Kevin Allen, Director of the San Francisco Office of Citizen Complaints
"The chief can only discipline officers by suspending them for up to ten days. If it's more serious, we'll ask that it go to the commission. Cases of excessive force, lying by a police officer, and cases that have drawn a lot of public attention will go to the commission a lot of the time." | Read more »
Joyce Edgar, Lieutenant with the San Diego Police Department
"We've always prided ourselves, especially when I worked in Internal Affairs, that we want the facts out, we want to do a complete investigation. If the oversight board points out something that got missed, we go back and we investigate it. We get a tremendous amount of information from a board that's willing to do that." | Read more »
Joe Navarro, Sergeant with the San Diego Police Department
"At that time we had high levels of violence, gang issues, and drug issues. But, for the most part, we found that the citizenry was not so concerned with crime as with disorder — graffiti, vehicles parked in the streets and abandoned. For us it was an issue of community involvement, because we wanted people who lived there and had an interest in solving the problems to be involved." | Read more »
John Parker, Executive Officer of the San Diego County Citizens' Law Enforcement Review Board
"Essentially we're a complaint department, and satisfaction with complaints is hard to achieve. They usually want something unreasonable; they usually want an officer fired, which is difficult. You've got to be able to prove something that happened, and provide some recorded evidence or an admission, some very credible witnesses in order to sustain findings." | Read more »
Wesley Skogan, Professor of Political Science at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University
"Community policing has several key characteristics. First is organizational decentralization: pushing authority and accountability to geographical units, precincts or districts. Holding commanders responsible for what goes on in those places, to make it more turf oriented. It means involving the community in identifying problems and priorities. Part of that, for civilians, can mean involving neighborhood residents in neighborhood action projects. Chicago has done that." | Read more »
Introduction
"The chief can only discipline officers by suspending them for up to ten days. If it's more serious, we'll ask that it go to the commission. Cases of excessive force, lying by a police officer, and cases that have drawn a lot of public attention will go to the commission a lot of the time." | Read more »
"We've always prided ourselves, especially when I worked in Internal Affairs, that we want the facts out, we want to do a complete investigation. If the oversight board points out something that got missed, we go back and we investigate it. We get a tremendous amount of information from a board that's willing to do that." | Read more »
"At that time we had high levels of violence, gang issues, and drug issues. But, for the most part, we found that the citizenry was not so concerned with crime as with disorder -- graffiti, vehicles parked in the streets and abandoned. For us it was an issue of community involvement, because we wanted people who lived there and had an interest in solving the problems to be involved." | Read more »
"Essentially we're a complaint department, and satisfaction with complaints is hard to achieve. They usually want something unreasonable; they usually want an officer fired, which is difficult. You've got to be able to prove something that happened, and provide some recorded evidence or an admission, some very credible witnesses in order to sustain findings." | Read more »
"Community policing has several key characteristics. First is organizational decentralization: pushing authority and accountability to geographical units, precincts or districts. Holding commanders responsible for what goes on in those places, to make it more turf oriented. It means involving the community in identifying problems and priorities. Part of that, for civilians, can mean involving neighborhood residents in neighborhood action projects. Chicago has done that." | Read more »
Kevin Allen
Kevin Allen, Director of the San Francisco Office of Citizen Complaints
POV: How did civilian oversight develop in San Francisco? How does your office work?
We investigate every complaint about policing that comes in, when the officer is either on-duty or acting in a position of authority by identifying him- or herself as a police officer. We receive complaints in person, over the phone, or through our website. Complainants can be anonymous. After a complaint is filed, we have one year to investigate and make recommendations about imposing discipline. We can't impose discipline, and we don't recommend specific discipline. We make our recommendations to the chief, or, if we feel the complaint is very serious, directly to the police commission. The whole process is confidential, until a discipline recommendation is made. The chief can only discipline officers by suspending them for up to ten days. If it's more serious, we'll ask that it go to the commission. Cases of excessive force, lying by a police officer, and cases that have drawn a lot of public attention will go to the commission a lot of the time.
POV: Civilian oversight is popular in a number of cities, but its effects have varied. What are the keys to making civilian oversight effective in San Francisco?
