Editor's note - Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy - Editorial

We don't hear much about community policing these days in Chicago.

A reconstituted gang crimes unit, desk cops out on the street, specialized patrols dispatched to high-crime areas and cameras with flashing blue lights capturing it all on film appear to have taken precedence over the Chicago Police Department's once highly touted Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy.

Now entering its 11th year, CAPS used to be billed as one of the department's keys to reducing all kinds of crimes, block by block. Vandalism? CAPS would discourage it. Dangerous drug corners? Residents would be empowered to shut them down. High levels of violence? Police would work with community members to take back their streets, developing multi-layered strategies to solve those problems, together.

To be fair, CAPS was never offered as the city's only solution to stopping crime. And throughout its history, the program's critics have been plentiful. Back in 1999, in fact, a Chicago Reporter investigation revealed that CAPS was having little effect on crime rates in the South Side Englewood neighborhood, one of the city's busiest police districts. Though police officials disputed those findings, they acknowledged officers there had little down time to develop the relationships with residents so crucial for the program's success.

But CAPS did encourage a different kind of conversation between police and neighborhood residents from the one we are hearing now. Officers, they promised, would keep their beat assignments longer to get to know the residents they served. Those residents, they hoped, would begin to view police as their allies, providing valuable information that would lead to better crime fighting.

As flawed as the program might have been, it seemed to represent a willingness to rebuild confidence in police in communities scarred by decades of brutality, corruption, mistrust and high crime. While it surely did not give residents all the solutions they longed for, in many neighborhoods, it gave them some hope.

But, in a year of notoriously high homicide rates and the ongoing proliferation of hand-guns, the possibility of real partnership appears more difficult--for both sides.

As detailed in this month's cover story, more Chicagoans are dying at the hands of police, and most of them are African American. In the eyes of many activists, protesting those killings takes precedence over getting to know the local beat cop.

But, in the same neighborhoods, more residents have guns, and more of them are attacking police. Amid this, officers must respond to the demands of law-abiding citizens who want better protection. Add those tensions to a few high-profile incidents of police brutality, and you've got a recipe for frayed relations.

It means that some African Americans who see police coming want to get as far away from them as they can. In the mind of a trained officer, this is a natural response for a criminal who doesn't want to get caught. In the mind of a frightened black Chicagoan, it might be the only way to avoid becoming another statistic. The situation leads parents to teach their children to live in fear, not admiration, of police. And it tests the mettle of officers who must return daily to communities with no welcome mats.

Both sides, however, agree that reducing crime has to be the police department's number one priority. And, so far, there are some encouraging signs: Recent reports indicate the city's homicide rate is falling, at last. Still, it appears any future successes will be tempered by a very different challenge: Rebuilding trust between police and Chicago's black community.

These latest efforts by our police department may make some inroads into solving that problem. In the meantime, it seems awfully hard for even the best-trained officers to serve a community that runs from them.

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