Since its launching in 1990, the Multnomah County’s Neighborhood D.A. Program has tackled numerous problems, among them: graffiti, gangs, illegal camping, chronic truancy, car prowls, pan-handling and elder abuse. What follows is a description of one strategy the office employed to address public-safety concerns.

Traditionally, in order to obtain a search warrant Portland police and prosecutors had to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that drugs were being sold on a property. This was a very high standard, one that usually required at least three undercover buys but also one that went above the requirements of statute and case law. After a thorough examination of case law, prosecutors determined that they only needed to prove that there was “probable cause” to believe someone was selling drugs on the property in order to obtain a search warrant.

This determination allowed the neighborhood prosecutors to develop an alternative method of obtaining a search warrant. From this arose the “community-driven search warrants,” which leveraged community resources by allowing neighbors to get involved. Prosecutors successfully argued in court that neighbors’ observations of suspicious activity—such as people coming in and out of a house at all hours of the day and night—supported by two or three hours of observation by police were enough to establish probable cause and obtain a warrant.

An important part of this plan was that the neighbors’ identities be kept confidential. “An affidavit from a police officer saying that these observations are accurate allowed us to keep warrants anonymous,” said Michael Kuykendall, a former neighborhood D.A. who helped develop the strategy. “The warrants would note how long the informant has lived in the neighborhood, the lack of criminal history, the fact that they were personally known to the officer, and then we’d have an officer sit on the property to prove the reliability of the neighbor’s observations.”

The citizen-driven warrants have gone through several iterations. Initially, prosecutors asked neighbors to keep detailed logs of drug house activity over weeks and even months. But they found that they were asking too much. “It’s difficult to get the neighbors to sit there and watch this place for four hours a night over months. And they’d pay attention to things that weren’t important or necessary to secure the warrant. For example, they would obtain license plate numbers, but they might work so hard to get them that they would fail to observe the patterns of activity we were interested in to obtain the warrant,” Hayden said.

Prosecutors then abandoned the detailed logs and created instead an affidavit for a search warrant that was essentially a checklist police officers could use to interview neighbors. The checklists are detailed but also easy to complete, allowing the officers to obtain thorough information quickly. The checklist warrants describe all the possible patterns that indicate likely drug sales, like people surreptitiously exchanging small items, including money, or cars driving by the residence slowly, or people looking nervously up and down the street as they enter and exit the house. A log took months to complete, but a checklist can be done in an afternoon.

Police officers then attempt to corroborate the information provided by the community. Corroboration can take the form of pre-existing “police reports, or undercover drug buys, or just purely our own observation,” said Police Officer Roger Axthelm, a neighborhood officer assigned to the Northeast Precinct. “We’ll either set up an observation from a vehicle, or a nearby house. We usually watch a couple of hours. ”

The best thing about the community-driven search warrants is “they’re really quick,” Axthelm said. “The fastest we’ve ever done one is two days between the time we first talked to the neighbor complainant and served the warrant.”

Those arrested as a result of the warrants are taken to community court (Multnomah County has four community courts, which focus on low-level offenses), where they are charged with a drug-related misdemeanor and usually receive a sentence of community service in exchange for a guilty plea, Hayden said. Meanwhile, the Police Bureau, city and the neighborhood D.A. officially contact the landlord and inform him or her that the property is in danger of being boarded-up by the city if the problems persist; more often than not the landlord decides evicting the problem tenant is the best course of action.

Out of 17 community-driven search warrants executed in the Northeast Precinct from April 2002 to May 2003, nine resulted in evictions. Four, involving owner-occupied buildings, resulted in owner citations and, in the case of a 70-year-old owner, referrals to a range of social services.

“In most cases the activity has gone away and not come back,” Hayden said. “We work with the landlords to ensure they don’t rent to more problem people.” 

Eric McDonald had been on the job for only six months when Austin District Attorney Ronald Earle asked him to work as the neighborhood district attorney in the downtown area. McDonald accepted, saying he was intrigued by the idea of focusing on the “overall problems in the community” rather than addressing problems in the courtroom, one offender at a time.

His aim initially was to establish a rapport with the community. He walked the streets of the district and introduced himself to storeowners and residents. He attended meetings of established community groups. And he actively brought community members together by establishing a crime advisory board. The board consists of representatives of social service providers, faith-based groups and law enforcement, as well as area residents and business owners.

