6 new deputies to patrol La Salle County in 2025 as consequence of SAFE-T Act

This time last year, La Salle County Sheriff Adam Diss had a New Year’s resolution: to put more deputies on the road. La Salle County is a larger county and he needed cops to cover the open space.

This year, Diss is about ready to crack open the champagne. While he’d like to add even more deputies – in a perfect world he’d double his fleet – the La Salle County Sheriff’s Office will get six new patrol officers in 2025. It will be the largest influx in memory.

Even before he became sheriff in 2021, Diss had looked at the patrol schedule with something close to dismay. From 2003 to 2023, the office’s workload had soared from 3,000 calls for service to 15,000 calls – a five-fold increase in more than two decades.

“Our manpower has never changed in that time,” Diss said. “Our deputies are more overloaded, more burdened and taking more calls than they can handle sometimes.”

In summer, Diss and county officials hit upon a solution. They phased out a few corrections officers through attrition – fewer guards are needed these days – and rolled the budgetary savings into patrol. Eventually, the funds were there to hire new officers.

The transfer of dollars from corrections to patrols is partly a consequence of the SAFE-T Act. While law enforcement agencies despise the changes in criminal procedure, the net reduction in jail census presented La Salle County with an opportunity to rework its budget.

“It’s an inverse side-effect from the SAFE-T Act. Through attrition we reduced the number of corrections officers. I recognized that by simply moving those dollars from one department to another, the taxpayer impact was not going to be severe.”

—  Brian Dose, La Salle County Board Finance Chairman

When Diss approached the La Salle County Board about reallocating funds from corrections to patrol, Brian Dose needed little convincing.

Dose, the finance committee chairman, is a firefighter-paramedic who had noticed sheriff’s deputies frequently were late in arriving to accident scenes. Dose understood the problem was deputies had greater distances to cover.

The solution, he agreed, was to hire more deputies. If there was a chance to juggle budgetary columns and bring in new hires, Dose was all for it.

“It’s an inverse side-effect from the SAFE-T Act,” Dose said. “Through attrition we reduced the number of corrections officers. I recognized that by simply moving those dollars from one department to another, the taxpayer impact was not going to be severe.”

Jason Edgcomb, superintendent of the jail, is no more a fan of the SAFE-T Act than the sheriff but he, too, recognized that tweaking the payroll would usher in improvements, starting with the physical plant.

“We were able to shut down parts of the jail and able to do maintenance work that will extend the life of the facility,” Edgcomb explained.

La Salle County also turned its empty cells into revenue. Intergovernmental agreements with Cook, Kane and McLean counties enabled the urban jails to send overflow inmates into Ottawa in exchange for daily fees. Most visitors seem glad to be out of inner-city lockup and have behaved accordingly.

“It seems to be working out well,” Edgcomb said. “Guys who come down to La Salle County are getting more freedoms.”

Meanwhile, a few corrections officers retired and the payroll tumbled accordingly. The budgetary relief enabled Diss and the board to post job openings in the patrol division.

The County Board approved a total of six hires and authorized the purchase of new squad cars and equipment. There won’t be six recruits on the road come Jan. 1, however.

Diss explained it takes more than six months – 16 weeks at the academy, 12 weeks of field training – before a fresh recruit can be readied for patrol with its sundry risks to life and limb. Three recruits leave for the academy on Jan. 5 and are targeted for mid-year deployment. Another three should be in place before next Christmas.

Finding recruits still is no easy task. Perceptions are changing from the initial passing of the SAFE-T Act and national stories where police gained headlines, Diss allowed, but the bodies simply aren’t there for him to quickly fill posts.

“Gosh, when I tested in 1998 you’d see batches of 70 or 100 people,” Diss said. “We still don’t see that. You might get 20 people to show up and you only end up with a handful of candidates. But I will say it’s better than a year or two ago.”

Grateful though he is for new patrol officers, Diss said his dream scenario is to double the fleet of patrol officers. Geographically, La Salle County is the state’s second biggest county and Diss and predecessor Tom Templeton have long yearned for more bodies to cover more than 1,000 square miles.