Allen: We have complete autonomy. We're our own department of the mayor. And though the commission oversees what we do, we receive a separate budget from the mayor's office. We have so many investigators [because of the 1995 amendment] it makes it a bit easier to get through the investigations. One thing we gained through Proposition H [a ballot initiative passed in 2003] -- before, if we wanted the police chief to send a complaint on to the commission, and the chief disagreed, the commission could only urge the chief to send it on them. Now, if the chief disagrees, and we feel that our findings are correct, we can go directly to the commission. It's given the commission more discretion to look it over and say, This should go to the public and be heard in front of us." If we turn the case over to the chief, and the chief holds the case, we can turn around and do that verified complaint procedure, sending it directly to the commission.
POV: Are civilian oversight boards and police departments inherently opposing interests? Can there be effective partnerships between them?
Allen: By its very nature, the process is somewhat adversarial. In my opinion, I think that the department could use us as management tools. When we get complaints that have merit, I would think they would want to know that so that they can improve public safety and efficiency. There is still some tension between the police department and the Office of Citizen Complaints, but what we're really trying to get them to understand is that we do what we have to do by law. The public's pretty hard on the police department. One big knock on the department is that they're violating civil rights, with unnecessary searches, unnecessary force, and harassment. The public supports the police, but they don't necessarily support what the police are doing right now. One knock on the OCC is that what we do is confidential. We get maybe 1000 cases a year, and we sustain about 10 percent of those. That doesn't necessarily mean something didn't happen, but that we couldn't prove it. In the last year, the complaint was that the commission doesn't do anything, that it wasn't coming down hard enough on officers, allowing them to run wild.
POV: How do your investigations begin? Is there any sort of automatic review process in place, for example in police shooting incidents?
Allen: Most of our jurisdiction comes from complaints. If there is a shooting by a police officer, we're one of several agencies that are called. We can have an investigator on the scene, while the crime scene investigators are on the scene. The homicide division does a review, and the management control division of the police department does an investigation. We can review their findings. Also, we look for policy failures that may be partly responsible, and we can make recommendations about policy, usually six to eight months later. Some of our recommendations have focused on contact between the police and non-English-speaking people. Our recommendations included getting more people who speak different languages, whether police officers or not, and including them from the beginning, rather than trying to translate later or using broken English. When we make recommendations like that, we make them public.
POV: What new developments would you like to see in community oversight?
Allen: For investigative purposes, we'd like to see a trial run of cameras in police cars. When people are doing investigations, film can be more telling. We are actually expanding our own services as well. We have a mediation program now, but it's pretty perfunctory. We'd like to get officers sitting down with citizens more, talking about incidents.
Kevin Allen was a public defender in San Francisco for four years. He has been the director of the San Francisco Office of Citizen Complaints since 2003.
Joyce Edgar
Joyce Edgar, Lieutenant with the San Diego Police Department
POV: How did community policing develop in San Diego?
In the early 90s, there was much more emphasis on problem-solving. All the officers were sent to do additional training, and taught to work as teams on problem-solving. In the mid-90s we reorganized our patrol structure to facilitate problem-solving, working in the neighborhoods. It's sort of been inculcated as part of the culture for officers.
POV: How have these innovations improved policing, in terms of crime rate and of community satisfaction?
Edgar: Everybody realizes that a police department is not going to solve all their problems. One example of community policing in San Diego is that we had one part of town that attracted a lot of chronic drunks. The previous process was that people would be arrested, taken to a detox facility where they were allowed to sober up and leave with no criminal charges. Working with social service agencies, we realized that some people were there several times a week. We also learned that a lot of these people were going into the emergency room. A lot of money was being spent on emergency services for people who were going to be released in a few hours. Some of the doctors got involved. We brought in alcohol rehab people, and mental health people, and we started a program with the city attorneys where we would make arrests of people that were so chronic at detox, we would take them to jail and charge them with a crime. They were then offered a chance to go into drug and alcohol treatment or go to jail. At first people were hesitant to go to treatment, but recently we've seen something like 50 percent going into treatment, and something like 50 percent of those turning their lives around. All this under a structured program that the county helped fund. It's called the Serial Inebriate Program (S.I.P.).
POV: Civilian oversight is popular in a number of cities, but its effects have varied. What are the key characteristics of effective civilian oversight?
