Community
Policing Evaluation
Introduction
For the
past decade, IPR researchers have been evaluating Chicago's
Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS), the nation's most ambitious
experiment in community policing. CAPS was unveiled in April
1993 in five prototype police districts and went citywide a
year later. Political scientist Wesley
G. Skogan is leading an academic team from Northwestern,
DePaul, Loyola, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, which
is evaluating the planning, implementation, and impact of CAPS
throughout the city. Project Clear (Citizen Law Enforcement
Analysis and Reporting) is working on a state-of-the-art integrated
criminal justice information system. Working on this project
are Susan
Hartnett, research associate and project director,
and Jill
DuBois, project manager.
Reports
From NIJ:
Community
Policing and the New Immigrants: Latinos in Chicago
Taking
Stock: Community Policing in Chicago
Problem
Solving in Practice: Implementing Community Policing in Chicago
Public
Involvement: Community Policing in Chicago
From OCOPS:
Policing
Smarter through IT: Learning from Chicago’s Citizen
and Law Enforcement Analysis and Reporting (CLEAR) System
(complete text)
•
Click here for an abridged version of the report.
Working
Papers
CAPS number: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31]
IPR has published a series of papers
(summarized below) that enlarge on many of the issues raised in
the annual reports. Each of these papers may be downloaded from
the links below. Printed copies may be ordered directly from the
Publications Department, Institute for Policy Research, 2040 Sheridan
Road, Evanston, IL 60208-4100, at a cost of $5.00 per paper.
Checks should be made payable to Northwestern University. We only accept checks drawn on U.S. bank and payable in U.S. funds. The
price includes shipping and handling.
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(CAPS-1):
The Public and the Police in the City of Chicago
By Tabatha R. Johnson
This paper describes in detail findings
from the Spring 1993 citywide resident survey. It examines citizens'
assessments of the police and the impact of variables such as
race, class, gender, and experiences with the police. The report
suggests that each of these factors has an important effect
on how citizens evaluate police performance and activities.
Click
here to see Acrobat version.
(CAPS-2): Winning the Hearts and Minds of Police
Officers: An Assessment of Staff Perceptions of Community Policing
in Chicago
By Arthur J. Lurigio and Wesley G. Skogan
Findings from the 1993 police officer
survey are described in detail. Before the CAPS program began,
officers were surveyed about their job satisfaction, their supervisors,
and their opinions regarding community policing. Results show
they supported some of CAPS-related activities, but not others.
(CAPS-3): Partnerships for Prevention? Some
Obstacles to Police-Community Cooperation
By Wesley G. Skogan
This paper examines one aspect of
the crime prevention equation, the ability of the police and
community members to develop cooperative relationships that
focus on problem solving. The data are drawn from the on-going
study of Chicago's adoption of a community policing model .
The report examines structural changes made by the Chicago Police
Department to encourage the formation of a partnership, as well
as launching a massive training effort to ensure that officers
and their immediate supervisors understand the new roles and
responsibilities they are being called upon to adopt.
Click
here to see Acrobat version.
(CAPS-4): Community Participation and Community
Policing
By Wesley G. Skogan
This report focuses on the role of
the public in community policing. To gauge public opinion on
the eve of the new program, survey interviews were conducted
with residents of the areas selected to receive community policing
and matched neighborhoods that served as comparison areas for
the evaluation. The report focuses on program awareness and
program participation of residents.
Click
here to see Acrobat version.
(CAPS-5): Spring 1994 Supervisor Training Evaluation
Report
By Arthur G. Lurigio, Sheila Houmes, and
Sigurlina Davidsdottir
This paper describes an evaluation
of CAPS training for supervisory staff. The training was conducted
during the spring of 1994. The evaluation team examined the
nature of the training sessions and the performance of the trainers;
the background of the training participants and their attitudes
toward their jobs, citizens, and CAPS; as well as participants'
reactions to the training. Many recommendations for future training
are included.
Click
here to see Acrobat version.
