Bloomington Police plan to work more closely with Illinois State Police to seize guns from people whose FOID cards have expired.
The Bloomington City Council on Monday approved an agreement for the city’s police department to join the Illinois State Police Violent Crime Intelligence Task Force.
“Through enhanced communication with them and resource allocation, hopefully we will be able to target those individuals that need to relinquish their cards until they are in a valid status,” Bloomington Police Chief Jamal Simington said in an interview on WGLT’s Sound Ideas.
He said the department will seek grant funding for officers to dedicate time to the state police's violent crime task force.
“It’s important that we allocate some of our personnel, investigators to carry out this mission,” Simington said.
The agreement comes weeks after a triple-murder-suicide in Bloomington. In that case, the gunman had a revoked FOID card.
About 300 Bloomington residents have their FOID cards revoked every year, city officials said in a memo to the city council.
Police officials have said tracking these cases — and removing their weapons — is often time-consuming and costly, especially when card holders don't cooperate.
Simington said it's unlikely these gun seizures will have a big impact on reducing gun violence, because he says most illegal gun users never had a FOID card.
“Our average age of gun offenders last year was 19 years old and so a great majority of them never applied for or even had a FOID card,” Simington said. “Many guns are stolen.”
