A year after controversy over the Mount Prospect Police Department uniform patch deeply divided community leaders and residents, police officials have put a postscript on the saga that everyone should be able to get behind.
Officials announced this week that they’re donating $23,391 from sales of the decommissioned shoulder patch to the 100 Club of Illinois. The organization provides resources, financial assistance and other support to the families of Illinois first responders killed in the line of duty.
“Chief (John) Koziol came up with the idea of putting patches up for sale and turning it into a donation to a worthwhile organization like the 100 Club of Illinois,” officer Greg Sill told us Thursday.
Koziol pitched it to the rank-and-file, who bought in.
“We want to continue to live our mission, which is, ‘With courage we protect, with compassion we serve,'” Sill said. “And this goes to that point of that second part of the statement, where we want to take care of our community, we want to take care of our fellow officers and their families. And that’s really what we wanted to focus on, making sure that we could take something and make it as best as we could.”
This Mount Prospect police uniform patch was removed last year amid complaints about its “thin blue line” imagery.
– Courtesy of the Mount Prospect Police Department
First introduced with little fanfare in 2018, the…
