The Little Village Gang Violence Reduction Project in Chicago

police, probation and youth workers, and to a lesser extent the neighborhood organizer. Theteam approach, however, did not translate into involvement and support by administrators ofpolice and probation once the Project was underway. There was relatively limited directcommunication and involvement between the street-level staff and administrators from theChicago Police Department and Cook County Department of Adult Probation. The CPD andCCDAP probably did not clearly know or understand what the street-level staff were doing. Thepolice tactical team and probation officers on the Project were largely on their own and did nothave sufficient backup and supervision.The close interaction between police and youth workers on the Project served not only toprovide better targeted police-suppression efforts, but also helped the Project police to becomeaware of and focus on the needs of gang youth for social assistance and service. The closeinteraction of team members also required the youth workers to take greater responsibility fordirectly supervising and controlling gang youth behavior, alerting Project police to gangincidents, and at times assisting police directly and indirectly with their law-enforcement role.The probation officers had a close relationship with police on the Project early on, and oftenwent on patrol with them. In the later years of the Project, the probation officers participatedless in joint patrolling with police, probably due to increased rigidity of probation agency policy,in part due to a failure to work out general collaboration arrangements with the CPD.A major limitation of the Project was a lack of commitment to community organizing andinteragency coordination in regard to the gang problem at the citywide level. Local agency andneighborhood organization efforts were weak, and resources too limited for effective grassrootsand interagency work. Community organization efforts should have been carried out by both17.16