The Urbana, Illinois Civil Service Commission held a meeting on May 25th in a room on the 2nd floor of the City building. The location is inaccessible to the general public except for individuals permitted through the locked doors by City staff.
During the meeting, the Commission voted to reduce police officer qualifications for individuals applying to the Urbana Police Department.
Whereas police officers were previously required to have some type of post-high school education (typically an associate’s degree in criminal justice or law) or at least two years of law enforcement experience, the Urbana CSC has reduced the educational requirement to only a high school diploma or GED and no previous experience. A copy of the proposed changes can be viewed here.
It is not clear what the rationale was for the CSC to make this change. Since the meeting was not broadcast and was apparently not recorded, the public may never know what transpired. It is also not known why the CSC convened out of view of the public.
Check CU also notes that the list of Commission member names has been removed from the Urbana Civil Service Commission web page, so the public is no longer aware who is responsible for changes to City job qualifications. The only person listed is City staff member Elizabeth Borman, who recently stopped working for Urbana and took a job with the City of Champaign.
Last it was posted for public view, the members of the Urbana Civil Service Commission included Traci Nally (attorney for the News Gazette mugshot article and police propagandist Mary Schenk), Thomas Betz (attorney for University of Illinois legal services), and Marion Knight. Elizabeth Borman, the wife of a police officer, has was the Urbana City staff member who ran the CSC meetings for the past few years.
On May 23rd the Urbana City Council voted unanimously to reappoint Traci Nally for three additional years.
Check CU became aware of the change to the police officer requirements after Interim Chief of Police Richard Surles released a statement on June 2nd which contained the following: “Hiring is and must continue to be a significant initiative for the department and the city. The Urbana Civil Service Commission recently changed the minimum qualifications for police officer from 60 credit hours of college to a high school diploma or GED. HR should be credited for driving this change for UPD. This now puts us in alignment with nearly all of the regional police departments. Urbana was absolutely an outlier on this requirement. There is serious work to be done on this issue at all levels of the city government.”