Program in Law and Justice Studies

Introduction

Can community-based solutions decrease violent crime? How can information technology best be integrated into the criminal justice system? How do lawyers form networks to push their ideological agendas? Bringing together faculty from the law school and social sciences, IPR’s Law and Justice Studies Program, led by political science professor Wesley G. Skogan, is addressing the following topics:

Click here for more information on Community Policing (CAPS)

Overview of Activities

Project I-CLEAR
While advances in information technology (IT) have revolutionized how the world works and communicates, IT is still in the take-off stage in the criminal justice world, where law-enforcement officials are just beginning to implement systems for data-driven policing and understand their potential.

With a grant from the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority, Skogan and his team conducted a statewide evaluation of ongoing IT development at the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and I-CLEAR (Illinois Citizen Law Enforcement Analysis and Reporting)—an innovative criminal justice data integration project launched jointly by the CPD and the Illinois State Police.

The aim of I-CLEAR is to create a uniform incident-reporting system and facilitate data sharing among all law enforcement agencies throughout Illinois. I-CLEAR is the evolution of an ambitious data-sharing project begun by the CPD in partnership with Oracle Corporation. More than five years ago, the CPD created a “data warehouse,” a queriable repository of over 5 million arrest records drawing from multiple data sources that is updated daily. The Chicago

Susan Hartnett

Police Department first offered data warehouse access to jurisdictions in Chicago’s collar counties and eventually throughout the state. A survey on that effort is being conducted by IPR research associate Susan Hartnett, the lead researcher. She is tracing the data warehouse’s widespread and rapid adoption from 2002 to 2007.

To create the statewide I-CLEAR system, the Illinois State Police hoped to “piggy-back” off of Chicago’s local applications, but the agency soon realized the impracticality of that plan. Since the beginning of the I-CLEAR evaluation in May 2005, Skogan and his research team have witnessed some bureaucratic challenges to implementing the system statewide, particularly an erosion of the partnership between the Chicago and state police.

Their findings suggest that high personnel turnover at the CPD hindered IT progress and innovation internally as responsibility for the program shifted continuously. Better succession planning might have prevented the CPD from losing precious time and resources and would likely have expedited the I-CLEAR decision-making process. In addition, the report recommended that the state and the CPD establish an impartial governance body to mediate between the agencies and push the
I-CLEAR project forward.

Project CeaseFire
Chicago perpetually ranks as one of the nation’s leading cities for homicide. Project CeaseFire, an initiative of the Chicago Project for Violence Prevention (CPVP), aims to address this issue by reducing all forms of violence in targeted areas in Chicago and the state. The program has five core components: client outreach, community mobilization, law enforcement collaboration, clergy intervention, and public education. How effective can a broad-based community partnership like the CPVP be in reducing violent crime and deadly hand-gun use? The National Institute of Justice awarded Skogan and his team a grant to study this question.

The first phase of the project involved fieldwork, personal interviews, and surveys to outline the entire program and to evaluate 20 northern Illinois CeaseFire projects and their relationship to headquarters. In the second phase, researchers are examining the impact the program is having on violence through an area-level study of trends in violent crime.

Using statistical network analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, they are tracing the program’s effects on local gang dynamics. In addition to studies of local clergy, clients, and CeaseFire staff, Skogan and his colleagues are collecting data to map gang activity and analyze case studies of school violence. A Violence Interrupter Study and a Community Partner Study will also contribute to the final report, to be released in 2008. The report will also address the cost effectiveness of such violence prevention programs.

Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy Program (CAPS)
It has been more than a decade since the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy program (CAPS), the nation’s largest experiment in community policing, was started. Skogan and his research team have been evaluating the program since 1993.

CAPS involves the creation of turf-oriented teams of police officers with long-term beat assignments, extensive community involvement and empowerment, and integration with improved city services. The program encourages police and residents to engage in neighborhood problem solving.

Skogan’s latest book, Police and Community in Chicago: A Tale of Three Cities (Oxford University Press), traces the varying impact that CAPS had on Chicago’s neighborhoods. Based on the evaluation’s yearly tracking polls, many of the city’s communities grew significantly safer, more orderly, and cleaner during the 1990s and early 2000s. Yet after 10 years, benefits of the program seemed to fall unevenly between African Americans, whites, and Latinos, Skogan finds. The Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences named it its Outstanding Book of the Year for 2006.

In the book, Skogan pointed out that overall crime rates have dropped, particularly in African American communities, and satisfaction with the quality of police service is up across all demographic groups. Eighty percent of all Chicagoans—and almost 90 percent of African Americans—are familiar with the program, and in 2002, more than 67,000 people attended the monthly public meetings held by every police beat.

Latino neighborhoods, however, show a significant dark cloud in this picture. In predominately Spanish-speaking areas, crime levels, social disorder, and physical decay were substantially higher in 2003 than 1994. Skogan cited the continuous influx of new immigrants to Latino neighborhoods as one source of instability, and he concluded that the city’s police must find new ways to cope with the unique needs of this population. As for now, Skogan noted, “The success of CAPS depends on who you are and where you live.”

Chicago’s Decline in Crime
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation recently asked Skogan to investigate the reasons behind Chicago’s continued crime decline, in contrast to some other U.S. cities where the trend has reversed to increasing crime rates once again. Though a combination of other factors have produced and prolonged the decline in Chicago crime for nearly two decades, Skogan points to CAPS as the main cause of today’s positive environment. His research on the causes—and myths—of Chicago’s great crime drop were published in the 2006 report “Reflections on Declining Crime in Chicago.”

Network Formation of Conservative Lawyers
Lawyers for conservative and libertarian causes are active in organizing and mobilizing interest groups within the conservative coalition, and networks of relationships among those lawyers help to maintain and shape the coalition.

Using data gathered in interviews with 72 such lawyers, law professor John P. Heinz, Owen L. Coon Professor of Law, with Anthony Paik of the University of Iowa and Ann Southworth of Case Western Reserve University analyze the characteristics of the conservative lawyers and the structure of their networks.

Their findings suggest that the networks are divided into segments or blocks that are identified with particular constituencies, but that a distinct set of actors with an extensive range of relationships serves to bridge the constituencies. Measures of centrality and brokerage confirm the structural importance of these actors in the network, and a search of references in news media confirms their prominence or prestige. This “core set” of actors occupies the “structural hole” in the network that separates the business constituency from religious conservatives. Libertarians, who are located near the core of the network, also occupy an intermediate position. Causal analysis of the formation of ties within the network suggests that the Federalist Society has played an important role in bringing the lawyers together.