Few efforts at police reform can ever have been evaluated as intensively, over as many years, as community policing in Chicago. Skogan and his team of researchers began studying Chicago's community policing initiative in 1992, before it was even launched. Over the next 12 years they monitored more than one thousand neighborhood meetings, surveyed tens of thousands of police officers and residents, sat in on planning and training programs, rode along with patrol officers, and analyzed mountains of official reports. This book is the fullest account yet of what they found.
Any study of this magnitude will produce a wealth of data. Thankfully, this one has also produced a book of balance and insight. The picture that emerges is decidedly mixed. Skogan gives higher marks to some components of community policing in Chicago than to others. Beat meetings—monthly open forums for residents of particular neighborhoods and officers assigned to patrol it—have been well attended and productive; District Advisory Committees—appointed panels of community leaders who meet periodically with police middle managers—have proved largely pointless. More important, Skogan argues persuasively that the successes of community policing have been racially specific. Whites did not need the program; African Americans have benefited enormously; Latinos, on average, have seen little improvement.
Each of the three groups is further subdivided—by age, class, education, and so on. Skogan notes that the Latino community, in particular, “cleaved apart” during the 1990s, with “economics, language, and culture” separating Spanish-speaking immigrants from better-off, more well-established English-speakers (p. 14). But he argues persuasively that racial divisions have been paramount, and that any understanding of community policing in Chicago must begin by recognizing that there are “three Chicagos: one white, one African-American, and one Latino” (p. 12).
Here and elsewhere, Skogan's nuanced analysis provides a useful corrective to extravagant claims sometimes made for community policing. He makes clear, for example, that community policing cannot usefully be understood as putting “the community” in charge. It is not just that there is no single, unified community. Community policing in Chicago, as elsewhere, has left decisionmaking and agenda-setting firmly in the hands of the police. The department runs the beat meetings, selects the topics to be addressed, and decides how to follow up. Beats are geographically compact, so the small fraction of residents who show up (typically less than half a percent of the neighborhood) generally share important concerns with their neighbors (p. 155). But this is “a ‘depoliticized’ version of representation,” without binding votes or mechanisms of public accountability (p. 141).
Nor is community policing tantamount to Herman Goldstein's widely praised but less practiced program of “problem-oriented policing” (Reference GoldsteinGoldstein 1990). For the most part, Chicago police have continued to employ “traditional enforcement tactics, such as driving by more often, stopping cars, and trying to arrest people” (p. 210). It is not even clear whether community policing has made these tactics any more effective in combating either crime or the fear of crime. Crime and fear plummeted in Chicago during the 1990s, but that happened all across the country. Skogan credits community policing with some of the progress Chicago made on these fronts, but he is properly cautious about how much.
For Skogan, though, community policing is not chiefly about fighting crime or reducing fear. First and foremost, it is a way to build public support for the police—a means of “recapturing” their “legitimacy,” particularly among minority groups (p. 245). Secondarily, at least in Chicago, it has functioned as a point of access to a wide range of community services, “an alternative way of getting things done”—or, as Skogan half-seriously describes it, “a new political machine” (p. 174). On these measures, community policing in Chicago scores well, at least in African American neighborhoods.
We have known for decades that most calls to the police are not about specific criminal incidents. So perhaps it should not be surprising that community policing in Chicago has achieved some of its clearest success as a way to deliver graffiti removal, tree trimming, sidewalk repair, streetlight installation, sewer cleaning, and rat abatement to underserved residents and blighted neighborhoods. Police do not like to think of themselves as ground-level public service coordinators, but they happen to be pretty good at it—particularly when, as in Chicago, the mayor decides to use the police as a tool for making other city agencies more responsive.
Skogan worries, understandably, that these successes may be jeopardized by the Chicago Police Department's recent embrace of “centralized, data-driven management,” by rising alarm in Chicago about violent crime, and by the city's renewed emphasis on “tough, focused enforcement” (p. 308). And throughout the book he stresses the failure of community policing in Chicago to engage and assist Latinos—already the city's second-largest demographic group (after African Americans) and soon perhaps to be its largest (p. 326). But he makes plain that the program's achievements to date, particularly for African Americans, are as important as its failings.
