Wesley Skogan

While Chicago’s Latino population was exploding during the 1990s, conditions in heavily Latino neighborhoods—including burglaries, auto thefts, abandoned buildings, street crime, public drunkenness, and loitering—worsened. An IPR study also finds Latinos are not participating significantly in Chicago’s citywide community policing program (CAPS), nor are they benefiting much from it.

These findings are among the highlights of “Community Policing in Chicago, Year Seven,” the sixth report issued by an IPR evaluation team that has been following the progress of Chicago’s experimental CAPS program since late 1992.

“It’s partly a language and culture problem for Latinos,” suspects principal investigator Wesley Skogan (IPR-Political Science). Though the city has done much to promote the program among Latinos, especially in Spanish, they have been falling behind.

By contrast, the research team found substantial improvement in neighborhood conditions reported by African-American and white Chicagoans. In African-American areas, reports of serious drug and gang problems dropped from 50% to 30% between 1994 and 1999, and the residents’ ratings of other crime problems dropped by about one-third.

The report reveals trends during the 1990s for crime, city services, and citizen involvement in the CAPS program.

Satisfaction with police services. Though the team’s 1999 report was skeptical about many behind-the-scenes aspects of the program, giving it a “C+” in the public’s eye, according to Skogan, residents in 2000 reported significant improvements in police demeanor, responsiveness, and effectiveness. These improvements were across the board for whites, blacks, and Latinos, with racial minority views improving by about 20 percentage points between 1993 and 1999.

Nevertheless, after five years of citywide community policing, just half of the residents surveyed rated police performance as satisfactory, and less than 60% thought police were doing a good job in responding to community concerns.

Beat meetings. On average, nearly 6,000 residents a month attended some 250 beat meetings throughout the city. Although some feared citizen involvement would flag as the program became routine, that figure has remained constant since 1995. Participation rates were highest in poorer and high-crime areas, but within neighborhoods there was a consistent middle-class bias in those who came. Home owners and long-term residents were more likely to turn out, a familiar pattern in studies of volunteer-based social programs.

Attendees were more positive about police performance than community residents who did not attend. The team found large racial differences in “the optimism gap,” especially between the views of African-Americans and Latinos who attended meetings and their neighbors who did not.

Social disorder problems were most frequently discussed at the beat meetings, particularly gang loitering, public drinking, noise, and bad landlords. Drug problems were brought up at two-thirds of the meetings, and there were complaints about policing, particularly their slow response to 911 calls and lack of police visibility in the neighborhood.

District Advisory Committees (DACs). A major element of the CAPS program has been the creation of committees comprised of residents, business owners, and other community members who meet regularly with police to identify and discuss local crime and disorder issues, set priorities, and develop strategies for addressing them. The report was discouraging about their performance: “After seven years, confusion about the missions of the DACs persists. Low membership, poor or insufficient direction, and irregular contact with their parent body caused many to founder.”

Latinos were noticeably underrepresented on the committees, even in heavily Latino areas. Though their purpose was to identify the “larger issues,” DAC meetings were dominated by beat-level concerns, and often led by police rather than committee members.

Community mobilization. Beginning in 1998, the city deployed a cadre of community organizers—some directly supervised by the city, some members of partnering community groups—to help some of the most troubled communities rebuild their capacity to solve problems and interact more smoothly with police and city agencies. Skogan’s team found “no clear answers” for which type of organizer was more effective. For both, there were positives and negatives.

The best of the partnering organizations were staffed by experienced professionals. They represented dedicated constituencies and often offered expertise in areas such as community redevelopment, schools, youth, and the elderly. Others, however, focused on their organizations’ interests rather than CAPS,’ ignored non-members of their traditional constituency, and lacked experience with crime prevention.

The city-hired organizers spent more time attending beat and district meetings to facilitate CAPS projects and to work on improving resident/police relations. They helped promote neighborhood safety in schools and were successful in bringing city services to communities long deprived by neglect.

By many measures, the researchers found conditions in the beats they evaluated had improved after the first year of the community organizers program: “Fear went down, informal social control strengthened, and many serious neighborhood problems were in decline.” However, since parallel changes occurred in many other areas of the city, it was not always clear how much could be attributed to the program.

Management initiatives. A series of management changes were implemented in the past year to establish a clear line of accountability at the district level for making CAPS work. A new Office of Management Accountability is monitoring resource allocation, district and area planning and effectiveness, and analyzing crime trends and issues of public concern. The department has restructured its planning process to improve problem-solving in each district. These management initiatives are a major focus of the evaluation group’s ongoing research.