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Edits to Wikipedia page for CAPS (Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy)

1) Needs major citation help, much of the article is linked to the same bulky government document. It would really be in their best interest to make the CAPS seem as successful as possible, so I would need to check other sources before continuing.

2) Tone of the article strays away from mentioning police violence against blacks in an effort to remain unbiased, but in the scope of this class, I believe this should be somewhat changed.

3) Entire "Public Perceptions and Criticisms" section must be updated, and citations must be improved.

4) Look into the revitalization moving forward.

I) Program begins in 1993 in 5 Chicago police districts, takes only two years to spread to the rest of the city. Why?

Englewood:

-Population around 98% Black in 2010

Marquette:

-Population 49% Black, 45% Hispanic in 2010

Austin:

-Population 85% Black in 2010

Morgan Park:

-65% Black Population in 2014

Rodgers Park:

-Highest levels of racial diversity in Chicago

II) Issues with some of the articles citations

-Second citation regarding the "goal" of the CAP could have a better source but it is difficult to remain unbiased when the majority population of the initial five districts to implement the CAP strategy was Black. Would it be possible to define this issue as more of a rift between the Black community and the police, rather than the Chicago community as a whole? Otherwise, why would such a strategy focus on areas so heavily populated with Blacks.

-In the "Implementation" section, the article mentions new "tools" that were used by the CAP. The citation again links to a very large, government issued document detailing the plans to curb crime in the Chicago neighborhoods. These tasks forces that were created could have paved way for a more militarized version of the police force. Placing more power and resources in the hands of the police could have actually contributed to more deaths, as we have discussed in class. I need to find a better source to cite this new wave of policing technology, or relate its existence to an increase in Black deaths.

FINAL DRAFT OF WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE BELOW

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Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) is a community driven policing strategy designed for the Chicago Police Department that aims to bridge the gap between the police force and the citizens of Chicago. CAPS started in 1993 as a pilot program in five of the 25 police districts in Chicago - Englewood, Marquette, Austin, Morgan Park and Rogers Park - after a realization that the community and police were becoming increasingly isolated from one another throughout Chicago since the early 1960s. The original five districts, characterized by high crime rates  and cases of extreme poverty, provided the Chicago Police Department with an initial benchmark from which to determine the program's strengths and weaknesses. By 1995, the Chicago Police Department implemented CAPS across all Chicago neighborhoods with the goal of blending traditional policing strategies with alternative strategies aimed at encouraging community members and police to work together in order to prevent and control crime.

The program's motto, “Together We Can,” emphasized the need for increased lines of communication between the community and the police, so that together they could come up with solutions for chronic neighborhood problems.

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.

Problem Solving
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
Turf Orientation is a strategy used to familiarize officers with certain communities within the city. Chicago was split into 279 beats, or districts, with roughly 9-10 officers assigned to each beat. The Turf Orientation implementation proved difficult, as it required officers to stay in a certain area to build trust within a community over an extended period of time, leaving fewer officers available to respond to 911 calls. This forced the city to hire more officers, ensuring that the force was not short-staffed, and that trust between the officers and communities was not completely severed.

Community Involvement
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
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
New tools for police introduced a handful of new strategies for curbing crime in Chicago. New crime-mapping software was developed to encourage the routine distribution of crime-related data to both the public and those who regularly attended beat meetings. Specific task forces were created to enforce anti-gang and anti-drughouse ordinances throughout the city. The Chicago Police Department collaborated with building, health, and fire inspectors to ensure that any identified drug houses were kept under control and within the city building codes. Additionally, local prosecutors and county attorneys placed a greater emphasis on cooperation with the CAPS in order to prevent reoccurring offenses.

Operation
Chicago is divided into 25 police districts and further divided into 279 police beats. Beats are small geographic areas to which police officers are assigned. Rather than changing beat officers daily, CAPS assigns the same officers to a particular beat for at least one year in order to encourage partnerships and problem solving at the beat level, and to allow officers to develop relationships within the neighborhoods in which they work. The Office of Emergency Management and Communication (OEMC) dispatchers use a call priority matrix, often assigning the "nearest police unit" to respond to calls. This strategy, coupled with attrition shorts from under-staffing the police department, may result in officers spending most of their day off the beat.

