The effort to reform the Chicago Police Department was never supposed to happen quickly, with experts seeing the potential for a nearly decadelong, laborious process for a court to call it complete.
But three years into the work, criticism continues to grow around the department’s ability to grasp a fundamental tenet of any police reform effort: engaging with the public in a way that fosters meaningful and sustained trust and cooperation.
In its latest report, released Tuesday, the federal monitor overseeing the federal consent decree the department is under concluded Chicago police don’t fully understand the various ways the department can interact with the public, or even how its current community-policing programs complement each other.
The criticism strikes at an area that is both foundational for the court-ordered reform effort as a whole, and one that Chicago police Superintendent David Brown has often highlighted as he fends off critics. It also comes as the city is gearing up for a mayoral race next year, in which Mayor Lori Lightfoot will contend with the effects of persistent gun violence and clamoring from the community to see real reform.
“The Chicago Police Department this morning is taking a big swing at community policing, community engagement and building trust,” Brown said at a news conference last year. “Arguably, this will be the most significant commitment of effort, resources and leadership to building trust in Chicago PD’s history.”
But now, almost a year later, the report notes that community policing is a CPD push with deep flaws. Some community stakeholders view the report as an alarm bell — an indication that, although the department is ticking off reform requirements, deep-rooted change remains elusive.
“We continue to be concerned about how the CPD understands and discerns the differences and nuances among community engagement, community partnerships, community relationships, community policing, and community service,” the report reads.
Establishing trust and partnership with residents is one of the main remedies that experts prescribe to mend the long-broken trust between police and communities, especially those of Black and brown residents who have suffered a history of institutional racism, trauma, police violence and misconduct.
And reforming the department goes to the heart of another one of Chicago’s long-standing problems: providing public safety and reducing violence. A department that is fair and respected by the community will be better able to reduce crime, experts say.
‘More than a checklist’
Brown, at a news conference in April 2021, said if the culture of the police department is going to change, it will “be because the community demands it.”
“And we as a profession, not just as a department, have to, No. 1, embrace this change that’s happening across this country in law enforcement. We have to embrace it. A lot of what that means is shut up and listen. That’s what that means,” Brown said.
Departments across the country are being called now to set policies that assure policing is fair in all communities and that they can hold themselves accountable. And officers are expected, at all levels of a department, to work in partnership with communities to achieve sustained safety and reduce crime.
But the consent-decree report, the fifth such progress report released by monitor Maggie Hickey, continued a theme she has spoken out about in recent months. The department, in spite of making some strides in rewriting policy and adopting new training, remains hampered by a culture that struggles with the kind of major reform that is now mandated, she said, and it has struggled with the community policing goals Brown has laid out.
Hickey, in an unusual memo attached to the report, noted that the massive reform effort, which includes some 550 mandates, requires “more than a checklist.”
Meanwhile, the report notes how the department is struggling to put the correct resources in place to support reform and even suggests it has regressed in some areas. It also states that the department is not weaving constitutional reform into its efforts to address the overlapping and deeply connected issue of gun violence that continues to plague the city.
“Some resistance to police reform has been from those who believe crime reduction is separate from, or even opposed to, reform efforts,” Hickey wrote in her memo. “But constitutional and effective policing — and the Consent Decree — requires the CPD and its officers to reduce crime as community partners, which requires building, maintaining, and rigorously protecting community trust and confidence.”
Officially, the report notes that the department has made some sort of progress on 70% of its more than 500 tasks reviewed thus far. But each mandated change has three stages of compliance, meaning “some progress” doesn’t mean work is finished.
In reality, the department has fully completed less than 5% of the mandates reviewed so far.
Police officials, though, consistently say that the process of meeting the demands of the consent decree is a long one, and that they must first meet the preliminary requirements before reaching all of the goals. Overall, there are nearly 800 paragraphs in the consent decree, though not all are actionable mandates.