Edgar: San Diego adopted oversight before it was mandated. When there are serious incidents, complaints or shootings, the oversight board gets involved. The biggest problem is that we do the investigation, and they review the investigation, and if they bring up issues, then those issues are resolved, either explained or addressed. There have been some really positive things that have been involved. Our whole issue is trust, and we want the trust of the community, and if the committee can report back through the oversight board, we're more likely to gain trust.
POV: Are civilian oversight boards and police departments inherently opposing interests? Can there be effective partnerships between them?
Edgar: It hasn't really been an issue in our department, but when you start giving oversight boards subpoena powers, and people who aren't trained to do investigations are asking questions, it's not always really an effective investigative tool. It could turn into a witch hunt. We've always prided ourselves, especially when I worked in Internal Affairs, that we want the facts out, we want to do a complete investigation. If the oversight board points out something that got missed, we go back and we investigate it. We get a tremendous amount of information from a board that's willing to do that.
POV: Does the SDPD keep track of developments elsewhere? Do you know of programs in other departments that you feel are especially noteworthy?
Edgar: We're always interested in what goes on in other agencies, and we look for input both from experts and from individual subjects. We work closely with chiefs and commanding officers in other departments. The topics in law enforcement right now have to do with deadly force and pursuit policies. There's an annual Problem-Oriented Policing conference where we talk about best practices, and there are also a lot of resources available through the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF). The S.I.P. program has been highlighted by PERF for its success. The chief also meets with major city chiefs to go over issues that are important, and best practices from other departments.
POV: Is there a place for community input in developing guidelines for officers on the street?
Edgar: We have had several task forces, open to the public. The Use of Force task force brought people from all over the community. They looked at our use of force, and at best practices from elsewhere, and made specific recommendations to the chief of police. There was a real commitment to implement those. Some of the things we're working on are trying to increase the number of canine officers, and trying to upgrade our helicopters, many of which are decades old. Using helicopters in pursuits is often safer. We're starting a new cycle of training on crisis response teams, which will have eighty hours of training in crisis response. They'll be working around the clock to respond to incidents where anyone who seems to be in crisis can be contacted within a few minutes. The officers on that team will have training in how to deal with mentally ill persons who are creating difficulty for themselves. We're also looking into new kinds of non-lethal methods, such as the new generation of tasers. Those are expensive changes, but we're trying to get at least a minimum number of officers at every command with non-lethal weapons. It ties in to our approach to improve things.
Lieutenant Joyce Edgar has been with the San Diego Police Department for 26 years. She is currently working in the Training Division, adjacent to the Police Academy, and oversees the coordination of Advanced and In-Service Training for police officers.
Joe Navarro
Joe Navarro, Sergeant with the San Diego Police Department
POV: How did community policing develop in San Diego? What is the city's approach?
Joe Navarro: We called it neighborhood policing. The model we used was to change from the top down, to flatten the structure and allow officers to do what they need to do, to make contacts, and have control over the destiny of their efforts, without bureaucracy. We got away from the multiple levels of bureaucracy, doing away with certain ranks. In the old system you had patrol lieutenants and administrative lieutenants. As a field officer, if you wanted assistance, you had to go through the administrative lieutenant of another division. One of the primary changes in the structure was taking that mid-management position, and putting lieutenants in charge of both field and personnel. We also wanted to get away from traditional beats, allowing more flexibility in terms of off hours, and the structure of deployments. If an officer worked the graveyard shift, but the problem he was working on occurred during the day, he'd have the opportunity to work day and deal with that problem.
The other component of that was holding meetings with every established community in an effort to define community boundaries. Originally you had a structure where beats were within divisions, and a community could be divided by two or three patrol divisions. What you ended up with was not necessarily good for that community. We held forums throughout the city, advertising them throughout the city, and we'd bring people in with a map to confirm or modify our beat structure based on the community's input. We ended up realigning the division lines to cover whole communities.
Another component was to establish community groups, including neighborhood leaders, so that if they had an issue or concern, they could directly contact the lieutenants who were responsible for that area. The lieutenant would coordinate with supervisors to develop tactics or a response to whatever the concerns might be. Some of these were much more successful than others. In a lot of areas, we found homeowners, senior citizen's groups, and volunteers were eager to take part.
