The NIPAS Occupation: How EPD Uses Unidentified, Outsider Police to Handle Student Protestors
NU Community Not Cops had gotten used to seeing Evanston police officers around every corner. Over the three weeks spanning October 12th to October 31st, the student group’s daily marches demanding the abolition of policing at Northwestern and Evanston attracted a lot of attention and spurred discussions on abolition from townspeople and students alike. Despite openly using squad cars and motorcycles to follow and speed past students as they moved through the streets, the Evanston Police Department at first took a mostly “hands-off” approach to the protests, with each one ending without extreme incident.
But since the October 17th protest that ended with a burnt mask sign and an enraged President Schapiro, the ordinary blueshirts of the EPD have been joined by strangers riding bikes and wearing riot gear. Their badges are not colored with Northwestern purple nor Evanston blue; instead, their uniforms display a silver knight mounted on horseback, lance in hand, “NIPAS'' emblazoned in the center of the triangular patch. For the mounted bicycle officers, it sits on the chest of their yellow hi-vis shirts; for the vested tactical team, it adorns the shoulder pads of their all-black full body uniforms.
These are not Evanston police. These are Mobile Field Force officers with the Northern Illinois Police Alarm System (NIPAS), a police “mutual aid” organization comprised of over 80 suburban police departments. They come from all across Cook and even collar counties. They’ve been granted jurisdiction in a town other than their own. And they have one purpose: control protests in a way EPD is unable to with their own force and equipment.
And after an NUCNC protest the night of Halloween ended in the use of chemical agents by police, the arrest of a student, and threats of running protestors over, one question is paramount.
WHAT IS NIPAS?
The NIPAS Mobile Field Force emblem, worn by deployed officers in Evanston.
NIPAS is an inter-municipal mutual aid organization of police departments across the suburbs west and north of Chicago. Formed in 1983 and formalized in 1988, its original mission was to facilitate resource pooling among member departments in the event of a natural disaster, so that no one member would be overwhelmed in a time of crisis.
However, the organization quickly expanded beyond that limited scope: in 1987, a full year before bylaws formalized NIPAS as an organization, a “special tactical squad” called the Emergency Services Team (EST) was formed to act as a SWAT equivalent for NIPAS members. Then, in 1994, NIPAS launched the Mobile Field Force (MFF), a “special crowd control team” designed to “maximize the effectiveness of initial response efforts by police when a major civil disturbance occurs.” It is the MFF, mounted on bikes and carrying riot shields and wooden clubs, that have become a fixture in Evanston, and appeared to deploy chemical agents against student protestors on the night of October 31st.
NIPAS describes the MFF as a “rapid, organized, and disciplined response to civil disorder, crowd control, or other tactical situations” during “civil disturbances, union conflicts, public demonstrations, and other events involving large or disorderly crowds.” Essentially, the MFF allows participating departments to empower police officers from departments all over Chicagoland to control crowds and demonstrations, by temporarily granting them jurisdiction within their community. The capabilities of the MFF are further enhanced by the inclusion of K-9 units, which were deployed multiple times during the protests, and the formation of the Bicycle Response Team, a unit of yellow-vested officers who have been frequently observed trailing NUCNC protestors as they march through the streets.
To gain access to the services of the MFF, a participating police department is required to pay “membership dues” to fund the operations of the organization, as well as devote one or more of their officers to train and be on-call 24/7 for the team. In total, the MFF numbers over 120 officers from approximately 80 Chicago suburban municipalities, covering communities across Cook, Dupage, Lake, McHenry, and Kane Counties.
Police departments with officers participating in the NIPAS Mobile Field Forces, per the NIPAS website.
OPAQUE FROM TOP TO BOTTOM
Beyond this, very little is publicly known about NIPAS, largely due to the organization’s own lack of transparency. The NIPAS website does not contain basic pieces of information, including any contact information, names or structure of leadership, records of its deployments and actions, records of training offered to participating officers and departments, or names and departments of officers who are members of the MFF or EST. Beyond what is immediately accessible through an internet search bar, information on how the organization actually operates is difficult to come by. NIPAS’s phone number, mailing address, and leadership as of 2018 were only found in a letter issued by NIPAS to member organizations that the Glenview Police Department happened to post online.
