CAPS Rises from the Grave

Of course, they're calling it something different. And they're pretending it's an original idea. But it's not and anyone with more than twenty years remember the older version:

• Mayor Lightfoot and Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown announced Thursday the expansion of the Neighborhood Policing Initiative in three more districts, putting officers in more one-on-one contact with people in the neighborhoods.
  
  The Neighborhood Policing Initiative has been tried in the 25th and 15th police districts and now will be put into effect in the 9th (Deering), 10th (Ogden) and 11th (Harrison) District.
  
  As part of the expanded initiative, each district will rollout new District Coordination Officers (DCOs) this fall, who will work directly with community members to resolve public safety issues through collaboration and remedy neighborhood issues with the help of beat officers, detectives, aldermen, area businesses and sister agencies. To ensure DCOs are fully integrated in the neighborhoods they serve, the CPD is also launching a new community-immersion training program, completing one of Mayor Lightfoot’s 90-day reforms announced in early June.

Back when CAPS first rolled out, one of the big selling points was Beat Integrity. Officers would work the same beat all the time so as to get a handle on recurring crime situations, build a rapport with the neighborhood, perhaps spot emerging crime trends or see a "little issue" that could develop into a "big issue" and nip it in the bud. This has actually been the basis for most good police work for decades as Officers were usually the first government functionary on a neighborhood scene and would (in theory) be able to stop, intervene or redirect the emerging crime pattern. Sometimes it even worked.

But then CAPS (like all government functions) became a money-eating monstrosity and a place to hide large numbers of useless officers (and bosses - LOTS of bosses) whose only function was to generate and keep track of numbers, numbers that tracked many non-police functions, but that aldercreatures needed so they could claim to be "doing something."

Many have tried to kill CAPS. Many more have realized the amount of untracked cash and material (donations and such) that flows through the program and kept it on life support for nearly thirty years now. But it remains a program with enough small successes to keep it around in some form.

This will be no different - much high praise, many press releases, some progress with stuff that could (and should) be handled by the Ward bosses in the old days, but eventually descending into the corrupt bureaucracy and backroom politics.