Vol. 10 No. 2 (February 2000) pp. 133-136.

COMMUNITY POLICING, CHICAGO STYLE by Wesley G. Skogan and Susan M. Hartnett. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 272 pp.

Reviewed by William Lyons, Department of Political Science, University of Akron

Understanding the variety of policing reforms and political struggles playing out under the banner of "community policing" remains a challenge and responsibility of the first order for anyone interested in public safety, social justice, or American democracy. It is our responsibility because the methods that we choose to use in policing, as Earl Warren noted with criminal justice in general, can be appropriately called "the measures by which the quality of our civilization may be judged." It remains a challenge because we still know very little about the actual workings of community policing, what officers and their community partners are actually doing, and how novel, effective, or progressive these activities might be. Also, perhaps most importantly, we know far too little about the political struggles that surround this reconstruction of this "mechanism for the distribution of non-negotiably coercive force" (Bittner 1980: 46). Designed to provide direction to information hungry policy makers interested in community policing, COMMUNITY POLICING, CHICAGO STYLE is a detailed, accessible, and critical evaluation of the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS). Based on three years of research (1992-1995), this study offers a much-needed examination of the political as well as policy struggles over the distribution of public safety in four prototype districts in Chicago, each with a population greater than the city of Seattle. Over 7,000 officers were surveyed, focus groups regularly formed to troubleshoot difficulties, 500 community activists interviewed, and two city-wide citizen surveys conducted. The research team attended 146 of 679 beat meetings held over an 18-month period, where they observed 1,079 problems being discussed and 36 types of solutions being crafted. The team also attended nearly all of the 65 District Advisory Committee meetings inthe four prototype districts. The Beat and District Advisory Committee meetings become the foci for the political struggles surrounding community policing, Chicago style.

Chicago's 25 police districts are divided into 279 beats, each with an average of 4,100 households (p. 53). Beat meetings were regular gatherings of the officers and other service providers working in that area and residents to identify, analyze, and address problems in that neighborhood and to assess their joint problem solving efforts. These meetings "were one of the most unique and visible features" (p. 113) of CAPS. Although the authors found "attendance rates were actually highest in African-American beats, and they were marginally higher in poorer areas," when they controlled for crime rates, however, "residents in African-American areas were

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somewhat less likely to get involved" (pp. 117-119). At beat meetings citizens raised the vast majority of the concerns to discuss. Of the 21 most commonly discussed problems, half involved social disorder, defined as drugs, gangs, noise, curfew, rowdy youth. "Complaints about police performance made up another quarter of these issues, including two of the top four problems" (p. 120). About twenty percent of the problems focused on physical decay -- defined as graffiti, litter, abandoned cars, and poorly maintained buildings. "Interestingly, the kinds of core problems around which policing is traditionally organized -represented here by complaints about either burglary or robbery - ranked only seventeenth on the list, and they were brought up in only 12 percent of all meetings" (p. 121). Surprisingly, citizens rarely raised the fear of crime as a concern -- two percent of problems overall, and zero percent in two of the five districts.

"Solutions were proposed for 76 percent of the problems cited at beat meetings" (p. 125). Action was taken on less than five percent of the problems (p. 126). And, joint action was taken in only 8 percent of those cases (p. 126). There is, however, no discussion of any criteria used or bias generated in the filtering out of 24 or 95 percent of citizen concerns. Further, solutions were nearly always proposed by the police, focused on police action, mostly pre-existing professional law enforcement activities, and never addressed the large number of concerns raised about police performance.

District Advisory Committee Meetings provided a second monthly forum for police-citizen interaction, where the district commanders chose the participants "on the basis of their standing in the community" (p. 148). These selected community leaders met to identify problems and "helped the commanders identify community resources that could be mobilized for district problem solving … wrote grant proposals … planned fund-raising efforts and applied for drug forfeiture assets" (pp. 148-149). One district meeting, for instance, focused on surveying properties to support the commander's abandoned buildings initiative, applied for -- but did not receive -- a federal Enterprise Zone designation, conducted self-help workshops, and "provided an opportunity for showcasing positive efforts…most of which were sponsored by areas churches" (p. 149). A second district meeting, which the police commander "rarely attended" was characterized by "recurring tension between its Hispanic and African-American members" (p. 151). Another district was also paralyzed by a combination of no leadership and racial bias -- that district committee was entirely white, despite speaking for "one of the city's most ethnically diverse districts" (p. 156). A fourth district meeting was described as "titular," because the "real CAPS work was carried out by a separate group…and its meetings were not open to the public, or to us [the research team]" (p. 153). The fifth district meeting was composed of residents with strong political connections, an established record of working together and cooperating with the police and a district commander who lived in the district. That district advisory committee had a longer list of more specific crime-related concerns, managed to get the local phone company to donate pagers to increase officer response time to calls from area businesses, and organized rallies to increase participation in beat meetings (p. 155).

