Policing Paper

Chicago alternative Policing Strategy

Jeromy Klinger

University of Phoenix

Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy

Introduction

Chicago in the 1990’s was overcome with rising crime rates the leader’s of the communities believed that this could be countered with the use of resources that were readily available. They wanted to organize the communities so that they would be able to work with the police and other city departments for the overall betterment of society. They began by instituting the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) in stages, followed by a city-wide implementation of the idea. The CAPS program has been evaluated thoroughly examining its effect on the involvement of community, and the police (Hartnett & Skogan, 1999).

The Beginnings of the Community Policing Strategy

CAPS began its planning in the fall of 1992 and Northwestern University was there to collect data before the program was to be implemented. Northwestern University wanted to be able to compare data from both before the CAPS program and after the program had been implemented. The goals of the CAPS program were not only based in crime prevention, but also focused on stopping physical decay, countering worries about social disorder, and building police and community relations. All three of these aspects of the CAPS program were assessed in the study that was performed by Northwestern University (Hartnett & Skogan, 1999).

The evaluation the Northwestern University completed prior to the implementation of CAPS was able to identify the biggest worries that the citizens of the initial five counties had. This consisted of a large group of concerns, most of which could be found everywhere; nevertheless there were also some issues that were specific to the area. Street drug dealing was one of the crimes that were of concern in almost every area, even though the importance levels varied from area to area. Some of the more confined instances varied from vandalism to parked cars,...