Despite the efforts of the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) program to reach out to the city’s rapidly growing Latino population, a recent IPR report found that community’s situation troublesome.

With a 2000 population of 754,000, the number of Latinos in Chicago is expected to surpass the number of whites by 2004, and could surpass the black population by 2014, said IPR faculty fellow Wesley Skogan, principal investigator for the report, “Community Policing and the ‘New Immigrants’: Latinos in Chicago.”

About 70% of Latino families include a school-age child, and 61% prefer to speak Spanish, Skogan said. Because these population trends will greatly influence the future of Chicago’s public service infrastructure, the CAPS evaluators, funded by the National Institute of Justice, wanted to evaluate the conditions of Latino neighborhoods and Latinos’ relationships with the CAPS program.

“We found that it’s real dismal,” Skogan said. “[Over the last decade] things got measurably better for blacks. For whites, things were never that bad but they got a little better. For Latinos, over the 1990s, things got worse.”

Among the findings:

• Latinos’ perceptions of their neighborhood conditions were worse than any other population group.

“Spanish-speakers were much more likely than others to report that conditions were bad,” the report stated. The evaluation questioned residents about gang violence, burglary, car theft and abandoned cars. Latinos generally felt these conditions had remained consistently bad or had worsened during the past decade, while other population groups perceived an improvement.

• Spanish-speaking Latinos were much less likely to know about the CAPS program than English speakers, despite the city’s aggressive marketing campaign to integrate Latinos. By 2001, about 80% of most population groups knew about CAPS, but awareness by Spanish-speaking people fell behind by about 19 percentage points from 1996 to 2000.

• While attendance rates among other population groups related directly to their perceptions of the level of violent crime, Latinos were less likely to attend district beat meetings even though most viewed their neighborhoods as unsafe.

• Latinos felt police service in their neighborhoods was poor. For example, the report cited a 1998 survey, which found that 40% of Latinos thought police in their area were “too tough on people they stop,” compared with 10% of whites and 33% of blacks.

In response to the report’s findings, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) has already attempted to address low attendance at beat meetings. It has chosen 30 beats in which meeting participation has been low, and plans to “try everything” to encourage attendance, including scheduling meetings on Saturdays and holding raffles, Skogan said.

But Skogan stressed that the CPD is not solely responsible for improving conditions in Latino neighborhoods. Many neighborhood conditions result from city service and social service problems as well, he said.

“This is a Chicago problem, not just the police department’s problem,” he said. “The problems reach across many issues that are the responsibility of many different kinds of organizations.”