Name: Chicago police announce weekly community service for summer patrol unit, but one alderman calls it ‘fluff’ without more engagement
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Chicago police announce weekly community service for summer patrol unit, but one alderman calls it ‘fluff’ without more engagement

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AdvertisementBy Chicago TribuneJul 10, 2020 at 6:18 pmChicago police Superintendent David Brown announced plans Friday for a new community policing initiative that would require the department’s summer patrol unit to engage in service projects every week across the city’s neighborhoods.The plan is an attempt to build trust with residents and combat escalating violence, Brown said.Advertisement“This builds trust, getting to know people before you take enforcement action builds trust,” he said during a news briefing in Woodlawn. “It gives officers a valuable perspective on what they are called upon to act.”The initiative kicked off Friday with an Operation Clean mission in that neighborhood, during which police and other city departments joined residents to help clean up the area.AdvertisementAt the event, Brown emphasized the summer patrol officers can be deployed anywhere in the city at a moment’s notice. The unit has been used in past years to address violence spikes.“However, this is not a roving strike force,” Brown said. “These officers ... are here to supplement local efforts to keep people safe and save lives. ... This is just the start of a larger effort to build trust and relationships between police and Chicago residents.”Brown has said the department is planning a separate citywide team to suppress violence, a controversial idea that has come and gone in Chicago.But Friday’s announcement could be a precursor. Details of the new permanent roving team are being finalized, but it would also have a community service aspect, Brown has said.The move follows an especially bloody July Fourth weekend in Chicago, during which at least . The Chicago-area homicide rate in 2020 has risen by , marking an uptick in violent crime that has seen frequent in recent weeks.CPD will add 66 officers to the summer mobile patrol over the next two weeks. Projects planned include neighborhood peace marches, prayer circles, Operation Clean missions, food drives and COVID-19 resource distributions, Brown said.“The idea here is simple: Whenever it looks good, the residents feel good about themselves and their neighborhoods,” he said. “And that makes a community safer.”Jeanette Taylor, an alderman for Chicago’s 20th Ward, spoke at the event. But afterward she told the Tribune that CPD didn’t have any conversations with residents before launching the initiative, which she believes is a publicity stunt unless the police do more to help the community in other areas.Advertisement“I’m not into stuff just to be doing it,” Taylor said. “I want us to have some thought-out, hard conversations that’s hard to have and then do the work. This has been going on for centuries, this is nothing new. So how do we have a thought-out process that includes the community and all the stakeholders and we decide what’s to be done?”Taylor said she was only at the event to show up for her community, but police failed to engage Woodlawn residents since they didn’t do enough outreach before the event.“We just need coordination,” Taylor said. “There’s no way you in Woodlawn and you don’t get the majority of Woodlawn to show up. But because you didn’t do a good job with outreach, that’s what you get, fluff. And that’s what it looks like to me: fluff.”Corey Brooks, CEO of Project H.O.O.D., a nonprofit that works with CPD on violence prevention, said the new initiative is a step in the right direction but is only a starting point in restoring trust with communities.The department is under a federal consent decree mandating reform. And as in other cities across the country, protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis gave way to looting and unrest here, further straining the department’s relationship with residents in some of the city’s struggling areas.“I’m not sure how much trust it can bring, but what I am sure of is that it’s going to bring more trust than what they have right now,” Brooks told the Tribune after the Friday announcement of the new effort. “Right now there is absolutely no trust for police in the community, and so engaging in the community, doing projects in the community, having conversations with the community can only increase that trust level.”AdvertisementCPD to respond to sudden flare-ups in violence during warmer weather months. Capt. Michael Barz, who was put in charge of the unit and new community-based initiative, said the summer mobile unit consists of young officers embarking on their careers.“We have focused our community-building in the same areas that we do our enforcement, and that’s primarily on the South and West sides of Chicago,” Barz said during the Woodlawn news briefing.In response to a question about how the officers will suppress violence, Brown said CPD has experience and data on where violence was occurring over the last three weekends, which he asserted are likely gang conflicts around the drug trade.“We will be aggressively enforcing the law as it relates to people (using) illegal guns, people doing violent crime,” Brown said. “But that is not the end-all be-all in reducing violence. That’s one part of what you see today — we want to be partners with this community, and we want to work together to reduce violence.”He said he planned to eventually get to a point when officers are doing community service all the time, every day each week.“You really have to be where people really see that your efforts are not just enforcement,” Brown said. “And I think that’s important in the way we’re describing summer mobile is that we’re directing them. It’s an order from me to do community service projects. It’s part of their work day.”AdvertisementBrooks said the community has to move forward in working with police, but officers should also extend community service events citywide instead of concentrating them only on Chicago’s South and West sides.“If we go on their past record, their past record is not that great,” Brooks said. “But I think we have to be willing to give people another opportunity to get it right. ... I hope and pray that this time they will get it right.”kelsmith@chicagotribune.com Advertisement

AdvertisementBy Chicago TribuneJul 10, 2020 at 6:18 pmChicago police Superintendent David Brown announced plans Friday for a new community policing initiative that would require the department’s summer patrol unit to engage in service projects every week across the city’s neighborhoods.The plan is an attempt to build trust with residents and combat escalating violence, Brown said.Advertisement“This builds trust, getting to know people before you take enforcement action builds trust,” he said during a news briefing in Woodlawn. “It gives officers a valuable perspective on what they are...

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Kelli Smith

The Chicago Tribune is a daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States, owned by Tribune Publishing. Founded in 1847, and formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" (a slogan for which WGN radio and television are named), it remains the most-read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region. It had the 6th highest circulation for American newspapers in 2017.

Chicago police announce weekly community service for summer patrol unit, but one alderman calls it ‘fluff’ without more engagement

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