ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the city's plan—and some of the reality—for "reengineering" the police organization to support problem solving. The organization itself would have to change for problem solving to tafce root and become part of the Chicago Police Department's ordinary routine. A portable version—the beat-plan binder—included beat profiles, crime analysis data, city service requests and several forms designed to help structure and monitor problem-solving efforts. Discussions of problem solving often involve assumptions about the role the community will play—assumptions arrived at too casually. Resident involvement is crucial because effective problem solving requires responsiveness to citizen input about community needs as well as about the best ways the police can help address them. A thoroughgoing problem-solving orientation inevitably leads to an expansion of the police mandate to include a broad range of concerns that previously lay beyond their job description.
