As the Foster Senior Club’s weekly meeting at the Fleetwood-Jourdain Community Center wrapped up its administrative business and members dug into their food, an Evanston police officer entered the room and switched on a microphone.

“Happy Wednesday!” he called out to the group. 

The officer had come to call the bingo numbers – a monthly tradition for the police department’s Community Policing Unit and part of a citywide effort to improve relations with residents. The Foster Senior Club, primarily composed of elderly African American Evanston residents, is a long-standing and integral pillar of the city’s community. 

Several of the members of the club had noticed a considerable decline in police-community relations in recent years. Under the leadership of Chief Schenita Stewart, though, they have seen that the department is focusing on trust and camaraderie with residents. 

According to 73-year-old Alice Aikens, who has lived in Evanston her entire life, the police were in touch more often with the residents while she was growing up. She said officers knew everyone by name. They would even tell children to go home – and if they didn’t, they would tell their parents.

“My son would never come home and tell me where he was, and just drove me crazy,” Kymara Chase, 76, explained. “So, I could actually call police officers and ask, ‘Did you see my son? Where is he?’”

As the years went on, she said the dynamic changed.

“Nowadays, the kids don’t know who the police are, and the police don’t know who the kids are, unless you’re a troublemaker,” Aikens said.

Rodney Greene, the 75-year-old president of the Foster Senior Club, is a former city clerk, a former police chaplain and a graduate of the Community Police Academy. He said police officers used to have bicycles and ride and walk around the neighborhood, but this changed as he got older.

“They took away a lot of the camaraderie that people felt,” Greene said. “They didn’t have trust in the police because they were never in the neighborhood anymore.”

Stewart, the city’s first Black female police chief, is striving to change this. She is a fourth-generation Evanstonian, and when she visits the Foster Senior Club, she talks with people who knew her grandparents. She said her personal connection to the city informs her leadership of the department.

“I have family here, and I want the same service to my family as I should expect to anyone,” said Stewart, who was named Illinois police chief of the year last month. 

The chief being homegrown is important to 82-year-old Gerri Sizemore, whose son had a traumatic experience with a police officer growing up, where he was wrongly stopped and handcuffed. She believes the department has improved since Stewart arrived.

“She knows the community, and she knows the history of things that had happened in the past with the policeman,” Sizemore said. “She’s a community-oriented policeman.”

The chief has emphasized connecting with the Foster Senior Club. Stewart said she often comes to club meetings bearing soul food from C&W Market or Hecky’s Barbecue. Now, she even has a club shirt with her name on it because the club made her an honorary member.

“They’re the bread and butter,” Stewart said. “They’re the grandmothers, the great-grandmothers.”

Greene said that while it’s great when Stewart comes to the club, it isn’t needed to maintain the connection with her – he knows he can reach her anytime.

“Everyone knows her name, she makes the rounds to the various communities,” Greene said. “She’s doing a great job at showing she’s transparent and available.”

Since Stewart increased efforts to bridge the gap between the department and residents, some of the seniors notice more similarities in the department to their childhoods. 

Aikens said now that officers come into the Foster Senior Club, she recognizes and feels comfortable around more of them. When she went out of town, she reached out to an officer and asked him to keep an eye on her house. 

“I see them, and we joke around with each other,” Aikens said. “That’s the way I felt with the police back then – you see a face and you know a name and who they are.”

Greene said this restored relationship has improved residents’ attitudes toward the police department. 

“Most folk have a disregard for the police department, but I think it’s changing now because they’re getting more involved in the community, and they’re making their presence a lot more known,” Greene said.

“It’s been major changes,” he added. “And I think it’s going in the right direction.”