Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy

Implementation

The CAPS Implementation Office was created and staffed by civilian community outreach workers who organized court advocacy programs and coordinated city services in support of CAPS related programs. The implementation includes five strategies: problem solving, turf orientation, community involvement, linkage to city services, and new tools for police. Other features of the implementation strategy include support from other government agencies, enhanced training, computerized crime analysis, updated marketing and communications techniques, stricter and more quantitative evaluation metrics, and long-term strategic planning.

The problem solving initiative requires officers to develop proactive policing strategies beyond responding to calls, such as identifying concentration of crime in certain areas and entering those communities to diffuse and prevent future crime. Between 1995 and 1997, most of the police force in Chicago received training to aid their ability to proactively police.

Turf orientation is a strategy to familiarize officers with certain communities within the city. Chicago was split into 279 beats, with roughly a dozen officers per beat. This strategy had a rough implementation, as it required officers to stay in a certain area to build trust within a community over an extended period of time, which proved difficult, as that left fewer officers to respond to 911 calls. This forced the city to hire more officers to ensure the force was not short-staffed, nor was trust between officers and communities completely severed.

Community involvement allowed the police force to be more responsive to the needs and requests of the public, which not only aims to help alleviate crime but also to solidify relationships between communities and officers. Individuals became involved by attending a local beat meetings. Chicago Police Department lists when and where all beat meetings take place on their website. Meetings generally take place monthly at a regular time and are generally held in a community area, such as a church, park or school. A CAPS facilitator runs the meetings, running the meeting according to an agenda and calling on community members to ask questions. The police are active members and play a major role in all discussions.

Another major component of meetings is the special role played by a small group of dedicated beat meeting activists. These activists come to meetings frequently in their beats, driving up attendance and CAPS related activism. CAPS related activism includes marches, rallies, prayer vigils, and smoke-outs (group barbecue at gang or drug-infested sites). Community members who attend the meeting have the chance to ask questions and voice concerns about crime-related problems in their neighborhood, hear reports by the police on crime activity in their beat, and meet neighbors who are also concerned about the safety of their community. Attendance is generally higher where it is needed. The beat meetings where attendance is the highest, are areas with bad housing, high levels of crime, and poor schools. Awareness of CAPS has grown in all racial groups, but several studies have found that awareness is highest among African American residents of Chicago.

In 2000 the United States Department of Justice found that beat meeting attendance rose steadily with levels of civic engagement, rising to more than 40% among residents involved in at least three kinds of local organizations. Church involvement showed a high correlation with CAPS involvement as well; one explanation for this was that many CAPS meetings are held in churches, especially in African American communities where both CAPS and church involvement are particularly strong.

Linkage to city services allowed the police force to communicate and coordinate with other city agencies to streamline responsiveness. For instance, an interagency database was created to provide access to all city employees regarding crime areas, high-profile criminals and even police activity. Additionally, the police coordinated with other city agencies regarding graffiti removal and abandoned car removal, as residents expressed those two issues as major frustrations within their communities.

New tools for police introduced a handful of new strategies. New crime-mapping software was developed, specific task forces were created to address particular problems, and a greater emphasis was placed on cooperation with other city officials.

Operation

Chicago is divided into 25 police districts and further divided into 281 police beats. Beats are small geographic areas to which police officers are assigned. Rather than changing beat officers daily, with CAPS the same officers are allegedly assigned to a beat for at least a year. This encouraged partnerships and problem solving at the beat level. Office of Emergency Management and Communication (OEMC) dispatchers use a call priority matrix, often assigning the "nearest police unit". This coupled with attrition shorts from under-staffing the police department results in officers usually spending most of their day of the beat.

However, not all officers are beat officers, and some police units still used forms of the traditional method for emergency and rapid response. Each month, community beat meetings are held in all of Chicago's 281 beats, without the participation of any off-duty (not working) police personnel. Individual residents meet with their beat officers and other police personnel to discuss neighborhood problems and hopefully develop strategies to address them. Beyond the community, CAPS heavily relies on city agencies and services to prevent crime. The City of Chicago has set up cooperative efforts with the Mayor’s Liquor License Commission, the Department of Streets and Sanitation, the Department of Buildings and other agencies to ensure the police have support from the city to handle smaller problems like abandoned buildings and graffiti before they lead to more serious crimes. CAPS has no underlying criminology theory as its basis and no rigorous academic studies have shown CAPS as an entirely effective or efficient anti-crime tool.

