The frequency of beat community meetings—a staple of Chicago’s community policing program since it was launched in 1993 to improve communication between police and residents—will be cut in many areas of the city from every month to every other month starting the first of the year, Ron Holt, the director of the CAPS program, told the Chicago News Cooperative Tuesday.
Holt said most of the city’s police districts simply don’t have enough officers available to hold monthly meetings in each of their beats. The scheduling will vary by district depending on available staffing, he said. Holt said he was in a meeting and would provide more information later but did not respond to follow-up calls.
City budget constraints have limited police hiring in recent years, leading to a major reduction in the number of officers and a fierce political debate about how they should be deployed. To help cope with the drop, Holt and Mayor Richard M. Daley announced in September that most of the roughly 300 officers assigned to the CAPS program would be redeployed to street duty. They promised that the CAPS program would remain intact and the officers would be replaced by civilians.
The 2011 city budget, passed earlier this month by the City Council, calls for a slight increase in funding to the CAPS office, from $4.7 million to $4.8 million, though most officers assigned to community policing work are paid out of other portions of the budget.
“It’s not the number of volunteers, organizers, and supervisors that you may have within the CAPS office—it’s the quality and the passion that individuals bring to the job,” Holt said in an interview a few weeks ago. “You have to have a passion for this type of work because you’re involving yourself deeper into the lives and habits of the community. You’re going beyond what it means to be a traditional police officer.”
Many residents who participate in the program have been concerned that the shift of officers out of the CAPS office signifies that the police department is not committed to community policing, which was conceived as a reigning philosophy for the entire police department rather than an office within it. The idea was that beat cops would team with neighborhood residents to both fight and prevent crime.
“Chicago is faced with a widening gap between citizen demands and government resources,” police officials wrote in “Together We Can,” a 1993 document outlining their community policing strategy. “The resulting strains on the budgets of not only the Police Department, but also schools, parks, streets and sanitation, and other city services, only exacerbate the already dangerous conditions that are contributing to high levels of crime, disorder, and fear in so many of our neighborhoods.
“This new strategy must go beyond the limitations of traditional policing. It must expand the Police Department’s capacity to control and prevent crime. It must emphasize the results of our work, instead of just the activities we perform. And it must mobilize the resources of City government and the community in a united effort to make a real difference in the lives of all Chicagoans.”
The community beat meetings, which are open to the public, have long been at the center of the CAPS program. Each month, officers who work full time on community outreach are joined by cops who patrol the beat to listen to the concerns of residents and provide updates on recurring problems. In some beats only a handful of residents show up regularly, but in others dozens attend each month.
Critics have charged that the meetings are often little more than gripe sessions, but many officers say they collect valuable information when members of the community discuss what they’re seeing and hearing. At the very least, the meetings provide many residents an outlet to discuss their fears and frustrations about crime and other neighborhood problems.
“It’s a problem solving session in that you can discuss city services that you may need if you feel like you’re not getting them in your area, and you want to find out why,” Holt said in that previous interview.
Last week about two dozen residents showed up for the December meeting for beat 911 in Brighton Park on the Southwest Side. Officers Martin Loughney and Anthony Mejia, who are assigned to the CAPS program for the Ninth Police District, told the residents that they needed to speak up if they didn’t want to see the program disappear altogether.
“CAPS is on life support,” Mejia said during the meeting. “Our budget has been cut and all the officers except us have been assigned to street duty.” And many of them were sent to other police districts, he said.
Mejia said the district had previously offered community outreach programs for seniors, youth, and other groups, but that it would be hard for he and Loughney to continue them on their own. He said it was possible that some beats would hold their meetings in combination with others.
“They couldn’t quite kill CAPS because it was the mayor’s pet project and there would have been outrage,” Mejia said following the meeting. “It’s going to be interesting to see what the new mayor does.”
The residents were worried, with several speculating that this was a sign that they were set to lose not just CAPS officers but some cops on beat patrol as well.
Then, for the next hour, they shared stories of gang members loitering on their property, drug dealing on their corners, and break-ins on their blocks. The police officers promised to pass the information on to cops on the beat and advised the residents to keep in communication with each other.
“We’re just trying to give these folks the strength to keep an eye on their own neighborhoods,” Mejia said afterward.
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