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The Evaluation of Community Policing Initiatives in the Illinois State Police
Principal Investigator: Ernie Cowles

Beginning in 1993, the Illinois State Police (ISP) initiated a series of efforts to pursue Community Oriented Policing (COP) strategies. The most recent of these initiatives, the Community Oriented Policing Demonstration Center project, contained this embedded evaluation. The evaluation was slightly different than traditional assessments as it was designed to examine not only this project but the larger picture of the processes and outcomes of the other ISP COP initiatives as well. It also was unique in that an element of the evaluation targeted an enhancement of the ISP’s internal evaluation capacity. Primary project findings related to the Illinois State Police COP initiatives fall into four thematic areas. They include organizational support; the workload, work environment and careers; external relationships; and staff training.
Results indicate that one of the goals of the various ISP COP initiatives has been to improve the integration of the ISP with local communities and other law enforcement agencies in providing information, creating problem-solving partnerships and implementing community oriented policing strategies. However, internally, one of the dominant themes that emerged from this evaluation concerns the lack of perceived organizational support for ISP’s Community Oriented Policing efforts. There is little doubt that this viewpoint is impacting the implementation of the Illinois State Police COP’s efforts and ultimately, the sustainability of these programs. Clearly, there is a perceived lack organizational commitment to COP from top management to line staff with the weakest link in the integration of COP with the agency being at the lower level supervisory ranks. Despite the considerable amount of training that has occurred, it seems fair to conclude that more training will not, in itself, remedy this problem. The study results also suggest that the introduction of the ISP’s COP’s initiatives has impacted several facets of the job in both positive and negative ways. Even though officers generally believed engaging in COP increased their workload, over two-thirds agreed that it made police work a more pleasant experience. However, although officers enjoyed engaging in COP, they felt that being involved in this was not particularly helpful to their career within the agency. This suggests the ISP must develop ways to recognize and promote community-policing activities that are not traditionally part of an officer’s duties. While engaging in community policing activities appears to lead to greater internal job satisfaction, until the agency develops performance measures that recognize these non-traditional activities, staff will be reluctant to make commitments to this approach for fear of damaging their careers. Traditional measures tend to focus on activities, that is, what officers do, rather than on outputs and outcomes, which are the results of these activities. Developing sound measures of outputs and outcomes fits well with the philosophic basis of community policing, and the ISP should direct attention at identifying these within the framework of its larger mission.