, where he rose through the ranks for 21 years.

After a couple of years as deputy chief in Crystal Lake, he was chosen from a field of 31 applicants and took over as DeKalb’s top cop in May 2012. At the DeKalb City Council meeting Tuesday, he was praised by city officials for honesty, fairness and dedication to justice.

Lowery saves his highest praise for DeKalb’s police force, made up of 65 sworn officers and 27 support staff, who he said should be more numerous and better equipped.

“These are the finest men and women I have ever served with,” Lowery said. “With the challenges they face and the things that they deal with on a day-in and day-out basis, they are the finest that I’ve ever served with – and that’s a tough thing to say.”

Seven years of change

DeKalb police moved into a new headquarters in 2013, and Lowery put his stamp on it. There are glass signs affixed to the walls reminding officers of what Lowery calls the “four pillars” for police: “Remember your oath, focus on the mission, service over self and leave us better than you found us.”

Trends already in motion when Lowery took over in 2012 have accelerated, leading to an increase in poverty and gun crime, particularly in what’s now known as the Annie Glidden North neighborhood, north of the Northern Illinois University campus.

In fall 2017, the DeKalb County Major Case Squad was called in to help after more than 20 shots-fired incidents in three months left two people wounded. Days later, police announced 11 arrests, with warrants for three others. Six of the accused were from DeKalb, and all were alleged to be street gang members.

DeKalb has seen eight homicides during Lowery’s tenure, but with all the gunfire that’s occurred on the street, he said it’s remarkable the human toll has not been higher.

“There’s a lot of rounds that have been fired in this community that didn’t land,” Lowery said, “and it’s only by the grace of God, or terrible marksmanship skills, and maybe that’s a blessing.”

Declining enrollment at NIU is an underlying cause of the problem, Lowery said. DeKalb has more than 9,000 rental units, and as the number occupied by students has declined, others have taken their place. The number of yellow school buses that make the rounds in neighborhoods where they scarcely were years before are a good illustration, Lowery said.

Although most of the newcomers are honest people seeking a better life, Lowery said, some with criminal ties have come, as well.

“That’s everything, and when I talk to the chiefs from other university communities that are in distress, as far as [their] university shrinking in student population and crime, it’s like the factor that is creating tons of service demands,” Lowery said.

Things have calmed since fall 2017, but the shooting has not stopped. On the day Lowery spoke to the Daily Chronicle, police were investigating a shots-fired incident that had taken place days earlier on Hillcrest Drive, with officers inspecting what appeared to be a spent shell casing in a rain gutter on the street, and a vehicle with a couple of .45-caliber bullet holes in it sitting in the station’s garage after being processed as evidence. An arrest later was announced.

Crime has ebbed and flowed during Lowery’s tenure. Violent crimes and serious property crimes – classified by the FBI as “Part I” crimes – declined in the city during Lowery’s first three full years from 2013-15. In 2016, such crimes spiked, increasing 25% to 1,670.

When Lowery delivered a report to the City Council on the issue in February 2017, he said the crime increase in 2016 was the most dramatic he ever had seen.

Among the city’s most prolific criminals were children. A 14-year-old girl had been arrested 18 times, while a 17-year-old boy had been arrested 12 times and linked to 83 crimes, the report shows. In all, 73 children had been arrested, accused of almost 150 serious crimes that year. The top 20 child offenders in DeKalb had an average age younger than 16.

The data reinforced what Lowery already knew – reaching out to children and helping families in the more disadvantaged parts of DeKalb was critical.

Connecting with neighborhoods

Lowery said he grew up “country poor.” A child of divorce, he remembers moving from apartment to apartment with his mother in his hometown of Ottawa.

It did help him relate to the sometimes-desperate circumstances that children in DeKalb’s poorer neighborhoods face, he said.

“When you look at kids that are getting in trouble and you look at their circumstances locally, what they were facing, being locked out of their homes, not having food during the day, using the outdoors as their restroom, stealing to get food or getting in just general trouble, you know you’ve got to do something,” Lowery said. “But you could relate to it. “

Under Lowery in 2013, the department formed the Youth In Need Task Force, with a goal of reducing juvenile delinquency. In June 2014, the task force joined with specialists from the Ben Gordon Center and elsewhere, and with the help of a $20,000 grant, the Camp Power program was born. It is a free summer camp for children in DeKalb’s University Village housing complex, the city’s largest apartment complex, where many children live in households headed by single parents who receive federal housing assistance.

The program is designed to provide meals and fun summer activities for the children, and to help them feel more comfortable around police.

Now in its sixth year, the program has served hundreds of children. Art done by a group of Camp Power campers adorns a wall at the police headquarters today.

The city also has enacted other community-oriented policing strategies, including its “Safe Streets Initiatives,” which led to changes in parking and other code changes designed to make the streets easier to police and provide less cover for criminal activity. Another program, started in 2012, places a police officer in a home the city renovated in the Pleasant Street neighborhood in order to build relationships with people in the community.

Although much of DeKalb is perfectly safe, Lowery is aware that some neighborhoods do not offer residents the same security. It falls to police to help those people deal with the daily problems that crime causes.

“When I look at crime and people who are disadvantaged, it’s always the same story, you can be the best family in the world and you just don’t have the same opportunity as somebody who has had a better life,” Lowery said. “But you still deal with the same problems of crime and its impact on the community because that’s where you live, that’s what you can afford.”

Since the big crime spike in 2016, serious crimes have ebbed once more. In 2018, the most serious crimes had subsided to near the lowest levels seen during Lowery’s tenure – and there were no homicides.

What’s next

Lowery says he and his wife, Caroline, who retired last year after managing a First National Bank branch, have been welcomed by the DeKalb community. He considers it his second hometown.

But they do have plans to move on. The couple plans to relocate to the Carolinas to be closer to Lowery’s mother-in-law. Lowery said he hopes to bring his own mother, too. She still lives in Ottawa.

Retirement should provide time for hobbies. The Lowerys love their dogs, he said. Lowery also hopes to spend more time scuba diving, would like to skydive and also may take another crack at alligator hunting – on his last trip in 2008, they bagged more than 20 gators.

“I want to live my life without living it through a filter, “ he said. “I don’t want to live it through my computer, I don’t want to live it through my telephone.”

That includes the filter through which he’s viewed much of his life – that of a police officer. At the City Council meeting where he was honored for his service Tuesday, Lowery eschewed his usual police uniform – sporting a gray suit with a tie instead.

“I’ve truly been wearing a uniform for our country and for a police agency for 43 years, and I’ve never taken any significant break,” he said. “So I want to try and see if I can become a regular person again. That’s the adjustment for me.”

The time he spent in DeKalb, however, he will remember fondly. Lowery said he has a great love for all those who serve, be it as police or as soldiers, and particularly for those who serve the city of DeKalb.

“I left my emotiton and my heart on the table; I’ve done everything I could. I wish I could have done more for them,” Lowery said.  “... I’m so grateful, there have been so many opportunities, so many things we’ve put in place since we’ve been here.”

Lowery’s successor, John Petragallo, will be next to lead DeKalb’s police force as it helps the city move forward to confront its challenges and build on its successes. Petragallo told Lowery that he had learned a lot from him in listening and watching.

“It’s going to be cliche,” Petragallo said, “but you left us better than you found us.”