“The goal of the board is to get the community involved and get a good cross section of everybody who is participating and working on downtown issues. It also helps prioritize what we want to focus on in the downtown area,” McDonald said. The board has about 30 invited members, about half of whom regularly show up at monthly meetings to identify hot spots and brainstorm solutions.

McDonald’s understanding of community concerns was enhanced by a survey that he distributed to local residential and business associations as well participants at meetings he attended. The seven-question survey, which about 250 people completed, asked questions like, “What do you feel are the major crime and crime-related problems in the downtown Austin community?” and “How safe do you feel in the downtown area during the day and night?”

It was the feedback from all these sources—community meetings, the crime advisory board and the survey as well as police data—that led McDonald to focus on burglaries of vehicles as a top priority.

“The commander of the area told me if you can reduce our burglary of motor vehicles you could go a long way in dropping the overall crime rate,” McDonald said, noting that police had recorded an average of 110 car burglaries a month. “Also, residents in the downtown area were telling us that they themselves or visitors they knew had had their cars broken into. It seemed to be an issue that really needed to be looked at, and one we thought we could have an impact on without simply making more arrests.”

McDonald created a task force to look at the issue. The task force included two officers from the Austin Police Department, a security manager from a large hotel, the president of the downtown area neighborhood association, a member of the downtown business association, a bar owner, an advocate for the homeless and someone representing the city’s lighting department. McDonald said he recruited participants based on their interest in the issue and the skills and knowledge they could bring to the topic.

“The first thing we did was look at Police Department stats and make hot spot maps to see where it was most prevalent. Then we actually visited the locations during the day and at night to check out what environmental changes could be made,” McDonald said. “That’s when we got this guy from Austin City Lighting involved, because we saw some areas where the lighting was bad.”  In another hot spot, task force members noted that trees were overgrown. They also found that vehicle burglaries were three to four times more common at night.  

Ultimately, the best information about the problem came from the offenders themselves. McDonald and a crime analyst from the Police Department actually interviewed about 15 convicted burglars. “It was amazing the similarity of the stories,” McDonald said. “Most were addicted to crack, although some were alcoholics. All for the most part were living on the street or on the verge of living on the street. Most admitted to being responsible for multiple car break-ins that they were never caught doing. One guy said he did over 700. He was a young kid, and he may have been lying a little bit, but who knows?”

The burglars said they could get in and out of a car in a matter of two minutes. They believed the probability of getting caught was fairly slim. “I could see how one person could be responsible for five or six of them in one night,” McDonald said. “The bottom line was that it didn’t matter if the car was a Mercedes, or old Honda, what would cause them to try and break in was if there was something of value that was visible when walking by, CDs, cell phones, quarters just sitting out. They didn’t break into the car to go digging.”

The information from these interviews led the task force to conclude that simply hiding valuables from view would put a dent in the number of burglaries. The focus then turned to education—that is, how to help potential victims reduce their vulnerability to theft.

The task force decided to create a flier in the form of a “vehicle inspection” survey. Beat officers and rangers (who are employed by the Downtown Austin Alliance, a business group) slip the survey, which offers a pass or fail grade, under windshield wipers. A “Pass” goes to vehicles with locked doors and no visible valuables. For those who fail, the survey warns in all capital letters, “Caution! You could have been a victim.”  Under “Fail” is a checklist of risks: property openly displayed; vehicle left open; parked in poorly lit or hard to observe location.

“When we first began to distribute the fliers, 70 percent of the cars had something of value visible,” McDonald said.

A local insurance company printed 10,000 flyers, which were distributed during the last four months of 2002. The flyers led to an immediate and significant drop in the number of burglaries the very first month—from about 110 to about 65, McDonald said.

The task force also encouraged a couple of businesses to put better lighting in adjacent alleys and the city replaced a number of street lights that had burnt out. Some bars and night spots also equipped their doormen and parking lot attendants with communication equipment so they could immediately report suspicious behavior. “A lot of the burglaries were happening in parking lots so we tried to educate the parking attendants to tell customers about stowing away their items. We actually posted 10 metal signs in the public parking garages that say ‘Stow away your items,’” McDonald said.

