Summary
Clients: Chicago Office of the Mayor, Chicago Police Department, Chicago CRED, and Metropolitan Family Services
Project: The third phase of a multi-year effort to strengthen how the Chicago Police Department and community street outreach workers coordinate to prevent violence, assessing what is working across the city, and refining the shared “professional understanding” that guides their roles, so the work can last through leadership turnover and continued growth.
Outcome: Refinement of Chicago’s citywide “professional understanding”, the shared framework that defines how police and street outreach workers interact at the scene of violence, now in place across all 19 police districts with a street outreach presence and 22 city-funded outreach organizations. Grounded in more than 40 interviews with frontline implementers and a review of 15-plus documents, this project delivers four recommendations plus the tools to sustain the work: updated guidance, standard operating procedures, communications materials, and a district-by-district information dashboard.
Opportunity
Chicago cut violence sharply in recent years (homicides fell from 805 in 2021 to 419 in 2025, including a 34% drop in shootings between 2024 and 2025), and frontline workers credit part of that progress to better understanding between police and community street outreach teams.
That understanding was not always the norm. Historically, police and street outreach worked in silos, even though both aimed to reduce violence. Since 2023, a shared “professional understanding” (a framework defining each side’s roles, boundaries, and how they communicate at the scene of a shooting) was rolled out across the city, reaching all 19 police districts with an outreach presence and 22 city-funded outreach organizations by the end of 2025. It has since become a signature part of Chicago’s community violence intervention (CVI) ecosystem: in a Chicago Tribune op-ed, former LAPD Chief Charlie Beck and Melvyn Hayward Jr. called it the strongest example of the city’s approach and a model the rest of the country should follow. With that scale came a new challenge: implementation varied from district to district, and the initiative needed to be assessed and reinforced to last through leadership turnover and continued growth.
Civic Consulting Alliance facilitated two earlier phases of the professional understanding, which launched in 2023 and scaled citywide through 2025, and was asked to return for a phase three to document and refine the understanding.
Action
In this third phase, CCA assessed how the professional understanding was working across the city and built the tools to sustain it.
“CCA has worked hand in hand with us on the professional understanding since the beginning, as a neutral partner both sides could trust. Today police and street outreach understand how their roles fit together, and that has helped drive Chicago’s decrease in violence.”
Discover: CCA interviewed more than 40 implementers (police leaders, officers, and street outreach workers) and reviewed 15-plus documents to assess what was working, where implementation varied, and where it could improve.
Design: Our team produced four recommendations to strengthen the professional understanding as a durable citywide framework: invest in leadership across the Mayor’s Office, CPD, and outreach organizations to guide the work through staff turnover; expand onboarding and training as the initiative scales; embed the work within Chicago’s broader violence-intervention infrastructure; and build stronger internal and external communications to clarify roles and promote consistent interactions in the field.
Deliver: CCA delivered a set of ready-to-use tools: a research-and-findings report, an updated professional understanding document to anchor onboarding, standard operating procedures for the initiative’s leads, communications guidance (including a case study and materials for a national violence-intervention conference), and a district-by-district information dashboard to support coordination, refreshed each year.
Result
Police and outreach workers now report markedly stronger relationships, trust, and mutual respect, and increasingly see each other as complementary partners in preventing and reducing violence. The Professional Understanding increased the speed of shooting incident notifications to CVI providers, enabling them to respond quickly, prevent retaliatory violence, and engage impacted people in supportive services. The engagement gave the City a clear-eyed assessment of the initiative’s strengths and gaps, along with practical tools to run it consistently in every participating district.
Together, the updated framework, standard operating procedures, training materials, and annual district dashboard give the Mayor’s Office, CPD, and outreach organizations a shared system that can survive leadership turnover and keep scaling, turning hard-won working relationships into durable civic infrastructure. As coordination becomes routine, it strengthens the very communication frontline workers credit for Chicago’s continued declines in shootings and homicides.
