This week’s meeting included 35 members and four guests.  Sam Badger brought his attorney, Carl Yudell from Northbrook, Heather Higgins was accompanied by her daughter-in-law, Martha Higgins, from Brussels and David Birkenstein’s guest was Bill Anderson, an investment advisor from Wilmette.  Former member Jim Corboy also joined us and announced he is planning on becoming active in the near future.

 

Bob Baker reminded the Club that the Wounded Warrior program is coming up on January 24^th.

 

Heidi Sibert appealed to the Club to solicit sponsors for our “Kids Against Hunger” program scheduled for March 21^st.  It is critical to get business and personal sponsors for the purchase of the food supplies that will be packed on the 21^st and then shipped to Nicaragua.

 

Barb Tubekis welcomed members to participate in the “MLK – Day of Service” being held on Martin Luther King Day at the Community House.  The afternoon will start with a video presented by the Winnetka Historical Society that traces Dr. King’s coming to Winnetka in 1965.  The WHS will post a link to this video within the next week.

 

A membership meeting is scheduled for 11:00 a.m. on January 29^th at the Community House.  All members are invited to attend.

 

Happy Buck$ this week were provided by John Stone, Joe Fell, Tony Kambich, Wes Baumann and Robert Mardirossian.

 

Keith Reed introduced the speaker, Bill Lustig, the Chief of Police of Northfield.  Bill has been a member of the Northfield department for 34 years, and served the last 19 years as the chief.  He addressed the high profile killings in Ferguson, New York and Cleveland.  He feels all of those individual cases are hard to judge without being an eyewitness to the incidents.  He stated that the victims would be alive today if they had obeyed the officers’ original request.  The Chief feels that the media and outside agitators have done a lot to cloud the specifics of the cases.  His stated goal is to stay out of the media and suggested that the Ferguson police needed to get advice from professionals as to how to deal with the media as they can make matters worse, while admitting that at times the press can be of help. 

 

Bill emphasized the importance of having officers know and understand the people and the culture of the communities they serve.  The Northfield Police Department places a high emphasis on community culture in their training program.  He mentioned that it usually took a new officer four years to ‘get’ the culture of Northfield and the North Shore.  Police departments need to represent the diversity of the community.  Chief Lustig stated that 32% of his officers represented minority races or cultures.   A new law requires officers to record the race of everyone they stop, which is then reported to the state.  Bill said that last year the department made about 27,000 traffic stops, 77.3% where white and 22.6% minorities.  They can also break down the percentages by officers to determine if racial profiling is occurring.

 

He said many police officers never fire their weapons while on duty in their entire career.  The Northfield police are also armed with non-lethal weapon such as Tasers and canisters of pepper spray.  They have had to use these latter weapons when suspects are violently resisting arrest. Chief Lustig stated he had mixed feelings about body cameras but said that the have often exonerated officers of charges of misbehavior.  He said that his department will arrest a person making a false charge against one of its officers when they have definite proof that the officer was acting properly.

 

His final advice to the audience was to obey any police officer’s request and if there is obvious false charges consider suing the officer afterwards.