 “If we could keep it up on a monthly basis, I think that number of 65 or 70 a month would continue to drop. The key is to be committed to it for the long term,” McDonald said.

It was clear to even a casual observer that there was a significant homeless population in downtown Austin. But what was not clear was how the community should respond. In analyzing the problem, community prosecutor Eric McDonald discovered, almost by accident, that the homeless population included a number of recently-released inmates.
 
“I’d been told by the Salvation Army, which runs the largest shelter in the area, that occasionally they would see law enforcement vans from neighboring counties drop off people at their place,” McDonald said. Then McDonald confirmed that the state jail was dropping up to 60 people a month on the street in front of the shelter. “That’s when it clicked, that there literally is a revolving door,” McDonald said.

Many of the offenders had been arrested on drug charges. “Knowing that this area around the Salvation Army is a hot spot for crack, and knowing that so many of the offenders are addicted to crack, I couldn’t believe it was happening,” McDonald said. “I knew if we really wanted to have an impact on downtown on the vagrancy and crack cocaine, we’d have to do something about this because it’s creating an endless supply of these individuals.”

Fortunately, the administrators of the state jail were willing partners. As it turned out, the state jail simply didn’t have the resources to ensure that every inmate had a discharge plan, or that those with plans actually followed them. The prison sponsored a day when social service providers would come to the prison and meet with offenders, but offenders were not required to attend—and those with discipline problems were actually prohibited from participating. And even those with plans to enter, say, a half-way house, were still being dropped off in front of the Salvation Army and told to make their own way to the half-way house. The state jail had selected that location because of its proximity to many of the city’s social service providers—but the reality was that few of the former inmates were finding their way to services. “Once they’re on the street, they can score crack in five minutes so the chances of making it to the half-way house on their own were pretty slim,” McDonald said.

McDonald then contacted as many potential partners as possible, including the warden, halfway houses, drug rehabilitation facilities, AIDS service providers, homeless shelters and organizations that work with ex-offenders. “I tried basically to educate myself about all the potential resources for these guys,” McDonald said.

McDonald found that there seemed to be enough resources; the only problem was making sure that just-released inmates were linked with the proper ones. With the permission of the administrators at the state jail, McDonald decided to meet with each inmate before his release.  At each session he talks about available services, reviews what benefits the inmate might be entitled to, and then explains the consequences of re-offending. “Many have multiple convictions, and I tell them that they could face the three strikes law. I also mention to them that they are prohibited from possessing any type of firearm for the rest of their lives and if caught doing so would be held accountable in federal court through the [Department of Justice-funded] Project Safe Neighborhoods initiative. But I also emphasize that I’m there to help.”

After each meeting, McDonald arranges for post-release housing and the Austin Police Department provides donated clothes. Perhaps most important, upon their release the police drive each person to a temporary home. “Many say, ‘I keep telling the judge not to drop me back downtown after I serve my time, but I keep getting dropped back down there,’” McDonald said.

To monitor the effectiveness of the program, McDonald periodically runs the names of participants through the criminal database to see if any have been re-arrested. Results so far have been promising. From September 2003, when the program began, to January 2004, McDonald met with 59 soon-to-be-former inmates (who collectively had literally hundreds of criminal convictions) and 53 agreed to go to a halfway house outside of the downtown area.

Of the six who refused to participate, five have been re-arrested—some within days of their release and at least one has been re-arrested four times. Of the 53 in the program, however, only 10 have been re-arrested or received a field release citation for a new offense. “At this point it appears that the program is having an impact on reducing the recidivism in downtown and for the city as a whole,” McDonald said, noting that the 53 participants “are a very high-risk population—most are chronically homeless and some have literally 9 or 10 pages of criminal history.” 

Community prosecutors in Denver have developed an expertise in the area of dealing with alcohol-related violations. That expertise was developed through their work in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, where crimes connected to alcohol are a top priority for stakeholders. Here’s how prosecutors addressed the problem:

This first step was to ascertain priorities regarding crime and safety in the neighborhood. Community prosecutors did this by administering a survey, obtaining 247 completed forms from residents and other stakeholders in Capitol Hill.

Based on the results of their survey and discussions with the Capitol Hill Community Justice Council, prosecutors and the council members decided to focus on three issues for the coming year:  family violence, drug sales, and crimes connected to alcohol.

