CPD's Shepard-Byrd Hate Crime Program

The Chicago Police Department (CPD) proposes to implement a Hate Crime Reporting Community Pilot Program. The purpose of the program is to encourage the reporting of hate crimes, hate incidents, and community tensions that may lead to hate crimes in communities of the City of Chicago that experience higher levels of hate crimes. The program will entail working with the Chicago Commission on Human Relations (CCHR) and an ethnically diverse group of eight community organizations (community partners) strategically located across the city that serve the Black, White, Asian, Latinx, LGBTQ+, Jewish, and Muslim communities.

The expected outcomes of the program include improved awareness and understanding about hate crimes and an increase in hate crime reporting in the specific communities who are the intended beneficiaries of this project. It is also expected that there will be an increase in reported hate incidents and community tensions. The subrecipient community partners will serve as alternate sites where the public can go to report hate crimes, hate incidents, and community tensions. For hate incidents and hate crimes, the community partner liaison will not take a report but will instead call 911 to have a police officer come to the agency. The liaison will remain with the victim to provide support and assistance, including translation services, if needed.

CCHR will provide training to the agencies about hate crimes and the victim assistance process. To ensure a legally sound police report—which will be instrumental in the potential prosecution of these acts—agency representatives will be instructed not to initiate the taking of a report. Similarly, when a resident comes to one of the partner agencies to report a community tension, the community representative will contact CCHR, which will then send a human relations specialist to visit the site to speak with the resident. CCHR human relations specialists are trained mediators who work with parties to resolve disputes before tensions escalate into violence.

CCHR will also develop educational outreach materials for the project and conduct community outreach presentations with the assistance of the community partners, who will help identify appropriate sites for the trainings and help to build audiences.