what plan was devised by the neighborhood to solve the problem ?
Answers
Explanation:
The Chicago Police Department has adopted a problem-solving
approach to crime and disorder—the Chicago Alternative Policing
Strategy (CAPS)—as part of a move toward community-oriented
policing. With more than 16,600 employees, Chicago’s police depart-
ment is the second largest in the United States, serving nearly 3 mil-
lion people and responding to calls over a 225-square-mile area. The
size and complexity of the CAPS initiative have generated significant
changes in the department’s structure and goals during a multiyear
implementation effort. NIJ has funded a long-term evaluation of this
organizational transition. This report presents one aspect of the NIJ
evaluation—the findings of a study conducted in a small sample of
beats to determine how Chicago’s problem-solving model has actually
been implemented. It is hoped this report will serve as a resource for
police and civil leaders who are interested in moving beyond the
rhetoric of community policing and into the reality of making it work.
Implementation studies are important because the policing field is
littered with failed efforts to change police organizations. Translating
the abstract concepts of community policing into day-to-day steps
that police officers can follow is complicated, and motivating officers
to follow those practical instructions is difficult. It is just as difficult
to rebuild the collective efficacy of communities that have lost it and
to involve residents of poor and previously disenfranchised neighbor-
hoods in partnerships with the police. The Chicago study examines
such issues in detail, isolating some of the factors that explain
implementation success and failure.
The study beats were selected to reflect the diversity of the city and
varied greatly in their level of community involvement and their abil-
ity to respond to local problems. To assess the capacity of these areas
to help themselves through problem solving, residents were surveyed,
neighborhood meetings were observed, and activists were interviewed.
The study found that poor and internally divided beats experienced
greater difficulty in translating their aspirations into practice than did
better-off and racially homogeneous areas.