Public Safety
& Criminal Justice

We facilitate collaborative public safety and criminal justice reform with institutions and communities to ensure that everyone is safe and justice is exercised equitably.

OPPORTUNITY AREAS

Violent Crime Reduction
Accountability and Community Trust
Equitable Application of Justice

KEY PROJECTS

Chicago Office of the Mayor - Violence Reduction
Chicago Police Department - Performance Evaluation System
Partnership for Safe and Peaceful Communities

“The Civic Consulting Alliance team gave us the capacity, expertise on collaborative decision-making, and planning tools we needed to amplify our violence reduction efforts and lay the foundation for this work over the years to come.”

— Susan Lee, Former Deputy Mayor Public Safety, City of Chicago

2020 Public Safety Snapshot

Indicators

Civic Consulting Alliance uses long-term indicators to evaluate our progress towards our platform visions and our mission. These indicators also help us understand how the challenges we seek to address impact people in our region inequitably, shaped by factors like race, ethnicity, gender, or where one lives. In turn, these indicators highlight that our solutions must be equity-focused and guided by the people they most impact.

HOMICIDES, SHOOTINGS, AND RACE BY COMMUNITY AREA
City of Chicago | 2019

Chicago continues to experience higher levels of shootings and homicides than our peer cities. Moreover, gun violence disproportionately impacts Black and Latinx Chicagoans, a pattern that can be clearly seen on a map of our city’s neighborhoods, due to decades of policies and practices promoting segregation and concentrating resources in predominantly White neighborhoods.

SHOOTINGS & HOMICIDES (#)
City of Chicago | 2001-2019

The graph below depicts the total number of non-fatal shooting incidents and homicides per year in Chicago. Both types of violence increased dramatically in 2016 and 2020.

Note: Graph reflects data through November 4, 2020.

Avg. Daily Population (#)
Cook County Jail | 2010-2019

The graph below depicts the average number of people held in Cook County Jail per day, overall and by race/ethnicity.

Note: Disaggregated data by race is only available beginning in 2018.

Population (%) - By Race
Cook County | 2019

The graph below depicts the racial composition of Cook County in 2019.

KEY TAKEAWAY

The average daily population of the Cook County Jail has decreased since 2010, suggesting progress towards a more just and efficient pretrial system. However, while Black residents made up 24% of Cook County’s population overall, on average, 72% of Jail residents were Black, demonstrating that significant racial inequities in our criminal justice system remain.

Chicago Office of the Mayor – Violence Reduction

In 2016, Chicago experienced a dramatic spike in shootings and homicides. Since then, the City, other public agencies, nonprofits, and community members across Chicago have ramped up their efforts to sustainably reduce violence. While these efforts have contributed to important progress, violence in Chicago remains unacceptably high. Moreover, in 2020, gun violence has again gone up precipitously, particularly in neighborhoods on the South and West Sides—compounding the disproportionate harm COVID-19 has wrought on these communities. Gun violence is an issue of paramount importance to our collective well-being and to our region’s prosperity—it is a crisis that affects us all, and that we must work together to solve.

To strengthen Chicago’s focus on reducing gun violence, in the spring of 2019, newly-elected Mayor Lori Lightfoot committed to building out the Mayor’s Office Public Safety Team; establishing the Office of Violence Reduction; and boosting coordination between the people, organizations, and agencies working across the city to reduce community violence. To advance the City’s efforts, Civic Consulting Alliance supported multiple violence reduction and prevention initiatives of the Mayor’s Office between June 2019 and July 2020.

“The Civic Consulting Alliance team gave us the capacity, expertise on collaborative decision-making, and planning tools we needed to amplify our violence reduction efforts and lay the foundation for this work over the years to come.”

— Susan Lee, Former Deputy Mayor Public Safety, City of Chicago

Summer 2019 Violence Prevention

With the Mayor taking office in late May 2019, the Public Safety Team had very little time to ramp up before the start of the summer—typically the most violent time of the year, when about 50% of annual homicides and 40% of non-fatal shootings occur. Accordingly, the Mayor’s Office called upon Chicago CRED, UChicago Crime Lab, and Civic Consulting Alliance to collaborate with the City to develop and implement gun violence reduction initiatives.