At that time we had high levels of violence, gang issues, and drug issues. But, for the most part, we found that the citizenry was not so concerned with crime as with disorder -- graffiti, vehicles parked in the streets and abandoned. For us it was an issue of community involvement, because we wanted people who lived there and had an interest in solving the problems to be involved. We also established relations with other city and government resources out there. These additional tools were outside law enforcement; things like code enforcement, tax abatement, several of those services that we brought under the law enforcement umbrella. We built a collaborative working relationship with resources outside of law enforcement.
POV: Much of that effort began in the 1990s. What changes has the police department made more recently?
Navarro: We still have a neighborhood policing division. Primarily what they do is provide training, and focus their efforts on community. We have a landlord-tenant program, in which we try to educate landlords as to what they can do to avoid future problems, what public resources are available to keep their properties and tenants safe.
There are really two theories of law enforcement: there's the academic end of community policing and there's the working end. Those don't really meet, much of the time. From our point of view, we aren't going to implement everything that the academic end suggests, but we recognize that there may be something else we can do to solve these problems.
Probably the primary innovation at this point is specifically what we are calling the critical response team, or psychiatric evaluation response teams. Those include one officer and one trained clinician. It's not a tactical thing, but the clinician's role is to talk to people who may have a mental illness, and maybe get them into treatment. From a working end, as an officer in the past, you might have taken somebody to the mental health ward, but not been able to get them effective help. Right now there's a move to not necessarily eliminate the clinician, but to provide officers with additional training and additional equipment.
POV: "Every Mother's Son" focuses on three mothers whose sons were killed by police in New York City, who then seek ways to improve the way policing works in the city. What role can citizens play in changing police departments?
Navarro: That's a hot topic at the moment. What we've learned is that community members, and the families of people who are shot by police officers are saying, "Maybe something else could be done." We've started a program that's modeled somewhat after the Memphis police department, but we've also implemented some other things. The goal is to provide 300 to 400 officers with additional training and knowledge, and new tools, and have these officers available at any time and location to work to defuse the situations where police shootings often occur.
POV: Civilian oversight is popular in a number of cities, but the police and the public often have different views of it. From the working officer's view, what is the role of civilian oversight?
Navarro: I've worked in Internal Affairs, which is the unit that works most closely with the civilian review board in San Diego. The board reviews all internal affairs cases of a certain nature, what we call Category 1 complaints. Those include excessive force, racial discrimination, and equal employment opportunity violations -- the relatively serious accusations. The board reviews the department's investigations and makes recommendations. They don't have subpoena power in San Diego. They review, and if there are questions, they bring them up. The benefit is that over the course of the board's existence, we've had a lot of different people on the board. And those couple of hundred people walk away from it knowing that the department does a pretty good job of investigating themselves. The internal affairs unit and the police department are not obligated to change a finding or to appear in front of the board and answer questions or things like that. But the board does result in a positive change in the community. They do get a lot of interaction from some groups, from some people.
POV: Are civilian oversight boards and police departments inherently opposing interests?
Navarro: I think we have a fairly positive relationship with the board members. That speaks positively of the administration and the investigative side of internal affairs. We do effectively police ourselves. One of the important issues is that there's always going to be a discrepancy between what the community and academic view as effective community policing and what law enforcement officers view as effective community policing. In the time I've been involved, there's a feeling among some of the academics in this particular field that we're never doing enough. From the law enforcement side, there's a feeling that we're bending over backwards to do as much as we can. There's a disparity between those two views. I feel that there's a traditional way to do things, and we can modify it, but there are some components of community policing that just can't be fully implemented. It's important to make sure that there are open lines of communication. We don't have the same problem as Los Angeles with mistrust or issues between the community and law enforcement. And that's not just because we're lucky. We don't have those problems because we've made extensive efforts to establish and maintain lines of communication between the department and the citizens.
Sergeant Joe Navarro has been with the San Diego Police Department for 23 years. In the 1990s he was one of two officers in charge of supervising San Diego's Neighborhood Policing Initiative. He is currently a team sergeant in the Gang Suppression unit.
