Lincoln Heights disbands police department

Lincoln Heights' police department is history. For now.

The village council voted unanimously to disband the 16-member department.

"We're working on an agreement with the Hamilton County Sheriff's Department," Village Manager Stephanie Summerow Dumas said Friday. Council's Tuesday night action to disband the force led her to craft an agreement with the Sheriff which she estimated would be signed "in two weeks" and would be in force "until Dec. 31, 2015."

Sheriff deputies have been patrolling the village since the police department stopped responding to calls Oct. 2. Officials in the mile-square village of 3,200 called in the Sheriff after the police department was dropped by its insurance carrier.

Mayor Laverne Mitchell cited "frivolous lawsuits" filed in connection with village police as the reason the department lost its insurance coverage.

Those lawsuits increased the cost of insurance. The price of a new policy "would have made it impossible for the village to survive," Dumas said. The police department's budget was $800,000. The annual premium for the new insurance was $82,897.55. The new policy also required the village to create a retention fund of $100,000 "per incident" of an officer's behavior leading to legal action.

"We had 16 officers," Dumas said. "We could have had 10 incidents in a month. We never could have afforded that."

The contract with the Sheriff's office, she noted, "costs $773,000 annually. That covers all SWAT teams and K-9 and an officer in the school."

As part of the village's new policing agreement, Dumas recommended "the Sheriff consider hiring three members from our former department." One of those three former officers is Ezell Leonard. Before the village's police force was disbanded he served as Lincoln Heights Elementary's school resource officer.

"Everyone at the school has fallen in love with Officer Leonard," Dumas said.

Despite the village council's unanimous vote to disband the police department, Dumas refused to say never again about Lincoln Heights reactivating the force.

"It's not the end for the police department," she said. "It's just the beginning for something new."