From June through October 2019, Civic Consulting Alliance and our pro bono partners supported four initiatives that laid the groundwork for the new administration’s approach to gun violence (summer Public Safety Cabinet meetings, Regional Coordination meetings with stakeholders from across the South and West Sides, backbone operational support, and 2020 budget development), and established a governance structure that connects people from across the city and its violence prevention infrastructure with the Mayor’s Office.

Comprehensive Violence Reduction Strategy

Building upon the foundational work above, between September 2019 and February 2020, Civic Consulting Alliance and our pro bono partners helped the Mayor’s Office develop and launch a comprehensive violence reduction strategy. The strategy aims to measurably reduce gun violence over the next four years, and to guide the prioritization, coordination, and implementation of violence reduction efforts and resources.

Specifically, Civic Consulting Alliance:

With pro bono partner BCG, operationalized the Office’s vision including: translating its strategy to high-impact prevention and intervention programs serving neighborhoods with the highest levels of violence, estimating the programmatic funding needed to reduce violence, and updating the Office’s 2020 budget allocation to align with the new strategy;
Managed the development of RFPs for $7.5 million to expand community-based street outreach and integrate trauma-informed victim services for those who are at the highest risk of violence; and
Developed an updated approach to the City’s summer 2020 violence reduction efforts, leveraging the Safety Cabinet (including developing a revised meeting structure in which planning began in January 2020), and Regional Coordination community planning and coordination (including developing a community needs survey and toolkit).

Violence Reduction Planning

In early 2020, the City received a grant from the State of Illinois to engage community stakeholders in building out their violence reduction strategy into a comprehensive plan that would align City, County, and State resources and priorities. From February through July 2020, Civic Consulting Alliance provided coordinating and management support to the Mayor’s Office to engage stakeholders and develop this plan, including onboarding staff project managers, coordinating weekly meetings, and supporting the compilation of the report.

The planning process incorporated broad input from government officials, service providers, faith leaders, philanthropic and university partners, individuals with lived experience with gun violence, and advocates. As a result of this collaborative work, together with other ongoing City efforts, the plan—"Our City, Our Safety”—aligns stakeholders around a strategy that approaches violence as a public health crisis, one treatable by addressing the issues at its root—such as systemic racism, disinvestment, and poverty.

While the epidemic of violence does not have any quick fixes, we are hopeful that our work with the City has created the collaborative, flexible infrastructure needed to create long-term change and to respond to acute challenges like those brought by 2020. Moreover, we are proud to have contributed to an effort that is expanding investments in and coordination with community-based violence reduction infrastructure, which has proven even more critical as our city continues to grapple with the effects of COVID-19 on public health, economic well-being, and violence levels.

OUTPUTS

Increased capacity—supported four violence reduction initiatives and increased the Mayor’s Office’s Public Safety Team’s capacity by eight staff over summer 2019
Governance structure—developed for public safety cabinet coordination to ensure the City's violence reduction efforts are collaborative and shaped by community organizations' input
Two RFPs—developed to distribute City funding to expand community-based street outreach and integrate trauma-informed victim services for those who are at the highest risk of violence
Framework—for a comprehensive violence reduction strategy to guide the prioritization, coordination, and implementation of violence reduction efforts and resources
Design and implementation—of a process that convened over 100 stakeholders across various sectors to build out recommendations for the City's comprehensive violence reduction plan

OUTCOMES

Mayor’s Office developed and quickly launched a summer violence reduction strategy in 2019, and laid the groundwork for its approach to gun violence
Governance structure connecting people on-the-ground—from across the city and its violence reduction infrastructure—with the City and the Mayor in place
$7.5 million in City funding awarded to 17 community-based street outreach and victim services organizations in communities at highest risk of violence
Regional coordination meetings between Mayor’s Office and other violence reduction stakeholders expanded to cover three of the five Chicago Police Department Areas, ensuring improved collaboration in these key communities
City equipped for the first time with a long-term, collaboratively developed violence reduction plan to guide the work needed to sustainably reduce violence

Chicago Police Department – Performance Evaluation System

As Chicago and the nation experience a year marked by rising gun violence and widespread protests around policing, Civic Consulting Alliance remains focused on facilitating collaborative public safety and criminal justice reform with institutions and communities to ensure that everyone is safe and justice is exercised equitably. For more than four years, we have supported the Chicago Police Department (CPD) in its efforts to reform departmental practices to improve the quality of policing and the relationship between police and the people they serve. In recent years, work has included projects to prepare for and respond to a court-monitored consent decree, to implement a new use of force training, to develop and implement CPD’s new strategic plan, and to implement a new vision for community policing.