John Parker
John Parker, Executive Officer of the San Diego County Citizens' Law Enforcement Review Board
POV: When/how did civilian oversight develop in your community? Was it in response to particular incidents or practices?
POV: Civilian oversight is popular in a number of cities, but its effects have varied. What are the key characteristics of effective civilian oversight?
Parker: I'm not sure you can measure how effective we are. Two years ago we had a record year. We got 250 complaints. Last year we got 150. This year we've seen more normal levels, and we'll probably end up with around 120 complaints. We do conduct a survey of citizens who file with us, but I think a lot of them rate us based on evidence supplied in their case. I think our effectiveness is measured by the citizens we reach. Approximately 60 percent of complaints come from inmates in county facilities, with the rest coming from out in the field. We keep statistics and analyze them. Some things, like unnecessary force and procedure complaints, those percentages seem to remain constant. In one district, if officers seem to be getting an inordinate amount of complaints, we include that in our monthly reports to the departments. If there are any issues where one deputy or a group of deputies get higher levels of complaints, we notify the sheriff's department.
Essentially we're a complaint department, and satisfaction with complainants is hard to achieve. They usually want something unreasonable; they usually want an officer fired, which is difficult. You've got to be able to prove something that happened, and provide some recorded evidence or an admission, some very credible witnesses in order to sustain findings. We've tried to measure customer satisfaction, how the citizens view our services, and typically they wait until the end of the process, and they tend to link us with the department somehow, instead of our capacity as an independent review board. A bad experience with the sheriff's department tends to relate to how they rate our department. Less than ten percent of our clientele respond to satisfaction surveys.
POV: Are civilian oversight boards and police departments inherently opposing interests? Can there be effective partnerships between them?
Parker: I don't think they're inherently opposed. We've had a great deal of success in our policy recommendations. We tend to look at issues like liability and risk management when we gauge the deptartment's procedures. If we have an issue that's been problematic, we view it as a potential risk issue. We try to point those things out and shape our policy recommendations to lessen the chance of liability exposure. The review board and the sheriff's department have parallel interests. We all have interest in policy that doesn't expose the department to liability in the long run. We want law enforcement to be excellent and strong, within the law and policy and procedures of the department.
POV: Has oversight been effective in the local community? Can you give some examples of effective cooperation?
Parker: One jail death case really stands out, and there are a number with similarities, involving the death of persons being subdued by the police -- maximum restraint or hog-tying of the subject. In some ways, the actions of law enforcement, the hogtying, or the restrictions of a person's breathing, resulting in a person's death, is pretty common in law enforcement. Having a number of those cases, we've sought to change the policy regarding four-point restraint and the manner in which people are subdued and observed after restraint. We're seeking to change the practice of leaving them on their chest, trying to avoid holding them down, restricting their torso, and restricting their breathing. There are issues every day regarding the manner in which prisoners are handled within the system, how they are classified in the jail, how medical attention is applied. We review the investigation, review films or videos, review the statements, interview witnesses and participating deputies if necessary, and look at policy versus actual actions. We look at evidence to determine if autopsy findings were contrary to official reports. Up until August of last year, all of our case hearings were held in public session. Then a couple of appellate findings in California courts limited our ability to release reports and hold public hearings. So we're currently holding closed hearings.
POV: Was it valuable to have public hearings?
Parker: Absolutely. Our reports were detailed, with respect to investigations and the evidence, with the exception of law enforcement interviews. I think it provided confidence to citizens to do this in open session, in the public eye. California police review in general has suffered because of those appellate court rulings.
Ultimately, when you make recommendations that are adopted by the department, behaviors change. They're supposed to change anyway, with the advent of new procedures. Then these changes filter down to the street in more humane policing. The deputy sheriff's association has fought civilian oversight at every step of the way. They attempted political and legal challenges from the inception of the review board, but they lost every single challenge, including subpoena authority. Then it was fairly silent for a time, and they didn't mount any serious challenges until the year 2000, when they successfully argued before the appellate court that deputies should have the right to challenge our advisory findings, even though the department was not disciplining based on our findings. If we recommended findings, the department would conduct its own investigation before discipline. The court ruled that our findings alone constituted punitive action, and that deputies had the right to challenge our findings with the civil service commission. There were two cases out of the city of San Diego that attacked the public reporting aspect of review boards, and whether civil service commissions could have open rulings. Both rulings went in favor of law enforcement and confidentiality. So they shut down any public reporting and any public hearings.
