Recently, Time and The Marshall Project published a long investigative piece on Chicago's police reform and violence prevention efforts. Chicago has piloted, the story says, an unprecedented mix of cooperation with outside academics (like me), a new approach to stopping homicide and gun violence, and a new approach to resetting relationships with angry communities. The Department of Justice has taken note of the resulting “Chicago model” and is putting millions of dollars behind it; cities all over the country are seeking to replicate it.
And as they do, Chicago is in tatters: riven by violence, in a crisis of police/community relations, the police superintendent most identified with the reforms fired by the mayor, the state's attorney voted out of office, and DOJ likely poised for a takeover. “If the Chicago model has failed this city,” Time asked, “does the fault lie with the model, or with Chicago? And what does that mean for other cities where police are struggling to redefine their mission?”
In fact, that work hasn't failed—not yet, at any rate—and it's not important because Chicago is doing it. Rather, Chicago is doing it because it is important. And despite all of the city's horrific problems, and perhaps even because of them, it remains important.
It's easy to forget that not all that long ago there were clear signs that real progress was being made in Chicago: 2014 had the lowest levels of violence since 1965, and police shootings, arrests and complaints against police were all down. Then came the still-mysterious violence spike that hit many cities in 2015—and then the city exploded in the wake of videotape and other revelations about Laquan McDonald's killing by a police officer. That anger and resentment, and the policies that have fueled it, have been building for years and will not soon be addressed to anybody's full satisfaction.
But that prior progress was built on a solid platform. One plank I've been involved with for years is an approach to gang and gun violence that focuses—rather than on whole neighborhoods—on the very small population in any city at highest risk for both violence and victimization. This is an approach that a recent Harvard review of the social scientific violence prevention literature said baldly “has the largest direct impact on crime and violence of any intervention in this report.” Two of the most recent peer-reviewed, published studies found thatone such intervention reduced gun victimization by about a third among the gangs involved, and that another reduced violent offending by fully half among the felons it addressed. Those two studies? Of work implemented in Chicago as part of the Police Laboratory's “failed” police/researcher partnership.
Another plank addresses the most burning issue in American policing: the clear fact that it has lost the trust—if it ever had it—of angry minority communities all across the country. Black Americans, especially, have less faith in police to be fair, respectful and effective. Scholars have captured this reality as “legitimacy”—where legitimacy goes down, particularly in stressed communities, crime goes up.
Yale professors Tracey Meares and Tom Tyler helped Chicago develop a “procedural justice” curriculum for the department designed to reset officers' interactions with the public. The training is changing officer attitudes for the better; it will take more time to know whether it's making a difference to the public. But as the country's policing crisis has grown steadily, desperate departments have flocked to Chicago to be schooled in the state-of-the-art approach. DOJ has made procedural justice and the Chicago curriculum a centerpiece in itsNational Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice, a demonstration program to drive progress in police/community relations in six cities nationally.
When Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's Task Force on Police Accountability released itsblistering report earlier this month, one of its central recommendations was that the department should follow the National Initiative reconciliation framework. I'm deeply involved in that, and can report that some of the most powerful insights into how to go about it came from observing reconciliation work that former CPD Superintendent Garry McCarthy began pretty much the moment he hit Chicago and continued, largely under the radar, the entire time he was there.
Had the spotlight been turned elsewhere, it would have illuminated something quite different. Oakland, Calif.—until recently a national poster child, like Chicago, for uncontrollable violence—just saw its quietest six months in 40 years, using the same strategies as Chicago. New York City just reported its lowest violent crime numbers ever. Important parts of NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton's toolkit? His own version of the frank talk about policing's toxic history with the black community Garry McCarthy pursued in Chicago; research partnerships with many of the same people working in Chicago; his own version of Chicago's focus on high-risk potential offenders; and his own version of Chicago's procedural justice curriculum.
Those cities—and many others across the country thinking and acting more or less as Chicago—know what they're doing. Most fundamentally, no thinking police leader wants to go backward; the field has fully taken on board that locking up and locking down minority neighborhoods is disastrous, and that there is simply no alternative to building new relationships with angry communities. The ideas driving efforts in Chicago and all over the country are—for better or worse—the best ones we've got right now.
Chicago should be commended, not dismissed, for the work it is doing on behalf of its own public and for the country.
David Kennedy is the director of the National Network for Safe Communities at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a principal in the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice. He will serve as a panelist at Crain's Future of Chicago event on June 15. You can find more information about the half-day discussion here.