(CAPS-6): Preparing Police Officers for Community
Policing: An Evaluation of Training for Chicago's Alternative
Policing Strategy
By Gail Dantzker, Arthur J. Lurigio, Susan
M. Hartnett, Sigurlina Davidsdottir, Kristin Donovan,and Sheila
Houmes
Findings of a process evaluation
of CAPS training for police officers are presented. The study's
approach and instrumentation were adopted from the field of
adult education and involved observation and ratings of trainee
and trainer behaviors. Additional personal interviews were conducted
with sergeants, lieutenants, and trainers. The paper concludes
with recommendations on how to implement training for community
policing.
(CAPS-7): Evaluation Design and Survey Methods
Report
By Wesley G. Skogan
This paper describes in detail the
methods for the citizen survey conducted in the areas selected
to receive community policing and the matched neighborhoods
that served as comparison areas for the evaluation. Research
design, sample surveys, and survey weighting are given thorough
attention. It also discusses the overall design of the CAPS
evaluation, including the selection of control areas of the
city.
Click
here to see Acrobat version.
(CAPS-8): An Analysis of Beat Meeting Participation
and Activity
By Scott Althaus
This report evaluates the success
of beat meetings that were held in the five areas selected to
receive community policing from late April 1993, when the program
began, through August 1994. Researchers examined beat meeting
attendance, the beat meeting process, and the content and structure
of beat meetings. Two major questions were whether the beat
meetings were evolving toward a community policing model and
whether all the interests and immediate problems of the community,
as well as the community resources, were represented at these
meetings.
(CAPS-9): District Advisory Committees: The
Prototype Experience
By Jill DuBois
This paper offers a thorough discussion
of the District Advisory Committee meetings in each of the five
areas initially selected to receive community policing. These
committees were mandated by City Hall and were to be comprised
of a representative group of people from the district who could
guide the district commander to work on priority problems in
the district. A full description of each committee is discussed
followed by a recommendation section on the key elements that
pointed to the more or less successful committees.
Click
here to see Acrobat version.
(CAPS-10): Partnerships in Action
By Dominique Whelan
Several case studies of problem solving
in the areas selected to receive community policing are examined.
These represent police and citizen problem-solving initiatives
at the grassroots level. Each case study used a variety of data
including personal interviews with key informants, observations
of neighborhood meetings and court cases, observations of the
area under study, and newspaper and other media sources. Both
a description and an analysis of the problem-solving process
is presented.
Click here to see Acrobat version.
(CAPS-11): Community Organization Survey Methods
Report
By Justine H. Lovig and Robert VanStedum
This is a survey methodological report
on our Community Organization study. Data were gathered on hundreds
of community organizations in the areas selected to receive
community policing. The paper reports in detail about the sample,
procedures employed, research questions, instrument development,
data collection, coding, and analysis. A copy of the instrument
is included.
Click here to see Acrobat version.
(CAPS-12): Community Organization Study
By Justine H. Lovig and Wesley G. Skogan
One goal of the study was to determine
the degree to which community organizations in the prototype
areas were involved in CAPS during its first year of implementation.
Based on survey interviews with hundreds of organizational informants,
this paper examines the roles their organizations played in
the community policing program. The survey was designed to elicit
the differences in CAPS involvement between various types of
organizations, and between the areas of study. The report documents
how the organizations mobilized to influence the shape of community
policing in their districts.
Click
here to see Acrobat version.
(CAPS-13): 1995 CAPS Training Evaluation Report
By Marianne Kaiser
This paper describes an evaluation
of CAPS training for police officers. The purpose of the training
was to teach them about their changing roles and responsibilities
under CAPS, with an emphasis on learning the skills needed to
be an effective team member. The evaluation team employed three
different methods to examine the nature of training and the
performance of the trainers. The methods included observation
of training, police questionnaires, and personal interviews
conducted with samples of trainees, trainers, and supervisors.
The report concludes with a set of recommendations based on
the evaluation.
Click
here to see Acrobat version.
