Chicago Police Department, Office of Community Policing

Investigations of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) by the Department of Justice and the Police Accountability Task Force highlighted the broken relationship between the Department and the Chicago communities it serves.

In the fall of 2016, the CPD Superintendent appointed a Community Policing Advisory Panel (CPAP) with community members, CPD staff, and subject matter experts to provide recommendations for revamping CPD’s community policing efforts and improve police-community relations. Simultaneously, CPD established an Office of Community Policing (OCP) to ensure that the Department maintains focus on community policing and that CPAP’s recommendations are implemented thoughtfully and efficiently.

Since 2016, Civic Consulting Alliance has worked with CPD on various projects pertaining to the Department’s strategic planning and reforms. Building on this work, in the fall of 2018, Civic Consulting Alliance began to work with OCP to help the agency prepare for the January 2019 Consent Decree, which placed a strong emphasis on community-policing and mandated changes at the OCP to reflect this focus.

To begin, Civic Consulting Alliance and our pro bono partners, Bain & Company and Deloitte, designed an operating model and an evaluation process to drive the OCP’s work. Then, in the first half of 2019, we worked to operationalize these changes by:

• Implementing an updated OCP governance structure and management system; and

• Conducting community conversations with more than 2,000 community members to create District and Bureau Strategic Plans that embed community policing approaches into crime reduction strategies.

“My colleagues and I are grateful to Civic Consulting Alliance for helping us make strategic changes to our systems and processes to improve how our Department approaches community policing.”

— Dwayne Betts, Former Deputy Chief, Office of Community Policing, Chicago Police Department

By providing the capacity to implement these recommendations, Civic Consulting Alliance helped transform OCP operations to more effectively track, measure, and improve CPD’s community policing. Ultimately, this work aims to make communities and police safer by improving the quality of policing and the relationship between CPD and the communities it serves.

OUTPUTS

• Office of Community Policing equipped with: vision and mission; inventory of initiatives; governance structure; operations management framework; process for Community Policing Strategic Plans; and measurement approach to assess success

• Community Policing Strategic Plans for all 22 CPD districts

OUTCOMES

• All reporting districts have shown positive progress against the metrics tracked in the Community Policing Strategic Plans

• Doubled the long-term capacity of the Office of Community Policing