Police in Dolton, Illinois could soon be walking their beat instead of cruising the streets of the Chicago suburb after a bank moved to repossess much of the police department's fleet of vehicles for non-payment. According to KS StateBank, the village is behind on its payments to the tune of $76,000, and the bank has been unable to reach anyone at City Hall who could rectify the problem. 

Burt Odelson, the legislative counsel for the Village of Dolton Board of Trustees, says the board authorized the payments last May, and he and others are pinning the blame for the snafu on Dolton's anti-gun mayor Tiffany Henyard. 

As questions over unpaid bills have come to light in recent months, WGN Investigates previously uncovered exorbitant spending on lavish trips and experiences by Henyard, which included a trip to Las Vegas that cost more than $12,000 and fell in the same month the loan payment on the village vehicles was due. 

... Village of Dolton trustees have gone head-to-head with Henyard at village meetings, calling for transparency, so residents know where taxpayer dollars are going.

“The residents of Dolton deserve to know how the money is being spent,” trustee Brittney Norwood told WGN-TV Thursday.

The board of trustees is in charge of overseeing finances, but some said Henyard has restricted them from access to village financial records, leaving them mostly in the dark. On top of that, several trustees told WGN News Thursday they recently heard from several vendors who claimed they were hired by the mayor for work and never paid for their services. The village is in millions in debt, and did not approve of those expenses, Norwood told WGN.

There've been questions about Henyard's spending for years now. Back in 2021, Second Amendment advocate John Boch detailed that the mayor of the village was doling out hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for a team of officers to serve as her personal security detail, even as she was calling on lawmakers to pass more gun control laws that would make it harder for Dolton residents to protect themselves. The three officers, which accounted for almost 1/10th of the entire police force, cost taxpayers about $100,000 a year each, even though they were tasked almost exclusively with shadowing the small-town mayor. 

To put that into perspective, that’s the same number of bodyguards that protect Birmingham, Alabama’s mayor but that city has almost ten times the population of Dolton.

At the same time, Mayor Henyard’s armed personal security detail affords her far more protection than the residents of her city enjoy. One of her first acts after taking office involved organizing an “anti-violence” march. She was joined at that march by anti-gun activist and accused pedophile Father Michael Pfleger.

Henyard was actually recalled by residents in 2022, but the recall election was ruled invalid by state courts and she's remained in office ever since. With the next mayoral election not scheduled until 2025, there's no telling how much of a financial hole the village will find itself between now and next November, but it sounds like it's a distinct possibility that the Dolton Police Department is going to be crippled by the repossession of much of its fleet. I'm guessing that Henyard will ensure that there's still money to pay for her team of bodyguards or hire convicted child sex offenders for positions that require them to enter residents' homes, but everyone else who lives in the village is going to be impacted by the financial mismanagement at City Hall. 

It's pretty clear given her anti-gun activism that Henyard doesn't want those folks to be able to protect themselves with a firearm, and based on the complaints from the trustees and their attorneys it might not be long before Dolton PD isn't in a position to serve and protect the community at large either. What are they supposed to do to keep themselves and their families safe? I guess the obvious answer is "run for mayor", since it sounds like Henyard is the one person in Dolton who's guaranteed to be protected by armed individuals who are still legally allowed to purchase and possess so-called assault weapons and large capacity magazines for the mayor's defense.