After Highland Park Fourth of July parade shootings, hundreds of cops from other agencies rushed to help

On the Fourth of July, Vernon Hills police Chief Patrick Kreis was riding in a golf cart, handing out toy badges during the north suburb’s Independence Day parade when he got the news about what had happened in Highland Park.

“There was a radio call about a shooting in the Highland Park parade,” Kreis says. “The first thing you think about is: Someone’s got firecrackers.”

Twenty-two of his 45 officers were working at the Vernon Hills celebration. When he confirmed that a Highland Park shooter was still on the loose, Kreis ordered 15 of them to get their equipment and hurry to the suburb 11 miles away.

It was the start of a massive mobilization of cops to Highland Park that sent officers from other Chicago-area police departments, troopers from the Illinois State Police and federal agents to the scene of the parade shooting that left seven people dead and dozens wounded.

Kreis also is president of the Northern Illinois Police Alarm System, one of the biggest mutual aid organizations that sent officers to Highland Park. There are 104 law enforcement agencies that belong to NIPAS, created in 1983. SWAT and crowd-control officers from those agencies respond to emergencies in Lake, Cook, DuPage, McHenry and Kane counties. They fall under the command of the police chief who asks for help.

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Unlike the May 4 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two adults perished as, authorities since have said, law enforcement officers delayed in acting, it’s likely that the carnage in Highland Park was limited by the orchestrated police response, says Tom Weitzel, former Riverside police chief.

“In Uvalde, they think every single police officer was basically a coward who didn’t do their job and should be fired,” Weitzel says. “And, in Highland Park, parents were bringing their kids to the police station to thank the officers and writing with chalk in front of the station: Thank you. That was a really contrasting moment.”

Highland Park police Chief Lou Jogmen says other public safety organizations including NIPAS sent about 1,300 people to the mass shooting in his suburb. Despite the initial chaos, they worked effectively because they knew each other through mutual aid organizations, Jogmen says.

“You certainly don’t want to be meeting these people or having these conversations for the first time on the day of the incident,” he says.

Anthony Vazquez / Sun-Times

Jogmen’s Highland Park cops had conducted active-shooter exercises in schools.

“I used the training I received to apply a tourniquet,” the chief says. “I looked around and saw officers working shoulder to shoulder with firefighters and citizens rendering first aid. And that is because of the training we’ve done.”

Jogmen won’t discuss details of the operation or make officers available to talk, saying he doesn’t want to chance jeopardizing the case against shooting suspect Robert “Bobby” Crimo III.

Kreis, who was one of the first police chiefs from other towns to arrive, says he got the approval from Highland Park to mobilize NIPAS. A staging area was created at a water park west of the downtown area where the shooting happened. About half an hour into the crisis, a “unified command post” was set up farther west, at a fire station.

“The police officers on scene that were responding — some of my officers, some of the other mutual aid jurisdiction officers — had the same mission to find the threat, stop the threat and treat any victims,” he says.

About 80 SWAT officers who belong to NIPAS scrambled to Highland Park.

Kreis says those officers, on the Emergency Services Team, train at least twice a month. They’ve used abandoned hotels, an empty office building and an FBI facility in North Chicago. The first time the team was activated was in 1988, when Laurie Dann went on a shooting rampage at Hubbard Woods Elementary School in Winnetka, killing 8-year-old Nicholas Corwin.

In the Highland Park shooting, a group called the Incident Management Assistance Team coordinated the officers from other agencies who rushed there, with Jogmen having the ultimate decision-making power.

“Some of those decisions were as simple as: What intersection do I have to shut down?” Kreis says. “And how do I direct these cars out of the area? How do I direct people that are running from the scene? Hundreds of decisions.”

Meantime, the Lake County Major Crime Task Force, a separate mutual aid group of detectives, worked with federal authorities in an effort to figure out who the shooter was.

“It wasn’t a finely tuned operation at the 60-minute mark, but, over the course of the next hours, it got really smooth,” says Kreis, a former SWAT officer.

As more SWAT members arrived, some, armed with rifles, were assigned to do “long-range protective overwatch” on roofs. Teams of officers were reassigned to look for people sheltering in place or secure the crime scene, Kreis says.

“That was a large four-square-block area — lots of buildings, lots of places to hide — and it would take a long time to really make sure no one was hidden in it,” he says.

Lake County sheriff’s office

Crimo was identified by investigators who traced the ownership of a rifle that had been left at the shooting scene. More than eight hours after the massacre, North Chicago officers, responding to a tip, stopped Crimo’s Honda Fit on U.S. 41 in Lake Forest. He gave up without a struggle, according to police, who said a rifle was recovered from the vehicle.

After Crimo’s capture, NIPAS brought in its Mobile Field Force, created in 1994 to provide crowd control for soccer’s World Cup in Chicago and later stationed in some Chicago suburbs in 2020 during protests about the police-involved killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The Mobile Field Force relieved NIPAS’ SWAT officers.

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“There’s no question the mutual aid we received is what carried the day for us to be successful as we could be in the immediate response and the subsequent investigation,” Jogmen says. “There’s no question that it could have gone a different way.”

Kreis says NIPAS has provided a model for other places to follow. He says Korean national police officials came to Illinois in 2019 to learn how a mutual aid SWAT team works.

Weitzel, a past president of NIPAS, says the agencies in the group are required to contribute tens of thousands of dollars a year, an expense some city managers question when their budgets are tight. But he says the NIPAS response to Highland Park shows that the “insurance” is worth it.

“When I was in Riverside, there was no way we could handle the situation which unfolded in Highland Park on our own,” Weitzel says. “We couldn’t even handle a subject who barricaded himself in his house with an AR-15 and was holding his wife and kids. Our patrol officers aren’t trained to handle that — that’s not their function. So you have to be part of an organization that comes with the right personnel, the right equipment, the right training.”