The community policing program in Chicago began in 1993.
The Chicago Police Department has long advocated the core principles of community policing as an organizational strategy. The Chicago Police Department is perhaps the largest police agency to fully embrace community policing and sustain the strategy over a significant period of time.
Community policing as a police and law enforcement organizational strategy was originally envisioned as a way to reduce the increasing isolation of the policing institution from the community. Community policing was an offshoot-there were several other external societal factors involved-of the recommendations by the Presidential Task Force Report titled "The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society."
The primary recommendation of the report was that the police and law enforcement officers need to embrace the community and utilize information from the community more effectively. This was coupled with the fact that the Kansas City Preventative Patrol Experiment concluded that the traditional reform strategy of the police and law enforcement officers racing to 911 calls for service was ineffective.
Even more influential to the initiation of community policing was James Q. Wilson and George Kelling's article titled "Broken Windows," subtopic "The Police and Neighborhood Safety." Wilson and Kelling offered fresh and productive strategies for restoring order in our communities. They suggested that the police get out of their cars and into the neighborhoods in partnership with private citizens and local civic organizations. They felt that the police and law enforcement officers working on foot would be more integrated within the community, would understand the citizens better, and, theoretically, would be more approachable. Therefore, foot patrolling became the primary mode of policing according to the community policing doctrine. In other words, "Broken Windows" attempted to replace the orthodox philosophy of reacting to crime with pro-acting to crime and preventing it before it happens.
These events toward better law enforcement also occurred concurrently with the change in policing and law enforcement organizations toward accountability and decentralization, that is, giving local commanders more discretion to deal with local conditions. The community policing strategy fit perfectly within these evolving trends, and community policing was adopted in one form or another in virtually every urban police and law enforcement agency.
•How did the changing political landscape in Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s impact the implementation of community policing? Did the increasing cultural variation in the workforce in Chicago law enforcement agencies influence the beginning of the community policing movement? How?
•How did the national view of the Chicago Police Department and use of the police by the Mayor and political authorities during the Democratic National Convention in 1968 highlight the need for the change toward a new model of policing strategy?
•Residency Requirements have long been a debated issue in policing and law enforcement. The central issue is the residency of police officers. Should police officers reside in the geographical entity that they work for? Why?
•How has the Chicago Police Department integrated the core principles of community policing into other organizational initiatives such as Problem Solving, Hot Spot Policing, and Crime Reduction Strategies? Essentially, can the principles of community policing co-exist with these crime reduction strategies? Why?
•How did the new community policing strategy fit with the need to increase the accountability of police officers and the decentralization of responsibility?
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