To get any additional information, we as reporters used the Illinois Freedom of Information Act to ask NIPAS and the Evanston Police Department for the most up-to-date records on deployments, funding, rosters, and leadership of NIPAS. As of today, there has been no response beyond Evanston’s record-keeping department acknowledging the receipt of requests for incident reports. Trying to find a roster of participating officers in NIPAS, we resorted to contacting the Illinois Law Enforcement Alarm System (ILEAS), a separate mutual aid agency that has some relationship with, but no oversight or control over, NIPAS. The rosters that ILEAS gave us of participating officers are allegedly from this year, but we have already found discrepancies: Based on photos of the October 31st protest posted on social media, we have yet to positively identify any of the officers based on their ID numbers, as the ID numbers of NIPAS officers from the October 31st protest are not in the rosters from ILEAS. The information ILEAS has provided is wholly insufficient, and NIPAS and EPD have just days remaining to legally provide reports according to FOIA laws. As of right now, there appears to be no readily available information about the role of NIPAS at NUCNC protests, nor reports on how EPD and NIPAS coordinate their responses. EPD has further not provided an explanation as to why NIPAS was called in and who ultimately made that decision.
Here’s what we do know, based on information from NIPAS’s website, the Evanston Police Department’s Policy Manual, the 2018 NIPAS letter to participating agencies, and Mick McAvoy of ILEAS, who responded to our FOIA requests: NIPAS operates as an independent, inter-municipal public agency. The governing board of NIPAS is composed entirely of the chiefs of member departments and sets the budget for all of the organization’s expenditures. As of 2018, the President of NIPAS was Libertyville Police Chief Clinton Herdegen, the Vice President was Riverside Police Chief Thomas Weitzel, and the Commander of the Mobile Field Force was Lake Forest Police Chief Karl Walldorf. The organization’s budget is set by the board of chiefs and funded by annual dues paid by member departments; in return, NIPAS is beholden to respond to calls for assistance from those departments.
In Evanston, the Chief of Police, Deputy Chiefs, duty Commanders, and on-duty ranking supervisors are all able to call an alarm and request aid from NIPAS. The NIPAS dispatch is then contacted and given the nature of the incident, the location aid is needed, and the level of aid needed, ranging from five to fifty or more officers. Under the bylaws of the NIPAS mutual aid agreement, these outside officers are granted full jurisdiction as Illinois Police Officers in Evanston until the alarm has been terminated by the Evanston Police Department. While these outside officers are in Evanston, all supplies needed for them are provided and paid for by Evanston PD, including gasoline and food for personnel.
Per NIPAS rosters and training records allegedly from this year, obtained via FOIA requests to ILEAS, EPD currently has four officers participating in the MFF and three in the EST. NIPAS itself and EPD have yet to respond to requests to verify the number and identities of Evanston officers participating in NIPAS units. Further inquiries have been made as to the funding, training, and activities of NIPAS in the past few months via FOIA requests, and NIPAS has until Tuesday, November 3, to respond according to Illinois FOIA code.
ACCOUNTABLE TO WHOM?
While their identities and home departments remain unconfirmed at the time of writing, it is undeniable that the visiting NIPAS officers, whether seated on bicycles or dressed in riot gear, have treated Evanston as their own turf in their repeated appearances at NUCNC protests. In the past three weeks, they have: guarded Northwestern president Morton Schapiro’s home on numerous occasions, most notably October 17th; trailed students as they protested in front of Mayor Stephen Hagerty’s house on October 21st; circled around the gates of Ryan Field and swung bikes against protestors on October 24th; and appeared to disperse chemical agents against protestors in downtown Evanston on October 31st. While NIPAS and other officers have used their bodies and bikes to block movement of protests throughout the weeks, Halloween night was the first time that officers from any agency used less-lethal munitions against protestors in any fashion. Just as escalatory, October 31st marked the first day of protests that police arrested a demonstrator. Yet no officer or department has been held accountable for these escalations in force against the protests.
Social media posts and eyewitness accounts from the night of October 31st suggest that either EPD or NIPAS was the agency that fired “chemical munitions,” as an officer with a loudspeaker warned, when protestors refused to immediately disperse. Video stills and photos obtained from anonymous eyewitnesses show two NIPAS MFF officers with two different types of non-lethal guns commonly used to shoot chemical agents or non-lethal rounds such as bean bags or rubber bullets.
A MFF officer holds what appears to be a less-lethal variant of a multiple grenade launcher, which can fire chemical munitions such as tear gas and “bean-bag” rounds. Photo by Zach Watson.
An MFF officer aims a pepperball gun above the heads of protestors. Photo courtesy of an anonymous NUCNC march participant.