District Advisory Committees

In addition to the monthly beat meetings, there are also District Advisory Committees (DAC), which meet regularly with the commander of the district to discuss district affairs. The members of the DAC are generally community leaders, business owners or local community activists. The goal of the DAC is to discuss district priorities and develop district-wide strategies with community resources. A 2004 Northwestern University report, Caps at Ten, claimed that many members were frustrated about their ill-defined mandates, leadership problems and inaction. Instead of an overall guide for the whole Police Department Caps had evolved into a bureaucratic program. Community members and researchers have isolated a handful of problems with DACs that has caused them to become ineffective and untrustworthy: they lack a clear mission, have weak subcommittees, are not independent from the police force, and are composed of people generally out of touch with the community and not demographically representative of the community they represent.

Public Perceptions and Criticisms

An assessment conducted ten years after implementation of CAPS found that between 1993 and 2000, public perceptions of police effectiveness increased steadily until eventually leveling off in 2000. This demonstrates that the public's confidence in police increased initially as a result of the program. The study notes that this confidence is not specific to particular demographic groups, and is instead a general increase in confidence across racial and ethnic groups. The report also finds that after initially responding to public concerns of crime in their neighborhoods, after 1998, residents became less satsfied with the responsiveness and effectiveness of CAPS. Though the public trusts the intent and demeanor of police, with 90% of respondents saying they found the police concerned about their problems, only 57% of those same respondents found the police to be responsive to their concerns.

Public perception of the police is different depending on the race of the respondent and independently effects the efficacy of policing strategy, according to numerous studies. Among African-American and Latino respondents, less than a majority of respondents articulated a positive view of CAPS as a whole. Additionally, the gap between the perceptions of effectiveness between whites and minority groups was found to be the same ten years after CAPS implementation as it was before the strategy was implemented in 1993.

Results and Assessments

One comprehensive study found that residents in CAPS neighborhoods were 61% more likely to be satisfied with efforts of the police to reduce and prevent crime when compared to neighborhoods without CAPS but controlling for all other variables, but also found that residents in CAPS neighborhoods were only "marginally" more satisfied with police keeping order when compared to neighborhoods without CAPS but controlling for all other variables. Another report conducted by Northwestern University found that, after ten years of CAPS' implementation, both white and African-American residents felt a decreased fear of crime in their area.

Though the Chicago Police Department's budget increased since Rahm Emanuel took office as Mayor, the portion of the budget allotted for CAPS has decreased to roughly a third of its original funding level.Due to budget cuts and other resource shortages, fewer beat meetings have been held and fewer beat officers have been placed in various communities.

From 1991-2002, overall violent crime in Chicago dropped 49%. However, most reports find it difficult to conclude that CAPS is the leading variable responsible for the overall drop in crime.

As noted by criminology scholars, policing strategies often get no rigorous evaluation or assessment, leading to lack of data and evidence regarding the efficacy of the program.

Revitalized in 2013

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police chief Garry McCarthy pledged to revitalize the CAPS program. The central office will be dismantled and resources will be shifted to each of the 25 Police districts. "Under the new initiative, each police district will be assigned a CAPS sergeant and two police officers, as well as a community organizer and a youth services provider. Four citywide coordinators will oversee community policing programs targeted at victim assistance, seniors, youth, and victims of domestic violence."

In July 2013, Chief McCarthy unveiled a prototype for three districts that would facilitate the use of the Twitter micro-blogging service to share information, text-messaging directly to the responding officers, and the use of camera equipped smartphones to alert and assist at the moment of response. A more user-friendly website, ChicagoPolice.org, was also unveiled.

Police also begun working toward allowing community members to take part in beat meetings from their homes, without having to transport themselves to the physical meeting location. Additionally, the Chicago Police Force reinstated the ridealong program and also created another name for CAPS - the Community Relations Strategy.

Future Operations

Scholars generally agree that CAPS faces three main obstacles for future operations and implementation. The first and most intuitive is financing and resource allotment. Given that funding is limited, the police force has been forced to try to accomplish more crime prevention with less funding. If the trend of resource allocation continues to decrease, it complicates the prospects for effective operations in the future. Second, immigration patterns have the ability to muddle operations and implementation. The Latino/a and Asian populations are the two demographic groups expanding in Chicago, meaning that members of those communities must take leadership within their communities to ensure representativeness. Cultural and language barriers pose potential problems for smooth operations, and must be considered before moving forward. Lastly, sustaining efforts for implementation has been a large factor contributing to ineffectiveness in the past and will continue to hinder success if not addressed.