When it comes to alcohol, “Denver has an incredible saloon mentality, there are no checks and balances,” said Susan Motika, former Director of the Community Prosecution Division. In Capitol Hill, “We have scores and scores of bars and nightclubs, people vomiting on the street, cursing and swearing, and a city municipal code that’s doesn’t adequately address these problems.”

Community prosecutors researched the problem, finding that the number of liquor licenses in Denver had exploded in recent years. In 1996, for example, there were 804 licensed liquor establishments in Denver, but by the spring of 2002, there were 1,304 such businesses.

The residents of Capitol Hill acknowledged that most businesses were law abiding. But a few were linked to numerous problems, such as disruptive and unruly patrons staggering out onto residential streets, urinating and vomiting in alleys and breaking beer bottles. Residents also said that some stores were selling liquor to minors and visibly intoxicated people.

These problems were compounded by procedural obstacles, so that even if residents wanted to raise objections before city regulators, it was difficult for them to do so. Residents were given little or no advance notice of liquor licensing hearings; they also were ill equipped on their own to meet the exacting standards for denying, revoking or imposing conditions on existing licenses. (One problem, prosecutors discovered, was that legal notices about liquor licensing are printed in a New Jersey-based publication that is available only by subscription in Denver.)

Prosecutors decided to focus on a particular trouble spot—a liquor store that neighborhood stakeholders blamed for many community problems. The store was in an area saturated with businesses that sold liquor: in the 10-block radius surrounding the store, there were at least 113 liquor licenses. In addition, the liquor store had previously received three citations for violating the liquor code, and a hearing was scheduled to discuss the most recent violation (involving the sale of alcohol to a minor).

Ultimately, Susan Motika, in collaboration with community members, the city attorney’s office and other city agencies, developed a multi-pronged response to the problem consisting of the following components:

• The Capitol Hill Community Justice Council came up with the idea of circulating a petition calling for the revocation of the store’s liquor license. When an applicant requests a liquor license, the Department of Excise and License requests signatures in support of the application. There is no provision in the regulations, however, for collecting signatures to make the opposite point. Nonetheless, the Justice Council thought signatures showing that the community wanted the store’s liquor license revoked might be persuasive to the hearing officer. Seventy-five signatures were collected.
• The prosecutors from the District Attorney’s Office and the City Attorney’s Office encouraged community members to attend the hearing on the violation. (Fifteen attended and three testified.)
• Prosecutors did legal research to support their arguments in favor of revocation at the hearing. (For instance, a fourth violation against the store had been issued in the interim, and prosecutors found a regulation allowing them to submit evidence about the fourth violation at the hearing at which, technically, only the third violation was supposed to be discussed.)
• The Denver D.A.’s Community Justice Unit wrote two legal education handbooks on the liquor code for community members. One handbook explains how businesses obtain a new liquor license; the other addresses the process of sanctioning licensees for liquor code violations.
• The community prosecution team, in collaboration with the Denver City Attorney and community groups, sponsored a community forum on new liquor licenses.

An important part of any problem-solving initiative, of course, is the ultimate result. In this instance, community prosecutors logged a number of important outcomes. The most immediate and tangible result occurred shortly before the commencement of the hearing on the third violation when an employee of the store relinquished the liquor license at the Department of Excise and License. In other words, faced with a well-organized opposition, the storeowner called it quits.

In a further effort to measure outcomes, the community prosecution team handed out a survey to community residents who attended the forum on new liquor licenses. Question 1 asked people to rate whether the provision of new liquor licenses was an important topic for education in the Capitol Hill neighborhood; 83 percent of the participants responded that this topic is very important. Another question asked if the handbook, “A Community Guide to New Liquor Licenses,” provided useful information; 88 percent of participants agreed that it did.

The success of the initiative has led to additional long-term planning in this area.  The office is currently co-writing a guide with a national perspective (tentatively titled “Tactical Guide to Problem Bars and Liquor Stores”) with the Travis County (Austin, Texas) and Richmond County (Staten Island, N.Y.) district attorney’s offices, and also participating in the creation of a citywide task force on liquor licensing procedures.

In addition, successful closing of a problem liquor store has spurred other neighborhood organizations from other parts of Denver to advocate for new rules to expand resident participation in the liquor licensing process and to enhance penalties for liquor code violations. Thus an issue that began with a neighborhood liquor store is evolving into a citywide grass-roots effort.

