10 Years of Community Policing, Chicago Style
Most recent CAPS report grades four key areas

Fall 2004, Volume 26, Number 2

Members of the CAPS research team (from left): Susan Hartnett, Lynn Steiner, Wesley G. Skogan, and Jill DuBois

For more than 10 years, Wesley G. Skogan has been tracking Chicago’s Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS). More than 65 people have worked with him on the evaluation, which has been funded by the National Institute of Justice, the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, and the MacArthur Foundation.

The team conducted about 1,000 personal interviews, surveyed more than 48,500 Chicago residents and 13,600 police officers, made systematic observations of what happened at 1,079 beat community meetings, hung out to observe drug trafficking, and processed over eight million crime reports and 37 million 911 records. Their most recent report, “Community Policing in Chicago, Year Ten” summarizes what this says about the program.

The report points out that Chicagoans are happier about their police than they were 10 years ago; whites, Latinos, and African Americans alike see improvements in the quality of police service in their neighborhoods. Crime and fear have declined. Crime is down the most for the city’s African Americans, who have been the program’s most loyal participants and supporters. Many residents report improvements in their communities’ physical condition, and for many there is less concern about social disorder.

None of this was preordained, Skogan says. Throughout the country, community policing programs have floundered due to indifference from city bureaucracies, resistance by police officers, and public cynicism about the possibility of real police reform.

How well CAPS works, however, still depends in part on who you are and where you live. Things have worked less well for the city’s large and growing Latino population. A combination of language, poverty, and immigration-related issues has stalled progress on community policing, and Spanish speakers report growing concern about crime, disorder, and decay.

For the first time, Skogan and his team have graded key aspects of the program:

CAPS: The Report Card

Public involvement: B
Overall, CAPS does a good job of communicating. Monthly beat meetings, the key vehicle for police-citizen communication, see especially high attendance from people in high crime, low-income areas. Attendance has been sustained citywide even as the novelty of community policing has worn off because participants see solid benefits for their communities. Over time, the meetings’ quality has improved on many dimensions. On the downside, the problem-solving component of the meetings—which are sup-posed to involve residents in neighborhood-upgrade and crime-prevention projects—has declined. Police have been unable to deliver on their plan to involve the same officers month in and month out, so they can develop stronger links to neighborhood residents. Many of the committees set up to advise the 25 police district commanders are drifting, without clear goals or a coherent program.

Agency Partnerships: A
CAPS has done a great job of knitting together various city constituencies through interagency coordi-nation to work on some broad issues usually not tackled in other community policing programs. City services are targeted at the neediest areas, and in addition are responsive to concerns expressed at beat meetings. The police work with other departments on Chicago’s very successful anti-graffiti program. City lawyers collaborate with a multiagency inspection task force on gang and drug-house issues.

Reorganization: A
Chicago effectively reorganized to support community policing. Police reshuffled the daily work of thousands of officers to ensure they would be able to concentrate on their new neighborhood beat assignments. They put a district lieutenant in charge of supervising all CAPS and problem-solving efforts. A management accountability system was put into place in 2000, a version of New York City’s Compstat program, which helps to identify local priorities and then allocate resources to solve them. Chicago’s version has a broader focus than New York’s, and it uses internal inspectors to monitor important aspects of community policing. City service agencies reorganized to support the police department’s program, and a corps of professional community organizers works to coordinate problem-solving projects and turn residents out for beat meetings.

Problem-solving: C
CAPS received its lowest grade in this area, but all police departments find solving problems difficult because it necessitates high levels of training, supervision, analysis, and organization wide commitment. The researchers find that ineffective efforts have left local- and district-level priorities languishing. CAPS should work to reverse the declining action component of beat meetings, provide refresher training for its officers, and offer training to resident activists.

“Chicago is at the forefront of big city policing in the 21st century, and our CAPS data illustrate how difficult yet rewarding reinventing police can be,” Skogan said. “Chicagoans should be proud of this program because it’s not just the police department’s program, it is the city’s program. This is not true in most places, and in many cities, community policing is less effective—and vulnerable to cutbacks— because of it.”

He commended the Chicago Police Department for its unwavering cooperation and interest in the evaluation over the past decade.

Skogan is currently at work on a book that will describe how whites, African Americans, and Latinos have fared under CAPS.

More information on CAPS can be found at www.northwestern.edu/ipr/publications/policing.html.