* PJStar…

Mental-health experts could be deployed alongside Peoria police officers as soon as late this year as part of a pilot program proposed by state Rep. Jehan Gordon-Booth.

The Peoria Democrat’s House Bill 5319 would designate Peoria as the pilot city for a possible statewide program involving calls where behavioral health specialists are deemed more effective at handling a situation than patrol officers.

“We know that we have over 600 calls for service that are categorized as mental health calls but we have officers that are responding to that who are on patrol,” Police Chief Eric Echevarria said. “What we want to see is we want to be able to take those of their plate because we want our officer to be proactively working to make Peoria safer.”

* WCIA…

Remote video conferencing, a popular habit formed during the pandemic, could offer courts a safer path to help victims of sexual assault and domestic violence pursue justice against their abusers under a new plan approved by the Illinois Senate.

“For sexual assault survivors, a number of people were in situations where they didn’t feel safe, where they didn’t have as much access to resources as they had prior to the pandemic,” Carrie Ward with the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault said after a press conference at the Illinois Capitol on Tuesday morning.

During the early days of the pandemic, reports of domestic violence dropped off as many people were less likely to come into contact with mandated reporters like teachers, caregivers, or other co-workers who might have offered to help someone go through with filing for an order of protection.

“We don’t believe that this last two years has resulted in less violence,” Ward said. “We believe that it has resulted in less violence that has been reported to law enforcement or even to social service agencies.”

* WBEZ follow-up on a topic we covered this week…

After authorities in a Chicago suburb held a teenager for two days and wrongly charged him in a shooting, the county’s top prosecutor says police officers misled the boy during his interrogation and that a detective assigned to be his advocate helped extract his confession, which turned out to be false.

Authorities released Martell Williams, 15, and dropped aggravated battery charges last week after his family provided evidence he was playing in a high school basketball game the evening of Feb. 4, when a clerk at a dollar store in Waukegan — a city 18 miles away — was shot in the face.

“One of the concerns we have after watching the [interrogation] video is that there is an attempt to reduce the consequences for Martell … and make him feel like everything is going to be OK if he simply accepts the wrong information that the detective is giving him,” Lake County State’s Attorney Eric Rinehart said of the Waukegan cops who questioned the boy. “It was, like, ‘We’ve driven kids home before who have been accused of shooting if they just tell the truth.’ ”

In July, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed the nation’s first state law forbidding police from lying to minors during interrogations. The measure, which took effect Jan. 1, renders evidence from those interrogations inadmissible at trial but does not hold officers liable for the lying. […]

Rinehart said his office will also help write state legislation banning police personnel from serving as “advocates” for children under interrogation by the same department.

…Adding… ABC 7…

The Jelani Day Bill has officially passed the Illinois State Senate.

The bill would require a coroner or medical examiner to notify the FBI when human remains are not identified within 72 hours of discovery.

Day was a graduate student at ISU in Bloomington when he disappeared at the end of August. His body was identified weeks after he was reported missing, having been pulled from the Illinois River near Peru.

The FBI is still investigating his death, and is hoping to get more information from Day’s close contacts to better understand the circumstances surrounding his death. The agency is engaging in a coordinated, nationwide, multi-platform social media campaign to identify new leads, including offering a $10,000 reward.