We are awaiting appeal. A local newspaper has challenged the closed hearing ruling. So we're awaiting an appellate court ruling on that challenge. Whatever the court decides will tend to give us a signal. We've considered challenging the reporting aspects of their ruling, but we're being withheld from taking any legal steps until the Union-Tribune lawsuit is settled. Depending on which way the ruling goes, we'll look for a way to produce redacted or code-named reports from our investigations.
POV: What new developments would you like to see in community oversight?
Parker: I'd like to see California state law on confidentiality of police personnel records changed to make some exceptions for the review board, as it currently does for the district attorney and for grand juries. The law could easily be changed to include independent review boards. I'm not suggesting we should be able to release information that jeopardizes law enforcement officers, but case investigation and findings should be the public's business. That was the intent when the public voted for the review boards.
John Parker spent twenty-two years in the Oakland police department before working as an investigator in the San Francisco Office of Citizen Complaints. He became the Executive Officer of the San Diego County Citizens' Law Enforcement Review Board in 1997.
Wesley Skogan
Wesley Skogan, Professor of Political Science at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University
POV: What is community policing, and how is it different from traditional policing methods?
POV: What were the most significant problems with the Chicago police department's approach to policing before it began its reform effort in the 1990s?
Skogan: The police in Chicago were widely seen as not very effective. There weren't more than the usual specific problems, compared to other cities. The police were not popular, and there was not much confidence, across all races. What happened here in the early 90s was the media and civic leaders began getting on the city's case about the extraordinarily high crime rate. The crime rate peaked in 1991. So there was this internal pain about what to do in response to this discontent over, a seemingly ineffective police department and, very high crime rates.
POV: Could you describe the steps the city took to initiate change? What part do policy changes and bureaucratic reforms play in improving relations between the community and the police?
Skogan: There were three parts to what Chicago did. First, there was administrative decentralization to districts and to beats. The city was divided into 279 beats, each of which was fairly small. Each beat was assigned a specific team of officers. It used to be that police drove around everywhere in their district. The beat team is ten officers, roughly what it takes to police a beat, and they are thought of as beat officers. The patrol cars have the beat number on top. And Chicagoans got to know their beat numbers; it become a part of our knowledge.
The second part in Chicago was community involvement, which included several subparts. There's the beat meeting. Every beat has a public meeting every month, with officers from the beat and representatives from a special office, like the gang office or the youth office. Typically it's three beat team officers and a couple of others. And they meet every month. There are an average of 250 meetings a month. At these meetings, police report back on what they've done since the last meeting. There is discussion of new problems. Attendance from the public is seasonal, but a good meeting in the summer is 33 people. On average about 6700 a month come to these meetings. My research team has discovered that beat meetings are best attended in high-crime areas. Then there's the neighborhood problem-solving part. The idea is to get people involved in problem-solving projects. An example of this is that when citizens complained about graffiti, they organized a Saturday morning paint-up. People from the city will come by with paints and brushes. This has not been as successful as a dreamer might think it is, but it's very useful in addressing certain kinds of problems. Next is the court advocacy part, to get residents to turn out in court as witnesses and bystanders, to show support for the prosecution effort. And the last part of community involvement is the district advisory committee. These include eighteen to twenty-two people on the district level, mostly movers and shakers, business development people. Those vary in their success. The most significant predictor of success for the district advisory committees is leadership, on the civilian side and the police side. Where the district commander takes it seriously, it does better.
The final part of Chicago's effort was interagency coordination. The Chicago Police Department is capable of triggering different city services. They will do a service blitz in an area; say at a street drug market. Rather than simply sweeping in and making lots of arrests, part of that blitz will be towing abandoned cars, trimming bushes, and relighting all the streetlights. There's also a civilian staff on the police department's budget, independent of the department leadership, in charge of turning out people to beat meetings and coordinating service blitzes. These civilians are assigned to police districts; each of the 25 districts has three organizers.
POV: What effects have reforms had on crime rates and the community's relationship to the police?
