Page 53 - July2021

10th District officers team up to help single mother of four
n BY KAREN JENKINS
When 10th District Officer Miguel Salazar responded to a call from the Department of Children and Family Services on June 10, he anticipated a typical domestic response.
What he didn’t expect was walking into a home with a 12-year- old girl watching over her 3-year-old, 2-year-old and baby sib- lings while their mother worked two jobs to make ends meet.
“We just wanted to make sure they were OK,” Salazar affirmed about the response. “We called firefighters to come and check, and they were good. And then that’s when we took them to the hospital and waited for mom to show up.”
But the sergeant responding with Salazar knew that there would be more to the story. He called Katherine Hitz and her team of District Coordination Officers (DCOs), a neighborhood policing initiative, to assist with resources and referrals for the mother. When Hitz arrived, she immediately recognized that the mother was anything but neglectful.
“At the root of this, if you were somebody looking at it from the surface, all you would’ve seen is a mom who left her kids alone,” Hitz explained. “You wouldn’t have seen the background story, which is that she’s a single mother of four. She just moved here from Indiana. She had nothing established as far as any help with the state of Illinois. And she was trying to work two jobs.”
The DCO team talked about the mother’s situation with her while at the hospital and established rental assistance for the next five months. They also connected her with an organization that provides emergency child care to parents in the Chicago- land area and helped set up the oldest child with a summer day camp.
Commander Gilberto Calderon said that the DCO team shows the community that assistance from law enforcement can go beyond the first response.
“It’s a much bigger plan, the strategy that I’m utilizing in the 10th District to be able to communicate with our residents,” Calderon shared. “The whole block saw us come up and help. That in itself is going to pay big dividends, changing the per- spective of how people are looking at law enforcement.”
And Salazar, who initially responded to the call, feels even more empowered every time he connects with residents, know- ing that he can offer resources through the DCO team to other families in the 10th District who may be in similar situations.
“In order for us to establish a good relationship with [the com- munity], we have to get to know each other,” Salazar affirmed. “Now if I bump into something similar, I know who to call. I real- ly hate going through a call and not being able to follow up with them and successfully give them hope. It’s helping officers out.”
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