Thursday night I took a group of journalism students to a community policing beat meeting in the hopes they’d catch a glimpse of how the Chicago Police Department works.

They did.

The police department began implementing its community policing programs, known as CAPS, in 1993 and ’94, and officially it still touts the cops-and-residents-working-together approach as an effective way to keep city streets safer. “The City of Chicago has a new weapon in the fight against crime–and that new weapon is you, the community,” declares the community policing page on the department’s Web site. “By opening up the dialogue between police and community, CAPS is producing a number of important success stories at the neighborhood level.”