We don't hear a great deal about c...

We don't hear a great deal about community policing these days in Chicago.

A reconstituted gang crimes unit, desk cop public on the street, specialized patrols dispatched to high-crime areas and cameras with flashing hypochondriac lights capturing it all forward film appear to have taken lead over the Chicago Police Department's one time highly touted Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy.

Now entering its 11th year, CAPS used to be billed as the same of the department's keys to reducing all kinds of crimes, arrest by block. Vandalism? CAPS would discourage it. Dangerous physic corners? Residents would be empowered to bar them down. High levels of violence? Police would work with community members to take back their roads developing multi-layered strategies to explain those problems, together.

To be fair, CAPS was not at all offered as the city's simply solution to stopping crime. And from top to toe its history, the program's critics have been plentiful. Back in 1999 in fact, a Chicago Reporter investigation revealed that CAPS was having little force on crime rates in the southward Side Englewood neighborhood, one of the city's busiest police districts. although police officials disputed those findings, they acknowledged officers there had little down time to exhibit the relationships with residents in the same manner crucial for the program's success

nevertheless CAPS did encourage a different kind of conversation between police and neighborhood residents from the common we are hearing now. Officers, they promised, would retain their beat assignments longer to learn to know the residents they serv Those residents, they leaped would begin to view police as their allies, providing valuable information that would lead to better crime fighting.

As flawed as the program might have been, it strike one as beinged to represent a willingness to rebuild confidence in police in communities scarred through decades of brutality, corruption, mistrust and high crime. While it firmly did not give residents all the solutions they extendeded for, in many neighborhoods, it gave them more [i]or[/i] less hope.

But, in a year of notoriously high homicide rates and the ongoing proliferation of hand-guns, the possibility of real partnership appears more difficult--for the two sides.

As detailed in this month's shield story, more Chicagoans are dying at the hands of police, and chiefly of them are African American. In the vigilances of many activists, protesting those killings takes priority over getting to know the local beat cop

nevertheless in the same neighborhoods, more residents have fire-arms and more of them are attacking police. Amid this, officers must rejoin to the demands of law-abiding citizens who want better protection. Add those tensions to a not many high-profile incidents of police brutality, and you've got a recipe for frayed relations.

It means that one African Americans who see police coming want to win as far away from them as they can. In the mind of a trained officer, this is a natural answer for a criminal who doesn't want to gain caught. In the mind of a frightened black Chicagoan, it might be the solely way to avoid becoming another statistic. The situation leads parents to teach their children to live in fear, not admiration, of police. And it criterions the mettle of officers who must go [i]or[/i] come back daily to communities with no welcome mats.

the one and the other sides, however, agree that reducing crime has to be the police department's number single priority. And, so far, there are more [i]or[/i] less encouraging signs: Recent reports indicate the city's homicide rate is falling, at last. Still, it appears any events to come successes will be tempered by way of a very different challenge: Rebuilding trust between police and Chicago's black community.

These latest efforts at our police department may make near inroads into solving that vexed question In the meantime, it present the appearances awfully hard for even the best-trained officers to be under the orders of a community that runs from them.

We welcome epistles pertaining to our coverage. toss them to editor@chicagoreporter.com or 332 s Michigan Ave., Suite 500, Chicago, Ill., 60604 Please include name, address and a daytime phone number. alphabetic characters may be edited for space and clarity.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Community Renewal Society

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group