The Chicago Police Department solved this dilemma by creating teams of rapid response officers in each of Chicago's 25 Police Districts.These rapid response officers still use the traditional methods for emergencies and rapid response, and are able to take most of the emergency calls in their sectors, which are groupings of 3 to 5 beats. Aside from responding to emergency calls, the rapid response officers were put in place to not only provide backup to beat officers who may be assisting the community elsewhere, but to help each beat officer maintain a solid presence in his or her respective beats. Each month, community beat meetings are held in all of Chicago's 279 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 issues, such as 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 District Commander 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. Many DAC members argued that the CAPS had taken the shape of a more bureaucratic organization, instead of an overall guide for the policies of the Police Department. Community members and researchers have isolated a handful of problems with DACs that have 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.

Results and Assessments
From 1991-2002, overall violent crime in Chicago dropped 49%. City officials reported that, as of 2002, both violent crime and property crime dropped in each of the 25 police districts. However, most reports find it difficult to conclude that CAPS is the leading variable responsible for the overall drop in crime. In certain beats, citizens actually experienced increases in crime rates, proving that that strategy was not entirely successful, according to a Northwestern University study. Policing strategies often get no rigorous evaluation or assessment, leading to lack of data and evidence regarding the efficacy of the program.

Several community groups have been vocal supporters of CAPS. In the Prairie district (Beat 2111), the beat facilitator explained that he was able to communicate with police mugging and theft hotspots in order to help reduce those crimes. He says that as a result of his involvement in CAPS and partnership with the CPD, those types of crimes have decreased significantly. Additionally, in the Gresham district, Pastors United for Change said that the partnership with their district's beat officers resulted in the shutting down of a motel that was a known drug spot and the closure of a liquor store that sold alcohol to minors.

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.

Revitalized in 2013
In January 2013, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and former Police chief Garry McCarthy pledged to revitalize the CAPS program. The central office was dismantled and resources were 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. These tools allowed residents to text anonymous crime tips to police, including pictures and descriptions of crime scenes. Though these efforts have been responses to public criticisms, Jesse Jackson spoke out against the measures, arguing that these technological improvements do not resolve the reasons that people commit crimes in the first place.

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

Public Perceptions and Criticisms
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 the study also found that residents in CAPS neighborhoods were only "marginally" more satisfied with police keeping order when compared to neighborhoods without CAPS.

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 all 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, which could possibly be credited to the Chicago Police Department's inability to keep enough beat officers staffed in their respective beats. 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. One long time Chicago resident in particular, who regularly attended beat meetings for over three years, stated that the police was doing a very poor job of carrying out the CAPS, and that many times she found police response and action to be almost non-existant. After providing the police with numerous tips and detailed information regarding drug houses, she claims that nothing was ever done to remedy these issues within her community.

Public perception of the Chicago Police Department as a whole 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. 4 out of the 5 Chicago Police districts throughout which the program was inititally tested in 1993 are characterized by a majority African-American population and high crime rates, backing the claim that little was done within these communities to curb illegal activities. 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. This gap between the perceptions of effectiveness among 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, illustrating that the CAPS did not effectively bridge the gap between the police and the community as a whole. Possible explanations for this gap include the Chicago Police department's inability to effectively connect with the community members in each individual beat, and the overall ineffectiveness of the CAPS in areas where community members are less involved with collective action.

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 who are expanding the most in Chicago, meaning that members of those communities must take leadership within their communities to ensure representativeness. If the gap between these immigrants and the police is not closed, the Chicago Police department may experience similar issues to those found within the majority African American beats, such as a lack in community involvement, and a lack of police response. Cultural and language barriers also 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.

External links/Further Reading

 * Portal for CAPS
 * Chicago Police Department: How CAPS Works
 * Get Involved with CAPS