In 2019, CPD endeavored to redesign its performance evaluation system, a recommendation of CPD’s strategic plan, and a requirement of the consent decree. The existing system did not effectively identify how officers were performing or who needed additional training and support. As a result, CPD sought to develop a more robust tool for professional development, personal growth, and accountability. Moreover, CPD aimed to ensure that this revised evaluation system would fulfill consent decree requirements related to evaluation criteria, internal processes, and training.

From August 2019 through July 2020, Civic Consulting Alliance and a pro bono fellow from McKinsey & Company supported the performance evaluation system redesign. We:

Documented current state performance evaluation processes within CPD, and national best practices across peer departments and industry experts;
Synthesized findings and proposed options for improvements to the current system;
Built out the recommendations into a revised performance evaluation process flow and identified resources needed for implementation; and
Developed an implementation plan and designed materials to support implementation.

“The performance evaluation system that Civic Consulting Alliance helped to design will ensure that evaluation is fair and consistent across the Department, and will enable us to build a stronger culture of coaching and effective supervision.”

— Chicago Police Department, Former Deputy Superintendent Barbara West

As a result of this project, CPD is now equipped with a performance evaluation system that evaluates those qualities critical to ensuring officer growth and accountability, including community policing, impartial policing, effective use of de-escalation, and constitutional policing. Moreover, the new system standardizes evaluations across officers and those in higher, supervisor-level rankings to ensure a single, consistent process.

Beginning in January 2021, CPD will pilot the new evaluation process in one district, assessing roughly 400 officers and supervisors. This will set the stage for the anticipated rollout of the process CPD-wide, to more than 13,000 sworn officers and supervisors, in 2023.

As our country strives to ensure fair and equitable policing practices and build trust between police and the communities they serve, we hope that CPD’s new performance evaluation process will contribute to a body of reforms that lead to more effective and just policing in Chicago and beyond.

OUTPUTS

Design and implementation plan—for a performance evaluation system based in best practice research and in compliance with consent decree criteria

OUTCOMES

CPD equipped with a performance evaluation system that evaluates those qualities critical to ensuring officer growth and accountability
Approximately 400 officers and supervisors to be evaluated from 2021-2023 in pilot of the new process
Rollout of the new evaluation process CPD-wide, to more than 13,000 sworn officers and supervisors, slated for 2023

Partnership for Safe and Peaceful Communities (PSPC)

In 2016, a coalition of funders formed the Partnership for Safe and Peaceful Communities (PSPC)—today a collaborative of nearly 50 funders working to reduce gun violence and rebuild police legitimacy in Chicago.

PSPC’s model is innovative, aligning philanthropic stakeholders with diverse missions to support proven and promising approaches to reduce gun violence. From the beginning, Civic Consulting Alliance has driven this work forward, building upon our body of Public Safety and Criminal Justice platform work and our experience managing complex collaboratives to provide project management, operational, strategy development, and fundraising support.

In 2020, we:

Convened monthly meetings of the Working Group, PSPC’s executive committee, to provide strategic direction and oversight;
Convened bimonthly meetings of all funder members to align on investment strategies, review progress, and share lessons learned;
Coordinated with communications leads and consultant to plan and execute communications strategies;
Coordinated with teams at UChicago Crime Labs, Northwestern University’s Neighborhood & Network Initiative, and MarginNotes that are conducting evaluations of PSPC’s direct services strategies—Heartland Alliance’s READI Chicago, Metropolitan Family Services’ Communities Partnering 4 Peace (CP4P), and the Chicago Fund for Safe and Peaceful Communities, respectively; and
Supported the development of a renewed goal and commitment from funders in 2019 to make a significant contribution to a comprehensive, coordinated, city-wide and City-led plan to achieve at least a 20% decrease in gun violence year-over-year through 2023.

