The Little Village Gang Violence Reduction Project in Chicago

would gradually reduce its commitment to administer andsupervise the community youth-work unit. The Chicago PoliceDepartment should consider contracting youth-work servicestargeted to older hardcore gang youth from Neighbors AgainstGang Violence, with close oversight from the [new]10 th DistrictGang Violence Reduction Project Coordinator.The University of Chicago would expect to terminate fullyits coordination and provision of youth work services by August30,1995. It would begin to transfer coordination and supervisionof the youth worker unit in February 1995, but retain oversight andfunding responsibility for the youth-work unit until August 30 th .”The problem of transfer of the Project remained unsolved, pending promised meetingsamong representatives of the Chicago Police Department, the Illinois Criminal JusticeInformation Authority, and the University of Chicago.In a memo of February 1996, to the Director of the Research and Development Division(R & D) of the CPD, the Acting Director (C. K.) of the Illinois Criminal Justice InformationAuthority summarized the February 7 th GVRP meeting with the assistant R & D Director held atthe Little Village Adult Probation Project Office, as follows:“I found our discussion revolved around the following things:• Team approach: Over and over again, everyone stressed theimportance of the Project being a collaborative effort. It appearedthe feeling of the group was that the whole was greater than thesum of parts. Each Project team member believes he or she isbetter equipped to do his or her job because of the participation ofother members of the team.• Information: It was clear to me that those present felt they hadaccess to more information which assisted them in the performanceof their jobs than they would if the team was not in place.Information was gathered both in general and relative to specificincidents. I found it particularly noteworthy that police officersG.S. and R.C. are viewed as “ resources” by other police agencies(FBI, ATF, County Sheriff).17.3