Chicago Community Policing Study

Civic groups in Chicago joined in to commission a study, Operationalizing Community Policing Within the Chicago Police Department: A Summary of Current and Promising National Practices, to help the Chicago Police Department realize its goal to become an agency committed to "community oriented policing."

21CP’s study – which involved interviews with personnel and community stakeholders with direct knowledge of community policing practices in 17 jurisdictions nationally as well as a review of relevant literature –identified a number of elements that CPD’s community policing approach should reflect and incorporate going forward, including:  

• Community policing must be an express, defined overall philosophy. In many, but not all, of the departments studied, community policing is specifically identified as an overall philosophy of policing and an overarching way that the department does its work – and not a specialized program with its own label, name, or personnel
• Community engagement must be understood as part of, but not the same as, overall community policing. Because community policing involves dynamic partnership with community to co-produce public safety, it necessarily requires police personnel to foster relationships with community stakeholders. However, operationalizing “community policing” likely benefits from police departments systematically describing how that community engagement factors into a wider “community policing” philosophy or approach.
• Community policing likely benefits from formally codifying and tracking community problems, assets, and events – and from other types of centralized, department-wide coordination or administration. Even as community policing can and must happen at the level of individual officers, problem-solving efforts, community assets, and opportunities for community engagement must be inventoried, codified, and tracked so that progress can be made and measured. That is, it appears that departments benefit from maintaining some structures and processes to ensure that individual personnel are appropriately “plugged into” the department or a geographic area’s community policing concerns.
• Police agencies must articulate specific, granular performance expectations for personnel across all ranks (i.e., including supervisors) and roles on community policing responsibilities and provide training on such expectations. This may include: (1) Specific guidance on how to use unstructured community engagement time (2) Specific guidance on how to incorporate community policing principles into call response and enforcement activity (3) Specific guidance or instructions on promoting visibility (4) Designating specific expectations about the amount of time that officers should spend on community and problem-oriented policing activities; and (5) Providing personnel with responsibility for a defined geographic area
• Community policing programs benefit from mechanisms for gathering, analyzing, and using performance data and metrics. For a police agency to gauge whether its personnel are in fact conducting the types of activities that community policing requires, it will necessarily benefit from collecting and analyzing information from the field about officer performance. Although some departments have established mechanisms for gauging performance and outcomes, several departments with whom 21CP engaged said that data and metrics regarding community policing is an area that they are actively trying to address – recognizing that the absence of concrete information makes it more difficult for the department to gauge its level of success and share positive outcomes with community and external stakeholders.
• Many departments benefit from having some centralized, department-wide coordination or administration of community policing. Although departments must ensure that the existence of some individuals to oversee community policing is not seen by others as making community policing someone else’s role or responsibility, they can benefit from personnel ensuring that the department, as a whole, is aligning its activities with the community policing objective.

Also see the blog entry:

-- "The opportunity to rearticulate public safety delivery keeps being presented: Rochester New York,"