“We are encouraged that the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago have begun providing public funding for community-based violence reduction efforts. This is a testament to the life-saving work of countless people on the ground. It also demonstrates the catalytic impact of early stage philanthropic funding for promising, evidence-based solutions.”

— John Palfrey, President, MacArthur Foundation

“The events of this year—first the COVID-19 crisis and its disproportionate impact on Black and Latinx communities, then the murder of George Floyd—have awakened Chicago and our nation to the long-standing racial inequities that underpin gun violence and so many other challenges.”

— Gillian Darlow, Chief Executive Officer, Polk Bros. Foundation

PSPC saw encouraging progress over its first three years, both in terms of increased public funding for evidence-based gun violence prevention strategies, and in terms of reductions in violence. In 2019 compared to 2016, Chicago experienced a 37% decline in homicides and a 40% decline in non-fatal shootings.

The year 2020, however, brought several significant events that demonstrate the need for continued focus on gun violence, and that will shape PSPC’s approach in the years ahead. First, homicides and shootings increased dramatically relative to 2019—by 27% and 42%, respectively, in the first half of the year. Second, the killing of George Floyd in May sparked widespread protests of police brutality and systemic racism, rapidly changing public discourse on police reform.

At the end of June, as PSPC headed into its fourth year, Civic Consulting Alliance and PSPC remained committed to investing in gun violence prevention strategies to sustainably and substantially reduce violence in Chicago. In the year ahead, we will support PSPC in a refresh of its portfolio of strategies, building upon the learnings of the past several years, and in pursuit of sustainably and substantially reducing violence in Chicago.

OUTPUTS

Growth—PSPC grew from 30 members in 2018 to nearly 50 in 2020, including funders who had not previously supported public safety issues, raising awareness of and support for violence reduction in Chicago
Strategic investments—More than $90 million committed to date to support an evidence-based portfolio of strategies to reduce gun violence, which included:

- Street outreach and transitional jobs

- Police reform and community engagement

- Gun policy reform

- Rapid-response grants for grassroots events and projects

“Civic Consulting Alliance’s project management skills and breadth of expertise is invaluable to ensuring that PSPC continues to progress towards its goal of reducing gun violence in Chicago amidst changing conditions and new challenges in our city.”

— Owen Washburn, Vice President, Global Philanthropy at JPMorgan Chase & Co.

OUTCOMES

PSPC’s two direct service grantees adapted to assist communities through COVID-19. CP4P street outreach workers acted as community health workers, while READI made cognitive behavioral therapy sessions virtual and continued to provide financial support to participants
Mid-study analysis of READI shows sizable reductions in shooting and homicide victimizations and arrests—the costliest forms of violence—among READI participants after 20 months, but no change in arrests for serious violent crimes more broadly. The study is not complete, however, if these promising results persist, READI has the potential to contribute to the safety and economic opportunity among residents who have been disconnected, underserved, and at grave risk of violence involvement
CP4P partner agencies engaged over 4,400 participants in case management, re-entry services, and victim assistance services in the first half of 2020, an increase of 48% compared to the same time period the previous year
Public funding for community-based violence prevention organizations has grown. In April 2020, Mayor Lightfoot awarded $7.5 million to local organizations working to reduce violence in city neighborhoods, including $6 million for CP4P’s street outreach services, and in 2019, Governor Pritzker signed legislation to legalize recreational marijuana which earmarks a significant share of the state’s profits for anti-violence efforts
In summer 2019, nearly 58,000 Chicagoans attended community events organized by 181 neighborhood organizations with funding from the Chicago Fund for Safe and Peaceful Communities

Platform Funders

In addition to the many pro bono partners acknowledged in the Public Safety and Criminal Justice projects described above, the following corporate and foundation partners committed philanthropic support to fuel our staff investments in our Public Safety and Criminal Justice platform:

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General Operating Funders

Our ability to maintain our flexible and responsive capacity to get big things done in all platforms relied on those philanthropic partners who provided general operating support for our mission:

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