New Report Offers Recommendations for Police Reform in Chicago

The Policing Project at NYU School of Law has published an in-depth study on community safety and alternative first response in Chicago, the fourth report in a series on public safety innovations across the country.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 23, 2024

Media Contact: Joshua Manson, Policing Project at NYU School of Law, joshua.manson@nyu.edu 

CHICAGO, IL – Chicago lacks a strong community policing program and expects police officers to perform too many duties that take them away from their mission of addressing serious crime. These problems contribute to the city’s public-safety shortcomings, according to a new report from the Policing Project at New York University School of Law. The report recommends a number of programs that address both of these issues and notes that several other cities have had success in fully implementing them.  “In many neighborhoods, police officers are responsible for welfare checks, animal control, noise complaints, and mental health crises as well as their original mission of dealing with violent crime,” said Barry Friedman, a law professor and faculty director of the Policing Project and the report’s author. “It’s too much. That and a lack of a citywide community policing plan led to a state of affairs in which many Chicagoans tell us they’ve never experienced public safety.” 

The project has been involved in implementing a Chicago community-policing program for 5 years and has done extensive interviewing with community members and stakeholders connected with Chicago government and CPD to inform this report. They have also prepared reports on alternative response in Denver, Tucson, and San Francisco.  

Traditionally, police in Chicago have been the primary, if not only, responders to 911 calls. This increases the burden on officers who aren’t necessarily trained to deal with mental health crises or don’t have a nuanced understanding of neighborhood cultural issues. Other cities have established systems that allow trained professionals, other than police officers, to respond to 911 calls without law enforcement or the use of force. The report argues that this should be part of Chicago’s infrastructure as well.  

Several programs, such as CARE, Crisis Assistance Response & Engagement Program, already exist in a limited capacity, but the city needs to give them the resources they need to expand. Other recommendations include replacing 911 calls with online resources to register complaints and giving police officers more time “off the radio” to interact with members of the community.  

In addition, five years into a consent decree that emphasizes the need for community policing, the city still has not fully adopted such a plan. “The Chicago Police Department needs to foster a culture of true community policing,” Friedman said. “Without this there will not be trust between the police and community members—and without that trust, the two cannot cooperate to co-produce public safety. But that is what is needed to bring down violent crime. Chicago has such a model in its Neighborhood Policing Initiative, but CNPI has not been adopted wholeheartedly.” 

Many of their recommendations, Friedman added, would help satisfy the requirements of the 2019 consent decree for police reform between the Illinois Attorney General’s office and the city. The federally enforced agreement came in the wake of the Department of Justice investigation into the CPD after a CPD officer shot and killed Laquan McDonald in 2014. The consent decree mandated that a community policing philosophy be at the core of CPD’s programs and that all CPD members would be responsible for employing it. 

“We believe that community policing can deliver on its promise to create the community-police relationships and public-safety outcomes our city needs,” said Jose Abonce of CNPI. “This report confirms that CNPI and programs like it are essential to reaching that goal.” CNPI was established by the Policing Project at the NYU School of Law, one of the sponsors of the report. 

The Policing Project spoke with nearly 70 Chicagoans, both in public meetings and one-on-one interviews, and more than two dozen current and former city officials and CPD contractors and consultants about their experiences with public safety and policing in Chicago. It based its recommendations on those conversations and on research into community and municipal programs in other cities, including New York City, Denver, Albuquerque, Atlanta and San Francisco. Several Chicago philanthropic partners and nonprofit organizations contributed to funding this report. 

“While Chicago has fallen short on its efforts to reform policing since the start of the consent decree, it is significant that CPD is now taking several steps outlined in the Policing Project report,” said Tim Daly, Director of the Joyce Foundation’s Gun Violence Prevention & Justice Reform Program. “This report provides key insights on how CPD can move the needle on policing reform while implementing the consent decree: by assessing and reallocating its workforce, developing a clear and citywide community policing strategy, and determining how to best respond to 911 calls for service.” 

Read the full report at https://policingproject.org/s/reimagining-public-safety-in-chicago. 

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The Policing Project at NYU School of Law promotes public safety through transparency, equity, and democratic engagement. Learn about the Policing Project at www.policingproject.org.