Robert Boik, the Police Department’s executive director of constitutional policing and reform, said in a phone interview with the Tribune earlier this year that the department has to look at and count the paragraphs as it moves forward. The department’s compliance over the last year has “jumped significantly.”
“But compliance is not just numbers. There’s a ton of work behind all of that compliance and all of those paragraphs,” Boik said.
In a footnote later in the report, though, Hickey offered more pointed criticism, referring to a draft plan of a “Roadmap Toward Operational Compliance” that the department drew up.
“While we appreciate the strategic thinking and thoughtful effort that went into crafting the plan, we remain concerned about the lack of meaningful participation by the CPD’s Office of the First Deputy Superintendent (which includes the Bureau of Patrol, the Bureau of Detectives, the Bureau of Crime Control Strategies, and the Bureau of Counter-terrorism),” the report states.
‘Aspirations to do it well’
These findings come after months of Superintendent Brown pledging great strides, boasting even that the department would land 1.5 million “positive community interactions” in 2022.
Hickey’s report notes that the “PCIs” are defined by the department as a “brief, spontaneous, high visibility interaction that is positive, informative, helpful, or constructive in nature.” They are counted by having an officer report to the Office of Emergency Management and Communications that a PCI has happened.
But putting that kind of quota on engagement with the public made for one of the most critical parts of the report, which concluded the department was emphasizing “quantity of interactions over the quality of interactions” and also doubting whether the department could keep track of that many episodes to ensure they had any meaning or that they were not alienating the public.
“The new focus on ‘Positive Community Interactions’ (PCIs) provides the most recent example of how even well-intended efforts to build trust may ultimately undermine existing systems to establish and build trust,” the report reads. “… Combined with the CPD’s inability to meaningfully record, review, or learn from these interactions, the CPD seriously risks increasing negative interactions, damaging public trust, and under-mining its ability to ensure it is providing constitutional and effective policing.”
Cara Hendrickson, executive director of BPI Chicago, a nonprofit law and policy center, said she agrees with the independent monitor that quotas for positive interactions should be suspended.
In order to have a functional system for tracking positive interactions with the community, she said, the department, among other things, would need to collaborate with the community to define what a positive interaction with police is, include training for officers about what a helpful encounter is and apply supervision for patrol officers to evaluate how successful the community interactions are. She also noted that there is not a “one-size-fits-all definition” of a useful interaction with police.
“All of those building blocks have to be in place to even think about something like a meta numerical requirement,” she said. “Quotas in policing have a long and troubled history. It is not a tool commonly deployed in a way that serves communities. Any use of it should be approached with extraordinary caution.”
Hendrickson said overall community policing is not a program but a “fundamental principle that should guide the purpose and method of using police to promote public safety.”
“We can’t say community policing is only about basketball games or other discrete events. It’s about shifting how officers and how departments prioritize time and resources to ensure they are serving communities,” she said.
Barry Friedman, the founding director of New York University School of Law’s Policing Project, said the relationship between the community and police is an important part of the consent decree, and while the Police Department has made efforts, it’s struggling.
“It’s very hard to develop authentic community engagement, and it’s too easy to develop inauthentic community engagement,” Friedman said.
The independent monitor’s report noted the department may not have adequate staffing in the office that handles community policing. It also said the department has two different vehicles for community policing, Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (also known as CAPS) and its Neighborhood Policing Initiative (also known as NPI).
The monitoring team wrote that, despite asking for clarification for two years, it remains unclear how CPD will merge the two efforts.
“We continue to be concerned about how the CPD understands and discerns the differences and nuances among community engagement, community partnerships, community relationships, community policing, and community service,” the report said.
Friedman, who is working on NPI with Chicago police, said the department has an issue with not being able to cut the cord on CAPS, which Friedman said “has become a shell of its former self” and become fully committed to NPI, which he believes will develop true, authentic engagement.
NPI is a program that requires every officer to be a community policing officer and changes the philosophy of the Police Department to focus on community engagement, Friedman said. The program then evaluates how officers are spending their time with the community and if they’re collaborating on identifying public safety problems with the community.