The weapon in the top photo may be a less-lethal variant of the Milkor MGL or a weapon of similar build, which can fire both chemical and more bullet-like less-lethal rounds, according to two Chicago-area activists familiar with such weaponry whom we have decided to keep anonymous for their safety. The bottom weapon appears to be a less-lethal rifle that shoots chemical irritants, such as the Pepperball FTC. On Nov. 1, EPD confirmed the use of pepper spray against protestors “to prevent injury to bystanders and police officers,” but declined to state who actually fired the pepper spray. EPD further alleged that no tear gas was used on October 31st, calling any social media suggestions to the contrary “misinformation.”
Given this escalation, the question of who is holding NIPAS accountable for their actions at NUCNC protests is of great importance. Simply put: we have no idea. EPD has not released any information on who requested NIPAS aid, or how that decision to bring in outside officers was reached. Furthermore, once a unit of NIPAS is out on the streets, it is unclear who actually controls their actions: the EPD Policy Manual states that the authorizing officer has the authority to mark another officer as “staging area supervisor,” who can then direct NIPAS officers to certain duties and coordinate with the “command post.” But EPD has not made public who this staging area supervisor is for the NUCNC protests, or if they are a member of EPD. Furthermore, the officers that performed the arrest on October 31st, the officers that deployed chemical agents, and the MFF officers that held the less-lethal weapons shown in photos above all remain unidentified to the public by both EPD and NIPAS.
This lack of transparency around who exactly is coordinating and taking action against protestors allows the officers involved to evade public reckoning with any oversteps they may commit, and gives EPD a very convenient method of deflecting outrage about their brutalizing of citizens. So long as the NIPAS officers in Evanston remain anonymous, they can act with impunity. And so long as EPD doesn’t identify who in their leadership is bringing these officers in to begin with, they can continue to do so without consequence, without Evanstonians being informed as to who is coming into their city.
NIPAS was originally envisioned as a system of cooperation between police departments, so that no one department would have their own resources or personnel overwhelmed. But in effect, the real collective resource the NIPAS Mobile Field Force provides is the ability to outsource the work of suppressing protests. If the officers dispersing chemical agents against student protestors are not only nameless and faceless, but also come from dozens of miles away, it becomes almost impossible to effectively hold them accountable.
In this way, they act far more as an occupying force than as civilian peacekeepers.
DIGGING EVER DEEPER
The very idea of the need for policing as an institution has been brought into question, as NUCNC and others nationwide continue to protest and demand the abolition of police departments, the prison-industrial complex, and the military-industrial complex. But as long as they are still around, the names and actions of those given the legal authority to arrest and use force against citizens in service of the state must be public information, whether they operate at the level of municipal police or in an inter-municipal compact. And so, that is exactly what we will do.
We will continue to use the Freedom of Information Act to demand EPD and NIPAS name everyone involved in the deployment of Mobile Field Force officers to Evanston, including who called the alarms to NIPAS, who coordinates their actions in the streets, and who is accountable for the actions they take against protestors. We are also demanding full and up-to-date rosters of all NIPAS teams, as well as the names and home departments of the specific officers that have been deployed to Evanston since the NUCNC protests began.
We will also be digging deeper into NIPAS as an organization, including how their executive positions are elected, how their membership dues and budget are calculated, what training is provided to member departments, and how the organization interacts with other agencies like ILEAS and the Chicago Police Department.
At the time of publication, NUCNC is conducting a week of digital actions, and NIPAS officers have not been deployed in Evanston since October 31st. But it is likely that, given the tension set to explode around the 2020 election, NUCNC protests are only the beginning of NIPAS’s presence in Evanston and suburban communities around Chicago. If they continue to claim jurisdiction in towns they don’t reside in, then they must be held accountable to the citizens they police. For NIPAS, the chant echoed by abolitionists and protestors nationwide applies far more literally than it does for most:
WHO DO YOU SERVE, WHO DO YOU PROTECT?
Update 11/4/2020 at 3:00pm CST:
Read Scene+Heard’s examination of Northwestern’s current protest movement, Northwestern Community Not Cops, here.
To demand the removal of NIPAS from Evanston, visit bit.ly/NO-NIPAS.
This article is written by Alex Harrison and Zach Watson as guest writers for Scene+Heard. For questions about this article, we direct you to sceneandheardnu@gmail.com. We cannot guarantee a response but will do our best to engage with all good faith inquiries.