CPD & CVI Professional Understanding
Clients: Chicago Office of The Mayor, Chicago Department of Public Health, Chicago Police Department, Community Safety Coordination Center
Partners: UChicago Booth School of Business (Fellow)
Challenge: Starting in 2020, the City of Chicago, Cook County, and the State of Illinois significantly increased investment in community violence intervention (CVI) services in Chicago – including street outreach – as part of a holistic and community-driven approach to violence reduction. As street outreach teams respond to more incidents, there is a need for clarity on roles and protocols between the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and CVI providers.
Action: In 2023, Civic Consulting Alliance convened CVI practitioners and CPD leaders to develop a common vision, protocols for notification, rules of engagement, and communication guidance to clarify the complementary but independent roles of street outreach programs and police. In a second phase of work, we developed recommendations for an interdisciplinary incident response protocol that incorporates street outreach, City staff, CPD, and other service providers for various scenarios. In 2024, we continued to use CPD data to monitor shooting incidents and notifications, and host monthly shooting reviews with pilot participants in order to build a monthly report on data, themes, and trends. We worked to launch more comprehensive CVI response data practices for this emerging field, including a tool for CVI organizations to share response information with CPD. We also built onboarding materials for new CPD Commanders and transitioned full ownership of this data review and management process to CPD leadership in partnership with CVI practitioners.
Result: CVI outreach providers and CPD now have a formalized understanding of how their efforts should complement each other in the common pursuit of community safety. The professional understanding has now launched in nine police districts and includes 20 CVI organizations. The new protocol is showing promising results by increasing the speed of shooting incident notifications to CVI providers, and enabling them to quickly respond, prevent retaliatory violence, and engage impacted persons in supportive services.
Metropolitan Peace Initiatives conducted training sessions on this groundbreaking work at the 2024 Professionalizing Law Enforcement-Community Engagement Training National Conference in May 2024.