A "virtual roundtable" of experts answers questions about community prosecution.

How would you define community prosecution?

Dr. Catherine Coles
Researcher and Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
I see community justice as justice officials working directly with the community and giving high priority to the concerns and priorities of community members. Also, community justice attempts to build a capacity within the community for improving and maintaining public safety. Community prosecution is doing just that. There is a real commitment to citizen priorities. That means that citizen priorities can have an impact on the work that prosecutors do, whether it’s by affecting the weighting of cases that they process, the cases prosecutors choose to file and focus on, or how particular cases might be handled. To me, community justice also involves problem solving, carried out in a coordinated and collaborative fashion that involves justice agencies working together with various governmental bodies, the private sector, and citizens themselves. Citizens have described this to me as ‘a new way of government doing business in our community.’ So, I draw problem solving into the community justice framework, and see it as a central part of community prosecution as well. 

click here to read full interview

Susan Motika
Former Director of the Community Prosecution Division
Office of the Denver District Attorney
Denver, Colorado
Community prosecution is a proactive approach like community policing. It's about forming a partnership with the community and not being merely in a reactive mode of reporting on the progress of cases. The goal is to support community capacity-building efforts so that neighbors can identify problems and come up with effective strategies for dealing with crime and quality-of-life problems. We involve the community as a partner to develop solutions, and we develop partnerships with community policing so that community prosecutors and community police have a unified strategy. 

Bart Dickinson
Former Community Prosecution Coordinator
Frayser County Community Court
Memphis, Tennessee
I'm from a small town where people know each other. The police know everybody and the prosecutor knows everybody. And really, in a big city, a community prosecutor is like a small town prosecutor. You get to know the people in the community; you get to know the people who are concerned with the community; and the people who are violators and defendants in the community, as well. 

Mike Kuykendall
Former Manager of the Community Prosecution Program
American Prosecutors Research Institute
Alexandria, Virginia
[Community prosecution is] a grassroots effort by the local elected prosecutor to get their assistant prosecutors, citizens, local government resources, police and other stakeholders in the community involved in identifying low-level criminal offenses and neighborhood livability issues and engaging in long-term solutions to those offenses. The emphasis is not on arrest and prosecution, but on learning new ways to prevent crime from occurring... That's the vision the federal government has embraced as have the majority of jurisdictions now practicing community prosecution...

We do on occasion see prosecutors who claim they're embracing community prosecution by putting lawyers in the field to do just drug prosecutions or other traditional prosecution, but that's not really community prosecution because that's not involving the community in solving problems that affect their neighborhood.

click here to read full interview

How do community prosecutors communicate effectively with stakeholders?

Wanda L. Dallas
Former Assistant District Attorney
Atlanta, Georgia
Listening. When I go to meetings—and I go to 30 meetings a month—I don’t let them spend a lot of time complaining anymore. I used to in the beginning. What I realized is that the longer a person complains about what’s going on, the bigger it becomes in their mind, and they inflame the passions of the whole group, and by the time you’re done, you’re an hour into complaining and you’re no closer to the solution.

As community prosecutors, we’re supposed to be problem-solvers. So the first thing that I do, is I go in there and say, “I want one person to tell me what the problem is—the short version.” I get the short version. And now we have so many partners. We’ve got at least 30 partners. We’ve aligned ourselves with everyone we need to in the City of Atlanta to really do some things. So I listen, and I make an assessment. I’ll say, “This is what it sounds like your problem is. These are the solutions I think we need to explore. I’m going to get in touch with some people and I’m going to come back to you.” All of our dialogue has to be about solving the problem. If we can cut all of the complaining and get straight to the problem, we’ll have a lot more room and time to deal with the solution.

click here to read full interview

A "virtual roundtable" of experts answers questions about community prosecution.

Is there a ‘right’ way to organize a community prosecution program?

