Message from Chief Albert                             

The Village of Elwood is home to the largest container port in the United States.

Most all of the products coming into Elwood are from the Far East, which includes Burma, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.  The products from these nations are shipped to the United States’ west coast; the products not remaining on the west coast are then shipped to Elwood.

Elwood will receive approximately nine hundred thousand container shipments this year and has a daily traffic count in and out of the intermodal facility in excess of eleven thousand vehicles.  This commerce has weighed heavily on the Will County community as well as the Village of Elwood.  The Police Department has made every attempt to maintain a high quality of life for our residents, as well as providing a safe environment for those who work in or visit our community on a daily basis.

With the increased business population the intermodal has brought, the Elwood Police have had to initiate a new way of viewing police work.  The staff of the Department was well versed in dealing with small town U.S.A., but the intermodal became a new concept and the Department had two distinctly different jurisdictions to monitor.

The programs initiated for the Village residents had to be reinvented to deal with the new business partners.  It became immediately apparent that some new thinking had to take place.  The Village was also flooded with requests from places like Merryville and LaPorte, Indiana; Gardner, Kansas; Cleveland, Ohio; Seneca, Crete, Beecher and Joliet, Illinois all requesting information about intermodals, because they were all contemplating having intermodals in or near their towns.

Our response on how to gain much needed information about intermodals was to form a law enforcement rail consortium.  The consortium was comprised of law enforcement agencies from local, county, state and federal agencies.  Topics of homeland security and other relevant topics were shared by the numerous agencies, which have proven to be beneficial to all concerned law enforcement agencies.