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The authors of COMMUNITY POLICING, CHICAGO STYLE also document how the program actually worked, explains the difficult political challenges central to securing officer and citizen "buy-in," and analyzes the various impacts of the program on the prototype districts. Citizens in the prototype districts felt that the quality of police service improved. They reported that the improvements were specifically linked to community policing activities and not to pre-existing forms of professional law enforcement. Major and minor crimes were down slightly in each prototype district. And there was a decrease in the specific problems identified as most serious by residents in victimization surveys (pp. 218-235). These perceptions of improvement were shared across racial and class categories (pp. 234-235). And, unlike experiments with community policing elsewhere, this Chicago style program managed to avoid the debilitating effects of middle-class bias (p. 238), racial polarization (p. 234), and officer resistance (p. 109). "We found that Chicago's program enjoyed fairly inclusive recognition, and fairly widespread benefits. The visibility of community-oriented policing activity rose among all racial groups, and irrespective of income, education, or home ownership. Increased visibility was linked to higher levels of satisfaction… reduced fear…and [reduced] perceptions of police misconduct" (p. 235).

The authors also point to several critical issues that remain to be addressed. CAPS did not address performance evaluation. Citizen participation in the problem solving process was limited to the problem identification stage. Also, investing in redressing the unequal capacities of different communities to mobilize the resources needed to direct police-community partnerships was not a priority for the department or the mayor. As the authors put it, their study "highlighted some very real difficulties in sustaining citizen involvement in community policing. Organizations serving white and home-owning constituencies got involved quickly, because it fit their volunteer-based, block-oriented, neighborhood orientation. Organizations serving the poor and African-Americans were heavily skewed toward providing them with individualized services, and they were staffed by paid employees rather than volunteers. Community policing did not help them very much" (p. 239).

Perhaps most interesting, this book offers valuable insight into the paradoxes central to community policing: the fantastic popularity, modest crime reductions, and -- even in a program that sought to be inclusive -- little impact in those communities most victimized by crime. These become less perplexing when community policing is understood to be about public safety, political power, and governance, as the authors outline in the first two chapters of the book. "The mayor and his advisers thought he had to do something about crime that would appease the media and trump his potential opponents before his next campaign. His biggest political fear was that the opposition would form a coalition of the city's African-American and Hispanic constituencies, for together they would be hard to beat. Community policing turned out to speak to all of his concerns" (p. 20). These political factors may, in part, account for the fact that crime was worst in Chicago's public housing project (p. 22), but there was no effort to ensure that even one of the prototype districts would include public housing (p. 45).

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The location of crime in areas of concentrated disadvantage did not appear on the political radar screen. "The strongest card in the mayor's hand was the fact that blacks and Hispanics were far from being united politically. In fact, they were in fierce competition over housing, schools, and jobs. However, as a group, they had at least two important concerns in common: crime and police. The possibility that African-Americans and Hispanics might form what was known locally as a Rainbow Coalition - perhaps in response to crime and police issues - had important political ramifications, for it threatened to destabilize the city's dominant electoral coalition and loosen the mayor's grip on power" (pp. 30-31). It seems fair to say, then, that community policing was expected to serve the mayor's electoral needs by encouraging African-Americans and Hispanics to fight over the distribution of public safety just as they already were struggling over schools, jobs, and housing. In this sense, then, community policing is also about encouraging the fragmentation of potentially powerful political coalitions who might better speak for the concerns of our most victimized communities. To the degree that this political strategy succeeds it does so by weakening communities. Also, it reveals one way that the methods we choose to use in policing can redistribute public safety and community as they distribute non-negotiable coercive force.



REFERENCE:

Bittner, Egon. 1980. THE FUNCTIONS OF THE POLICE IN MODERN SOCIETY: A REVIEW OF BACKGROUND FACTORS, CURRENT PRACTICES, AND POSSIBLE ROLE MODELS, Cambridge, MA: Oelgeschleager, Gunn & Hain, Publishers, Inc.


Copyright 2000 by the author.