$847K police training center coming to downtown Rockford

ROCKFORD, Ill. (WTVO) — The Winnebago County Sheriff’s Office has secured $847,000 for a new police training facility, to be located in downtown Rockford.

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin (D) and U.S. Rep. Eric Sorenson (D-17th) were in Rockford on Monday to announce the new funding.

The state-of-the-art equipment and training center will be located on the third and fourth floors of the former Public Safety Building, at 420 E. State Street.

Training at the facility will be available to local, state, and federal agencies.

“We’re all brothers in blue and we want to make sure they’re safe and we want to make sure when they’re out there, the community is safe,” said Winnebago County Sheriff Gary Caruana. “So, we gotta make sure that we do the right thing, continuously, and we cannot take our eyes off the ball as far as training and keeping everyone in the community and in the law enforcement community safe.”

The new facility will offer law enforcement roughly double the space of its current training center.

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