As our country and our city face a summer marked by rising gun violence and widespread protests around policing, Civic Consulting Alliance remains focused on facilitating public safety and criminal justice reform to ensure that everyone – residents and police – are safe and justice is exercised consistently across all communities. We have long supported the Chicago Police Department (CPD) in its efforts to reform Departmental practices in order 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 the Department’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 the Department’s strategic plan and a requirement of the consent decree. The existing system did not effectively identify how officers were performing or which needed additional training and support. As a result, CPD sought to make the performance evaluation process a more robust tool for professional development, personal growth, and accountability. CPD needed to:

• Document performance evaluation processes from within CPD, across peer departments, and industry experts;
• Identify strengths and opportunities for improvement in the current system;
• Define a new performance evaluation process and create the materials to facilitate this process; and
• Ensure compliance with 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:

• Documented current state processes and national best practices;
• Synthesized findings and proposed options for revisions to the existing 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

As a result of this project, CPD is now equipped with a performance evaluation system that includes the qualitative evaluative dimensions 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, who were previously reviewed using two dissimilar processes.

“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.”

—Deputy Superintendent Barbara West

From 2021 to 2023, CPD will pilot the new evaluation process in one district and among all members of rank Captain and above, assessing roughly 400 officers and supervisors.

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.