(CAPS-14): 1995 Joint Community-Police Training:
Interim Report
By Marianne Kaiser
This paper describes an evaluation
of the Joint Community-Police Training (JCPT) program conducted
by the Chicago Alliance for Neighborhood Safety (CANS) and the
Chicago Police Department (CPD) for Chicago residents. This
is the first large-scale attempt in the country to train neighborhood
residents to work together with the police to solve crime and
disorder problems in their neighborhoods. The goal of the training
is to produce better informed and more organized citizens and,
as a result, safer neighborhoods. Research methods included
observation of the curriculum development, observation of training
sessions, resident questionnaires, and personal interviews with
the trainers. The report fully discusses the process of implementation
and concludes with a comprehensive list of recommendations.
Click
here to see Acrobat version.
Click
here to see Table 1a
Click here to see Table 6
(CAPS-16): 1996 Beat Meeting and Citizen Training
Participant Study
By Justine H. Lovig, Jinney Smith and
Wesley G. Skogan
Citizen involvement in neighborhood
problem solving is a fundamental part of Chicago's community
policing program. During 1996 we condudcted a survey of two
groups of citizens to gauge the extent of their involvement
in problem solving efforts. We surveyed particpants in the city's
beat community meetings, and those attending training sessions
designed to enhance the public's role in problem solving. This
paper presents a detailed description of the methodology employed
in those two studies, and a full set of survey questionnaires.
Click here to see Acrobat version.
(CAPS-17): Evaluating Problem-Solving Policing:
The Chicago Experience
By Wesley G. Skogan
This conference paper describes the
evaluation of a community policing program in Chicago. There
is a great deal of interest in systematically assessing how
well community policing programs work. A thorough assessment
of a new program generally calls for two kinds of evaluations.
Process evaluations examine program design and implementation,
and detail both the program's "theory" (how was it supposed
to have an impact on crime) and its actual implementation (whether
or not the police actually adopted different practices). Impact
evaluations analyze the effect that the program had on the problems
that it targeted. The Chicago study was both a process and impact
evaluation, but this paper focuses on what we found about the
impact of the program on the lives of the city's residents.
The first section describes the program and the evaluation.
The next documents the analytic approach that was adopted that
enables us to assess the impact of community policing in five
city neighborhoods. The third section presents what we found
about the impact of the program. It looks at the impact of community
policing on a variety of community problems, and illustrates
how different ways of measuring those problems pointed to the
same conclusions. The next section deals with geographic displacement;
it examines whether crimes were actually prevented, or if they
just shifted to another nearby locale. The final section summarizes
the findings, and comments on the general features of evaluation
projects.
Click
here to see Acrobat version.
(CAPS-18): Measuring What Matters: Crime, Disorder,
and Fear
By Wesley G. Skogan
This paper considers two issues:
measuring the possible effects of an innovative policing program,
and doing so in a framework that could support the inference
that the program caused variations that the measurements might
reveal. Measurement involves the collection of data that represent
-- sometimes only indirectly -- the problems that are targets
of programs. These are the "outcome" measures, and it is vital
that they represent as accurately as possible the scope of a
program's intentions. The framework within which these data
are collected is evaluation's research design, and it is crucial
that the design account for as many alternative explanations
for what is measured as is possible under the circumstances.
Arguing that "the program made a difference" over the past month
or year involves systematically discounting the potential influence
of other factors that might account for changes in the measures,
through the use of randomization, matched control groups or
time series, and other design strategies. This essay focuses
on measurement issues, but it bridges to design issues through
some concrete examples of how measures have been used to make
judgments about the impact of programs. It examines in sequence
some of the experience of the evaluation community in taking
the vital signs of a community via measures of crime, disorder,
and fear.
Click
here to see Acrobat version.
(CAPS-19): The Super Block Project
By Raj C. Udeshi
This paper reports on a dynamic project
aimed at improving the quality of life for residents of one
of Chicago's neediest blocks. The idea was conceived by a police
commander who believed that utilizing the abundant human resources
of the people living there, as well as those available through
city and private agencies, would go a long way toward effecting
real change. The report provides a synopsis of the planning
and implementation period, successes and obstacles, and implications
for future application of the concept.
