How Can The Community Become Involved?
The best way for an individual to become involved is to attend their local beat meetings. Chicago Police Department lists when and where all beat meetings take place on their website.
The meetings are generally held in a community area, such as a church, park or school. Meetings generally take place monthly at a regular time and place. The CAPS facilitator runs the meetings, moving the meeting along according to an agenda and calling on community members to ask questions. The police do not run the meetings, but they are active members and play a major role in all discussions.
Another major component of meetings is the special role played by a small group of dedicated beat meeting activists. These activists come to meetings frequently in their beats, driving up attendance and CAPS related activism. CAPS related activism includes marches, rallies, prayer vigils, and smoke-outs (group barbecue at gang or drug-infested sites).
Community members who attend the meeting have the chance to ask questions and voice concerns about crime-related problems in their neighborhood, hear reports by the police on crime activity in their beat, and meet neighbors who are also concerned about the safety of their community.
Attendance is generally higher where it is needed. The beat meetings where attendance is the highest, are ares with bad housing, high levels of crime, and poor schools. Awareness of CAPS has grown in all racial groups, but several studies have found that awareness is highest among African American residents of Chicago.
The United States Department of Justice has found that beat meeting attendance rose steadily with levels of civic engagement, rising to more than 40% among residents involved in at least three kinds of local organizations. Church involvement showed a high correlation with CAPS involvement as well; one explanation for this could be that so many CAPS meetings are held in churches, especially in African American communities where both CAPS and church involvement are particularly strong.
In addition to the monthly beat meetings, there are also District Advisory Committees (DAC), which meets regularly with the commander of the district to discuss district affairs. The members of the committee are generally community leaders, like business owners or local community activists.
The goal of the committees is to discuss district priorities and develop strategies to address them with community resources. However, Northwestern University reports in Caps at Ten, that many members are frustrated about their ill-defined mandates, leadership problems and inaction.
Read more about this topic: Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy
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