WHEN a Chicago gang member was shot in the throat earlier this year, the local police commander faced the prospect of a vicious gangland war.

However, the man he called to avert it was no police officer but Rick Jackson, a former drug dealer who looks like Mike Tyson and admits he used to be “a menace in my community”.

Jackson took to the streets in search of the gang leaders no Chicago cop could ever hope to reach. “We went over there and we talked to these guys and then we went somewhere else and talked to some other guys, and there was no retaliation,” Jackson said last week.

He called the police commander, James Jackson (no relation), and told him not to worry. Another murder had been averted by the unusual collaboration between the city’s remarkably progressive police force and a reformed hoodlum turned community activist who works for a local anti-violence group called CeaseFire.

Chicago police’s willingness to co-operate with street-savvy former gangsters such as Jackson lies at the heart of a community crime-fighting programme that was hailed last week by Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, as a possible blueprint for British police.

Turning his back on the better-known strategy of zero tolerance — as invented in New York and widely exported elsewhere — Blair praised the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (Caps) for achieving a crime drop similar to New York’s without the friction that accompanied heavy-handed crackdowns on petty crime.

Introduced in 1993 to widespread derision within the Chicago police department, the Caps programme has since been credited with changing the face of some of America’s most violent neighbourhoods.

A murder rate of almost 1,000 a year in the early 1990s has been slashed by more than half. The introduction of regular neighbourhood “beat meetings” between police and residents has vastly improved community relations and contributed to falling crime rates.

“The rank-and-file officers used to say the programme was called Caps because it meant they had to use cap guns not real weapons,” said Professor Arthur Lurigio, head of the criminal justice department at Chicago’s Loyola University. “But no one argues with the results. There has been a consistent downturn in criminal activity over more than a decade and I think Caps has become part of the police department fabric.”

It was at the height of Chicago’s crack cocaine wars in the early 1990s that Richard Daley, the mayor, sought a new policing model. His first clever move, Lurigio said, was to keep the words “community policing” out of the new programme.

Many American police officers at the time were contemptuous of so-called “community” measures. They saw them as liberal follies.

“I remember sitting in on early meetings and hearing officers say, ‘This is just a fad, this won’t stick’,” said Dr Candice Kane, CeaseFire’s chief executive. “But it did stick. It became a lot more than the usual rhetoric of citizens getting involved.”

The beat meetings — named after local officers’ beats — began to attract heavy turnouts of residents. Police started gathering valuable intelligence about local criminal activities.

Instead of creating a specialist community relations unit — which most officers would be desperate to avoid — the city trained all 14,000 of its officers in grassroots communication techniques. “The key to Caps’ success was sharing information between the department and the community,” said David Bayless, a Chicago police spokesman.

On the drug-addled streets of West Garfield Park, one of Chicago’s most violent black districts, Jackson had decided it was time to change his life. Dealing drugs had almost killed him. “But the Lord blessed me, and I’ve been clean for nine years now,” he said.

Five years ago, he started trying to make a difference. He would talk to the drug dealers on street corners. He started recruiting ex-convicts when they returned from prison.

He tried to find alternative activities for bored, jobless youths. He would set up barbecue grills in known criminal hotspots, in the hope that would-be drug-dealers would come and eat hot dogs instead.

“We had a 67% decrease in gun violence in the first two years and sustained the decline for the next two years,” he said. “People started to take note.”

Among those who took note was the then district police commander, Dana Starks, who used to encourage his men to contact Jackson and his colleagues in CeaseFire to help them keep local youths out of trouble.

Starks has since been promoted to a senior position in the Caps programme — not least because of the dramatic fall in crime in West Garfield Park.

“The police have realised they can’t do this alone,” said Lurigio. Britain’s top police chief seems to have reached the same conclusion.

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