Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy

Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) is a community policing strategy designed for the Chicago Police Department. The program started in 1993 as a pilot program in five of the 25 police districts in Chicago - Englewood, Marquette, Austin, Morgan Park and Rogers Park. By 1995, the Chicago Police Department implemented CAPS all across Chicago. The goal of CAPS was to blend traditional policing strategies with alternative strategies aimed at encouraging community members and police to work together to both prevent and control crime. It was implemented after a realization that between the 1960s and 1990s, the community and police were becoming increasingly isolated from one another throughout Chicago.

This alternative method was designed to combine community involvement with police action to decrease crime. CAPS emphasized the need for increased lines of communication between the community and the police, so that together they could come up with solutions for chronic neighborhood problems. Their motto was “Together We Can” which promoted the cooperation of police, community and city services in fighting crime.

The CAPS Implementation Office was created and staffed by civilian community outreach workers who organized court advocacy programs and coordinated city services in support of CAPS related programs. The implementation includes five strategies: problem solving, turf orientation, community involvement, linkage to city services, and new tools for police. Other features of the implementation strategy include support from other government agencies, enhanced training, computerized crime analysis, updated marketing and communications techniques, stricter and more quantitative evaluation metrics, and long-term strategic planning.

The problem solving initiative requires officers to develop proactive policing strategies beyond responding to calls, such as identifying concentration of crime in certain areas and entering those communities to diffuse and prevent future crime. Between 1995 and 1997, most of the police force in Chicago received training to aid their ability to proactively police.

Turf orientation is a strategy to familiarize officers with certain communities within the city. Chicago was split into 279 beats, with roughly a dozen officers per beat. This strategy had a rough implementation, as it required officers to stay in a certain area to build trust within a community over an extended period of time, which proved difficult, as that left fewer officers to respond to 911 calls. This forced the city to hire more officers to ensure the force was not short-staffed, nor was trust between officers and communities completely severed.

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