Making Progress in the Chicago Police Department, 1862–2024

Claims to have made progress are a mainstay of organizational reputation management. However, confusing and contradictory performance expectations can make progress difficult to locate among a police department’s priorities. A case study of the Chicago Police Department’s front-facing pronouncements over more than a century and a half clarifies how a bureaucracy works, stretches, and repackages ‘progress’ to resolve those confusions and contradictions. We find that progress claims featured more prominently and fervently during moments when the department had reason to believe its legitimacy was threatened. Within that general pattern, we also find specific patterns in the form that progress claims took. We observe the stable reliance on two techniques to gesture toward progress the police either promised to enact or that it claimed it had already delivered: the police shifted goalposts by cycling through inconsistent measures of favorable performance from one year to the next, and they drummed crises to dramatize the obstacles that favorable performance required them to overcome. By showing how both techniques reinforced one another, we clarify how a police department ‘makes’ progress.