Click
here to see Acrobat version.
(CAPS-20): Institute for Public Safety Partnerships:
A First Year Evaluation
By Jennifer Comey and Marianne Kaiser
This paper evaluates the first year
of the new Institute for Public Safety Partnerships (IPSP).
The Institute is one of 35 regional community policing institutes
funded recently by the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of
Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS). IPSP was established
as a partnership between the University of Illinois at Chicago,
the Chicago Alliance for Neighborhood Safety (CANS), and a number
of police and sheriffs' departments in Illinois. The purpose
of IPSP is to provide basic and advanced community-policing
training and technical assistance, to advance the state of the
art in community-policing education and training, and to advance
the application of new and different training and technical
assistance delivery systems in small and mid-sized towns throughout
Illinois. The report looks in-depth at the development of the
Institute and the community-policing curriculum, as well as
evaluates the training conducted in six Illinois sites. The
report provides trainees' opinions of the training and evaluators
recommendations for the Institute's second year of operations.
Click
here to see Acrobat version.
(CAPS-21): 1998 Citywide Beat Meeting Observation
Methodology Report
By Joel F. Knutson and Wesley G. Skogan
This paper provides documentation
for a field observation study of beat community meetings in
Chicago. Beat meetings are one of the cornerstones of Chicago's
community policing program. The city has 25 police districts,
and they in turn are divided into 279 small police beats. Teams
of 8-10 officers from all watches are assigned to each beat,
where they work under the supervision of a beat team sergeant.
Chicago's program features regular meetings between these officers
and residents of the beats they serve. These beat community
meetings are to provide a venue for identifying and prioritizing
local problems through a dialog between police and residents
that is informed by the regular distribution of crime and arrest
information. Residents and police are also supposed to discuss
solutions to the problems that are identified at the meetings,
and divide the responsibility for specific problem-solving efforts
between police, residents and municipal service agencies. Most
beats meet monthly, and-- except in December--the city held
between 225 and 268 beat meetings each month during 1998. Based
on department records, 25 residents attended the average beat
meeting during 1998, along with about seven police officers.
During 1998, more than 67,000 residents attended beat meetings
in their neighborhood.
During 1998, a team of field researchers
from the Institute for Policy Research attended 454 beat meetings
throughout the city. They recorded what took place at each
meeting on lengthy observation forms, and they distributed
questionnaires to residents and police who were present. This
paper describes the project in detail, and includes as appendices
all of the observation forms and survey questionnaires that
were employed in the study. Analyses of the data can be found
in the forthcoming 1999 report, Community Policing in Chicago,
Years Five-Six, which is available on request from the Illinois
Criminal Justice Information Authority, 120 South Riverside
Plaza, Suite 1016, Chicago IL 60606.
Click
here to see Acrobat version.
(CAPS-22): CAPS Evaluation Officer Surveys
Data Documentation
By Wesley G. Skogan
This report provides a brief description
of all of the police surveys conducted by the evaluation group
between 1993 and 1999. It indicates the number of officers surveyed
in each study and provides a brief summary of the major issues
touched on in the questionnaires and the demographic measures
that were included. Publications that have used these data are
cited. All of the data will be available from the Criminal Justice
Data Archive at the University of Michigan in 2000.
Click
here to see Acrobat version.
(CAPS-23): CAPS Citywide
Resident Survey Documentation
By Wesley G. Skogan
This report provides documentation
for all of the citywide resident surveys conducted by the evaluation
group between 1993 and 1999. It includes reproductions of all
of the survey questionnaires. The data will be available from
the Criminal Justice Data Archive at the University of Michigan
in 2000.
Click
here to see Acrobat version.
(CAPS-24):
Community Mobilization for Community Policing
By J. Erik Gudell and Wesley G. Skogan
This report describes an experiment in
Chicago aimed at creating community capacity for self help in neighborhoods where that had been lost. Beginning
in 1998, the city deployed a cadre of organizers charged with
rebuilding the capacity of some of its most troubled communities. Some worked directly under the supervision of the
city while others were on the staff of neighborhood organizations.
