public safety
La Grange resident Mary Le Beau chats with Steve Kneifel, the police department's recently appointed Elderly Service Officer. Kneifel's goal is to meet face-to-face with each of the Village's nearly 1,300 senior residents.
Village seniors are police officer's constituency
Mary Le Beau looked concerned and somewhat puzzled as she peered out through the window screen on the dormer of her home on N Brainard Ave.
Down below, on the front porch of the tidy brick bungalow, stood Steve Kneifel, a uniformed La Grange police officer with a white, letter-sized envelope in one hand and a broad smile on his face.
"Hello!" he exclaimed, and proceeded to explain the purpose of his visit.
Kneifel is the police department's recently appointed Elderly Service Officer (ESO), a post he assumed this past February. His impromptu visit to Le Beau's house was just one of several similar calls he would make on this sunny July morning, part of Kneifel's summer goal of meeting face to face with each of the nearly 1,300 residents of La Grange who are 60 years of age or older
In less than a minute, Le Beau had joined Kneifel on the porch where they engaged in a friendly, informative chat.
Kneifel learned that Le Beau and her husband, Bernard, had lived in their home for some 40 years. "We were the youngest couple on the block when we first moved here," Le Beau told him. "Now we're the oldest."
Kneifel in turn handed her the envelope, which contained his business card, along with a letter and several brochures describing various services offered by the La Grange police and other local agencies that are designed to address the special needs of senior residents.
Listening as Le Beau recalled the last time police officers had come to her home—after she had fallen down the staircase, breaking bones in both her feet—Kneifel suggested Le Beau and her husband obtain and keep on their persons free cellphones from the Aging Well initiative of Lyons Township that would enable them to readily place 911 calls should they have a similar mishap in the future.
For any other non-emergency concerns where the police might be of help, Kneifel encouraged Le Beau to call him directly.
Upon completing his visit with Le Beau, Kneifel, who joined the La Grange police force 11 years ago, got in his squad car and drove to the Windsor Place retirement home on Ashland Ave. It was almost noon and residents there were beginning to fill the facility's dining room for lunch. It presented Kneifel with an opportunity to make several senior contacts in a single visit.
Introducing himself to one woman, Kneifel gave her his information packet. "You'll find my business card in there," he said. "You need anything at all, you call me. "
"Help, help!" the woman chuckled.
"Exactly, that's it," replied Kneifel, sharing her laughter.
HAVING AN OFFICER DEDICATED TO WORKING with senior residents is not unique to La Grange. In fact, Illinois law mandates that every department with at least 10 sworn officers employ an ESO.
The law's intent is to help protect the elderly from financial exploitation and physical abuse at the hands of both criminals—such as scam artists and thieves—and malicious family members who, surprising as it may sound, are the most common predators threatening the safety and welfare of seniors.
Physical abuse at the hands of a family member fortunately is rare among La Grange's elderly population, Kneifel says. He has not yet encountered such a case.
Financial abuse on the other hand is not uncommon, he says, and was at the center of one of the first cases he handled after becoming an ESO.
A woman from Berwyn, an inpatient at Lexington Health Care in La Grange, suspected that her son was inappropriately withdrawing funds from her bank account. After meeting with the woman, Kneifel made a few phone calls on her behalf to investigators at her bank in Cicero. Officials there immediately froze the woman's account until someone from the Illinois Department of Aging could take on the case.
"Even though it wasn't our jurisdiction, I still could help out—just knowing the right people to call," Kneifel says.
The fact that someone would prey on an elderly family member angers Kneifel. "Their thought is, 'I'm going to get it eventually, so why not take it now?' Just take Grandma's ATM card and go use it freely. It just blows my mind the way some people think about their own relatives. It's just terrible, it really is."
Combatting these crimes within families is often hampered by elderly victims who are reluctant to bring it to the attention of police and other officials.
"A lot of elderly people don't want to call because they don't want little Johnny arrested even though they know he is taking their money," he says. "But often I can just resolve the matter by talking with [the adult children]. It doesn't have to result in an arrest."
The elderly are especially vulnerable in money matters, Kneifel says, because financial security is paramount to many of them. "I've met seniors who have hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank yet are worried they won't have enough to make it through their final years," he says.
Consequently, seniors are susceptible to "easy money" scams perpetrated by swindlers from outside their families, who tempt the elderly with misleading or fictitious investments and non-existent sweepstakes prizes.