“The mayor and superintendent have said they’re going to do these things; it’s having them happen that’s the issue,” he said. “Until that happens, the things that the monitor identifies are not going to get fixed. It’s about commitment, fulfillment, and having a clear plan and acting on it.”
“Chicago has had aspirations to do it well, but its actions have not met its aspirations,” he said.
In a court filing in which CPD officials evaluated the department’s own progress in the fifth reporting period, the department noted some of its current community engagement activities. For example, police districts hold regular meetings that allow residents to meet with local police officers and officials and offer feedback.
It also highlighted the Police Athletic and Arts League, an opportunity for young Chicagoans to receive mentorship while participating in activities with officers.
The department also said it has undertaken an “extensive review of community policing policies,” which included defining positive interactions between police and residents.
“We built on the momentum from previous reporting periods and continued doubling down on the effort to accelerate widespread compliance and improve community engagement,” Brown said in a letter attached to the filing. “We realize that building a culture of transformation begins with conversation and collaboration not only internally, but externally. The community remains the most important stakeholder in every single one of our efforts.”
‘Screaming into the wind’
The news in the report was not a surprise to the community organizations who have been seeking a changed Chicago Police Department, said attorneys who have represented them in court.
Michelle Garcia, deputy legal director of the ACLU of Illinois, said her clients do not feel like they’ve been listened to on key policy changes, nor do they feel as if they’ve been treated “like a partner.”
And while they are “tired of screaming into the wind,” they are not relenting, Garcia said.
“Many of our clients have been in this (since) before the consent decree. They have been showing up to public hearings. They have been on the streets protesting. They have been showing up,” she said. “What we know from our clients is they are willing to put in the work.”
Garcia said the department failed to engage enough on the critical issue of foot pursuits, which was thrust into the spotlight last year after Chicago police officers fatally shot two people, including 13-year-old Adam Toledo, during the highly dangerous chases.
Garcia said that in order to gain the trust of the community, officials must sit face to face with residents, provide feedback and incorporate residents’ input when possible.
“If there was a will to have honest communication, you would have policies that actually reflect what people want. You would have that buy-in,” she said. “… You wouldn’t have a silly policy like the positive community interactions.”
Despite such concerns about the commitment among police leadership around community engagement, no doubt, there are members of the community who continue to work daily with police to improve relations.
At the South Side’s Grand Crossing District, for example, officers have met weekly with members of the community to discuss crime patterns, drilling down on shooting data.
Joyce Chapman, a community organizer on the Far South Side, has worked with police officers for decades to try to help them build trust in her community and improve relationships between the department and local organizations. She chairs an advisory council that gives recommendations to the Calumet Police District.
Chapman often tells officers to smile at residents when they are in the neighborhood.
“It’s OK to wave at us,” she said. “We’re not going to bite you.”
With her group, the Far South Chicago Coalition, she is involved in events that put officers and young South Siders together, allowing young people to have their voices amplified and see officers dancing and talking among neighbors.
“These new recruits, these new officers coming in, have to acclimate themselves to the community,” Chapman said.
She believes some police officers have made inroads, and thinks the department is slowly moving on the right trajectory. But she acknowledges the lack of trust for some in the community remains.
“The superintendent must present that in his role engaging the community and hopefully it will filter amongst the rank and file and into districts,” she said. “If we say we are going to do this, we have to live it and do it and show this is going to happen.”
Chanel Phillips, director of operations for Resident Association of Greater Englewood, a neighborhood organization, said she would like to see officers taking a more personal approach toward people in neighborhoods they work in.
“You have to spend time together,” Phillips said. “It has to be genuine. It can’t be forced.”
That might mean police officers participating in community events, and interacting with people outside of safe spaces, like cars, she said. Officers could develop a sense of community by proactively getting to know people and engaging them.
“Everyone knows there is a tension between police and citizens and more specifically Black citizens and the Police Department,” she said. “It’s going to take time, but I think a little bit more of a sense of urgency is needed.”