The evaluation described in this report began at about the same
time. Evaluation staff interviewed the participants and monitored
the activities of the organizers as they worked in selected
beats. A survey was conducted to profile conditions in the beats
that were first involved in the program, and a few were re-surveyed
to monitor changes that may have taken place there over time.
This report summarizes the researchers' conclusions about a
number of the issues the evaluation addressed. These included:
What do community organizers do to build community capacity?
What were the impediments to their organizing efforts? What
projects did they succeed in bringing to fruition? And were
there any changes in neighborhood conditions that might be tied
to their efforts?
Click
here to see Acrobat version.
(CAPS-25):
The 2002 Problem Solving Study
By Jason Bennis, Lynn Steiner and Wesley
G. Skogan
This paper documents a field study that
produced an independent assessment of the success of Chicago
police in solving problems. Problem solving is one of the
key components of CAPS, the city's community policing program.
Police and neighborhood residents were trained to tackle these
problems using a five-step process, and the department's new
information systems produce data for planning and evaluating
their efforts. This study focused on the most commonly identified
priority beat problems. Interviews, field observations, and
archival data were examined to (a) reconstruct what actions
police and residents took at each site, and to (b) assess
the success of their problem-solving efforts, on several dimensions.
The research was completed in 68 sample beats. A total of
142 interviews were conducted with police officers and 136
with informed residents. A total of 419 forms that systematically
assessed the extent of problems and police or resident crime
prevention efforts were completed. The observers themselves
inspected the problem sites on 428 occasions, spending a total
of 569 hours observing events and conditions there. The fieldwork
component of the study was supplemented by statistical analyses
of quantitative time series data on crime and calls for service.
This aspect of the study is described in the forthcoming CAPS-27.
The paper includes all of the observation
forms and survey questionnaires used in the study.
Click
here to see Acrobat version.
(CAPS-26):
The 2002 Beat Meeting Observation Study
By Jason Bennis, Wesley G. Skogan and Lynn
Steiner
This paper documents a 2002 study of
the effectiveness of Chicago's beat meetings. Beat meetings
are one of the most distinctive features of the city's community
policing program. They are monthly gatherings of small groups
of residents and officers working in the area. In the city's
plan, beat meetings are to be the principal mechanism for
building and sustaining close relationships between police
and the general public. The 2002 beat meeting study assessed
the extent to which beat meetings are meeting their goals.
Observers attended beat meetings to make note of what happened
there and to survey residents and police who attended. A total
of 291 observations were conducted in 130 sample beats, and
3,706 residents and 643 police officers were surveyed.
The paper includes all of the observation
forms and survey questionnaires used in the study.
Click
here to see Acrobat version.
(CAPS-27): Statistical
Analysis of Timeseries Data on Problem Solving
By So Young Kim and Wesley G. Skogan
During the summer of 2002, the CAPS evaluation
team conducted a study examining how Chicago police tackle neighborhood
problems. The study focused on the problems most often identified
by the police as local priorities. The findings of the study
can be found in the main project report: Community
Policing in Chicago, Years Eight and Nine.
The fieldwork component of the study was
supplemented by statistical analyses of quantitative time series
data on crime and 911 calls. This paper describes in detail
the research design and statistical methods that were employed
for the study. Time series trends in appropriate categories
of calls for service and recorded crime data were created for
each problem site. Comparable time series data were assembled
for matched sets of beats in which the sample problem was not
identified as a priority. Crime data were aggregated from information
on 3.9 million individual crime incidents. 911 call data were
aggregated from 23.4 million calls to the City of Chicago’s
Office of Emergency Management and Communications. There is
an extensive discussion of the use of Box-Jenkins Intervention
Analysis to distinguish between gradual and immediate changes
in crime, whether those changes were temporary or permanent
in nature, and whether trends in the study beats were unique
or matched trends in similar areas of the city.
Click
here to see Acrobat version.