As recent news reports of corruption in the subprime mortgage industry has revealed, seniors often were the targets of unscrupulous brokers offering home-equity mortages with initially low "teaser" rates that later ballooned into unwieldly monthly payments that someone on a fixed income could not possibly afford. The result is in those cases is often a default on the loan and foreclosure on the home.
Con artists posing as home-repair contractors are another group of predators for whom Kneifel and the police department keep a watchful eye. Village officials have been especially vigilant since a ring of "gypsy" contractors operating in the area was broken up a few years ago. To the chagrin of local law enforcement officials, indictments in that case included two La Grange Park police detectives who had supplied protection to the contractors.
Anyone who solicits business door-to-door in La Grange must first register with the Village and pay a license fee. Most homeowners are aware of this ordinance, Kneifel says, and will "usually call us right away" if they suspect a solicitor is not legitimate. "We'll respond quickly, and [the solicitor] will go get registered or get ticketed. If they are not legit, they will usually leave town."
A bogus "Canadian lottery" is one of the more popular scams targetting seniors at this time, Kneifel says. Upon receiving a notification that they have "won" a large sum of money, the recipients are instructed to send as much $3000 to an address in Canada in order to secure and process delivery of winnings that in reality don't exist.
"It's a big scam right now—huge," Kneifel says. "But it can usually be stopped if someone just talks to the potential victim first."
As a step in that direction, Kneifel has met with officials from several banks that do business in La Grange, asking that they contact him if they see unusually large amounts of money being withdrawn by elderly customers so that he can at least talk with these seniors to ensure that no criminal activity is involved.
KNEIFEL RECOGNIZED EARLY ON THAT NETWORKING with businesses and agencies that serve the needs of La Grange seniors was crucial if his role as ESO was to have a meaningful impact, Kneifel says.
Not surprisingly, he has become a familiar face at the Southwest Suburban Center on Aging, which has its offices, and operates a Senior Center, on W Harris St in downtown La Grange.
Kneifel meets frequently with caseworkers at the Center to discuss situations where the involvement of law enforcement is appropriate. His intervention on behalf the woman whose son allegedly was making excessive withdrawals from her Cicero bank account is one example.
He also is a member of a local team effort, organized by the Aging Well Initiative of Lyons Township, that meets monthly at the Center to discuss and explore ways to bring together all of the community's various agencies and entities in service to senior residents. The La Grange/La Grange Park team is one of 13 such groups throughout the township sponsored by Aging Well and funded by a $1 million grant it received from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
When Kneifel told the team of his intent to go door-to-door across the Village in hopes of meeting personally with as many senior residents as possible, they quickly offered up a number of pamphlets for him to include in the packet he would distribute.
Working with the team, Kneifel plans to participate in a number of outreach efforts aimed at seniors.
THE SPECIAL NEEDS OF SENIORS ARE PREDICATED on the fact that as people age their faculties deteriorate, both physically and mentally. The latter is an area in which Kneifel has been indirectly schooled. His wife, Maggie, holds a Masters degree in social work and works in the dementia unit of a nursing home.
"As we grow older, we just don't think as clearly as we once did," he says. "That is what makes the elderly easy targets for predators both from outside and within the home."
As their faculties diminish, Kneifel adds, the elderly also face danger from another, much closer source—themselves.
He recalls one very early morning last year when he was in his squad car on routine patrol in downtown La Grange. He pulled over a car that was driving too slow and erratically, often the sign of a drunk driver. In this case however, the driver was an elderly man who said he was looking for his bank. "That in itself is somewhat unusual at three in the morning," Kneifel says. "But the man also happened to be from Michigan, and he had no idea just how far from home he was."
No one really wants to admit it when age had overtaken their ability to think clearly, Kneifel says. And family members often are reluctant to address the issue head on.
"A lady called me and said she didn't think her dad should be driving, but she didn't want to be the bad guy," Kneifel recalls. "No problem, I told her."
Requiring that a licensed driver in Illinois submit to a full retesting by the Secretary of State is a very simple administrative procedure that any police department can initiate, Kneifel says. Within two weeks of Kneifel's requesting a retest, the woman's father had received a letter from the Secretary of State, and ended up surrendering his driver's license. The daughter never had to confront her aging father over the matter.
Of course, Kneifel says, someday it may be the woman's turn to face the inevitabilities of age. "If you live long enough, dementia is almost always going to happen. It's just a matter of when. It's all about getting old."