Skogan: Well, public confidence in the police is up and crime is down. There's been an enormous decline in the crime rate, and the bulk of that has been in poor African-American neighborhoods. For example, between 1991 and 2002, robbery went down by 63 percent. The way that works out, that means there were 100,000 fewer robberies over the 12-year period. So crime is down a lot. We monitor public confidence with surveys, and depending on the measure, there's been a ten to fifteen percentage point improvement between 1993 and 2003. The bad news is that among white Chicagoans, support has grown to be, overall, on the positive side. Meanwhile, for Latinos and African-Americans, opinion has now risen to neutral. So there's a difference between better and good. There's still plenty of room for improvement. While Chicagoans of all backgrounds have an improved view of the police, the department is still much more popular among white Chicagoans.
Now, it's not easy to say what caused the dramatic drop in crime rates, because there are many other factors. The best indication that we have is that for the first eighteen months of the community-policing program, it ran in only five of the twenty-five police districts, and then began to expand into the whole city. During those two years, we saw that it improved people's attitudes toward the police, especially African-Americans. And each of the five districts enjoyed substantial declines in crime. It's the strongest research design we can get.
POV: Who took the lead in reforming the Chicago police department?
Skogan: It came from the police department and Mayor Daley's office, in response to the media and public pressure I mentioned earlier. But it's very much about the process they set in place. What the citizens come to meetings about, what they bring up at beat meetings, is their business. The changes created a forum. City Hall didn't say that street drug markets are the problem, and we'll attack that. City Hall said that we're going to have 250 meetings a month. At the meetings, the police will come with crime maps; there will be discussion of new incidents, new business, and new problems. By keeping police officers assigned to their beats, and by going to beat meetings, the officers come to know people who aren't the bad guys or victims. And the meetings have become more effective at creative solutions. They didn't say everybody has to do foot patrol. They pushed it down to the beat level and said you guys do this, you guys solve the problems. And they put in place a local accountability process. Every month the officers working your beat are there, and report what's happened since the last meeting. What we have here is a little feedback loop between public servants and their clients that doesn't exist anywhere else in municipal government.
POV: Has Chicago's style been influential?
Skogan: Everybody has their own program, and the proper approach depends on what your problems are. There are two things that are unique about Chicago's program: one is the beat meetings. Every city has an advisory committee, but I don't know of any other city where, on average, ten times a year five officers come and talk to thirty-five people. Also, the way that Chicago operationalized the idea of citizen involvement is different from other places.
POV: What kind of political steps are necessary to make positive change in policing possible?
Skogan: Well, there's starting and there's succeeding. Everybody starts to reform. Everybody does something. I think that to have a really far-reaching program, the key is it has to be the city's program, not the police department's program. Take the service coordination in Chicago. When people come to Chicago, they're awestruck by the fact that police can get sanitation and maintenance to do things. That's usually two different bureaucracies. If it's the city's program, you can make things happen. That's the mayor's greatest contribution to this process.
POV: What are the remaining challenges for the Chicago police department's reforms?
Skogan: One is that there's a long way to go in terms of public enthusiasm. The gap between blacks and whites in how the police are perceived remains where it was before. The racial gulf over policing didn't narrow. Chicago continues to struggle on the recruiting side, in particular recruiting African-Americans and Latinos. Compared to many cities, Chicago's not bad, but it's not been improving. The city is changing a lot faster, and the department has not been able to catch up. Service coordination works really well, because this team of about seventy-five civilian organizers is quite effective. Decentralization has worked pretty well, and they've met their goals of keeping people on the beat. Over the long haul, attendance at beat meetings has been strong. Something that's unique about Chicago is that unlike most cities, in Chicago all city employees must live in the city. One of the things I've noticed is that where the police officers live, they're seeing the benefits. A lot of police officers told me that before, they had no way of knowing who the officer on the beat in their own neighborhood was. It's contributed to the success of the program.
Wesley G. Skogan is Professor of Political Science at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. He is the author of Community Policing, Chicago Style and On the Beat, two books based on his years of studying Chicago's Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS). He is a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology. In 1998 Skogan was awarded a Senior Fellowship from the Center for Crime, Communities and Culture of the Open Societies Institute. In 2000 he organized the committee on Police Policies and Practices for the National Research Council, and served as its chairman.