(CAPS-28): The
Fall 2003 Police Information Technology Adoption Survey
By Wesley G. Skogan and Susan M. Hartnett
This paper documents the methodology used
in a telephone survey of Chicago suburban police departments
which was conducted during October and November 2003. The study
had two purposes. The first was to describe the scope of agency
utilization of the data warehouse, which is an information repository
developed by the Chicago police department to produce a variety
of relational reports using modern, flexible database query
software. The second purpose of the study was to explain variations
in the timing and extent of data warehouse use. The paper covers
questionnaire development, interviewer recruitment and training,
samples and completion rates, data organization and reliability,
and learning experiences from the field. Two hundred seventy-five
interviews were completed at 142 Chicago suburban police agencies.
One hundred forty-one interviews were conducted with a primary
respondent and 134 interviews were conducted with a secondary
respondent at the agencies. The paper includes the two survey
instruments.
Click
here to see Acrobat version.
(CAPS-29):
The Diffusion of Information Technology in Policing
By Wesley G. Skogan and Susan M.
Hartnett
This study examines the diffusion
of innovation among municipal police departments in Northeastern
Illinois. The opportunity to adopt an innovation arose when
the Chicago Police Department (CPD) opened access to elements
of its new centralized Data Warehouse to other criminal justice
agencies. There is a long history of research on the diffusion
of innovation, and a number of recent projects have applied
this work to policing. Like innovation studies generally,
this article presents the shape of the diffusion curve that
describes the pace of adoption, and it examines factors associated
with adoption and the extent to which the innovation was actually
used. Adoption and extent of utilization proved to be largely
independent processes. Involvement in cosmopolitan networks,
experience with using databases for law enforcement, and the
human capital capacities of the organizations influenced the
adoption decision, while organizational resources and experience
in using the system drove the level of actual use. The rapid
growth of system utilization was apparently due to three factors:
the active role played by the “evangelist” representing
the host department; the fact that access to the system was
free; and because it primarily empowered detectives –
who enjoy a privileged position in policing – and did
not challenge the traditional mission and organization of
participating agencies.
Click here to
see Acrobat version.
(Caps-30): Community Policing
By Wesley G. Skogan
Community policing is very popular, so much so that few police
chiefs want to be caught without some program they can call
community policing. In a 1997 survey of police departments
conducted by the Police Foundation, 85 percent reported they
had adopted community policing or were in the process of doing
so. What do cities that claim they are “doing community
policing” actually do? This paper goes beyond describing
the long list of projects they report, to examine the fundamentals
of community policing. At root, community policing involves
changing decision-making processes and creating new cultures
within police departments. It is an organizational strategy
that leaves setting priorities and the means of achieving
them largely to residents and the police who serve in their
neighborhoods. It has three core elements: citizen involvement,
problem solving, and decentralization, although in practice
these three dimensions turn out to be densely interrelated,
and departments that shortchange one or more of them will
not field a very effective program. The paper reviews those
three core concepts, describes how they have been turned into
concrete community policing programs, and reports some of
what we know about their effectiveness. It summarizes some
of the claims made for community policing, and some of the
realities of achieving them in the real world.
Click here to
see Acrobat version.
(Caps-31): 2001 and 2003 CAPS Evaluation Citywide Survey Documentation
By Wesley G. Skogan
This report documents two citywide sample surveys conducted as part of an evaluation of Chicago’s community policing program, known as “CAPS.” The surveys assessed public perceptions of the quality of police service, their encounters with the police, fear of crime, reports of neighborhood conditions, and awareness and involvement in the city’s policing program. The surveys were conducted by telephone in English and Spanish, using random-digit-dialing samples. Questionnaire responses were used to geocode respondents into police districts and police beats. There were 2,485 completed interviews in 2001, and 3,141 completed interviews in 2004. The surveys were conducted by the Survey Research Laboratory of the University of Illinois-Chicago. This report presents English and Spanish-language versions of the survey questionnaires. A detailed methodological report for each study is presented following the questionnaires.
Click here to see Acrobat version.
For more information on Chicago's
community policing initiative, click on Community Policing.
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