Dr. Catherine Coles
Researcher and Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
There are many different types of community prosecution units that have been started around the country… You might assign a certain number of prosecutors to work out in the community or at least to be a liaison to a particular area—to meet with residents/business owners and learn about their concerns. Then you assign responsibility for a particular geographical area, for handling all cases from that area as well as for maintaining community contact and working with police and other criminal justice agencies. I think something that’s been tried less often but would also work would be assigning particular prosecutors in an office to address certain types of problems of concern to a community—say prostitution, auto theft.

click here for full interview

Roxann Pais
Chief Community Prosecutor, Dallas City Attorney's Office
Dallas, Texas
Start small. That’s what we did, we started small, and I think it’s a result of us starting small that we grew so fast. We took small successes, and we showcased them. But some of those successes were amazing. I mean you could find one problem property that had more than 100 calls for service during a six-month period. You could actually quantify that in money, if you think about how much money is spent on that particular property, and then you get the community prosecutor involved and now there are no more calls for service to the property. So start small. Don’t be afraid to share your success stories. Always give credit where credit is due.

click here to read full interview

Charles J. Hynes
Kings County District Attorney
Brooklyn, New York
The police were already developing community policing strategies, so we started focusing on community prosecution. We took a look at the county: 84 square miles, 2.5 million people and we hit on the idea of restructuring the county into zones—basically, into five cities the size of Syracuse. By dividing the population into five zones and by reducing the land mass, you had some control over what was going on.

Because we were working in a smaller area, we could develop better contacts with the police commanders, the community leaders, the political leadership, the education and religious leadership. The key is to have religious leaders involved. … When we finished the design—and it took awhile to get the courts involved because we had to convince them that every crime committed in this area should be prosecuted by the team of prosecutors assigned to that zone. Structuring it that way would speed up arrest to arraignment time, the disposition of the case; we’d also have a better handle on the flow of the case. It also gave us the benefit of identifying people who might be candidates for our DTAP [Drug Treatment Alternative-to-Prison] Program. 

click here to read full interview

Scott C. Newman
Former Marion County District Attorney
Indianapolis, Indiana
I didn't give a lot of direction to each district prosecutor. The only direction I gave was: 1) Two or three mornings a week you need to be screening cases with the district detectives; 2) You need to have a drug strategy; 3) You need to have a domestic violence strategy for your district, and 4) You need to identify a third major problem that is of concern to the particular neighborhood that you are assigned to. It may be residential burglaries, it may be prostitution, but you need to hear what that third problem is. I told them to develop a strategy for that area.

We get out there in the neighborhoods and we perform. We do what we promise. We set reasonable, measurable, concrete goals for the community. Sometimes we deliver some ambitious projects, like the [Marion County] Community Court, which after two or three years of discussion we were finally able to open. We give community leaders in neighborhood associations terrific access to our prosecutors and, through them, to the justice system.

click here to read full interview

Thomas K. Cullen
Former Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney
Alexandria, Virginia
When we went out to the community and asked them, “Why aren’t you cooperating? Why won’t you come to court?” we learned that there was the fear factor and the ignorance about how the system worked. But there was a third factor that I thought was the easiest one to deal with.

For security reasons, the courthouse is open from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the doors are locked at 5 p.m. Our office is in the courthouse. Most of the people in this neighborhood work day jobs. They are not salaried employees. If they don’t work, they don’t get paid. If they miss any part of the day, they miss the whole day. So in order for them to come to court for a hearing or an interview with a prosecutor, they had to miss a whole day of work and not get paid for it. And that was a major problem for them because they’re basically getting by. So what we decided was that we would have an office in the community and have extended hours, so three nights a week we’re open until 8 p.m. We also have Saturday hours and hours by appointment. That has increased our availability to the community.

Also, to be a prosecutor is a big thing. Just to say you’re a prosecutor is to say, “Whoa, you must be important. You mean a prosecutor will be in our community and be here alone at night, allowing people to just walk in and talk to him?” The good faith in that alone really helped.

And we sort of established ourselves as kind of the Shell answer man. Not that I can always give the answer to your question, but I can make referrals. We have a bunch of cards in English and Spanish that you can put in your wallet that have about 20 or 30 frequently-requested phone numbers that we hand out all the time.

How can a prosecutor get his or her office more involved in community prosecution efforts?

Mike Kuykendall
Former Manager of the Community Prosecution Program
American Prosecutors Research Institute (APRI)
Alexandria, Virginia
Typically, most assistant district attorneys are busy in courtrooms eight hours a day dealing with judges and lots of cases, and they look at community prosecutors going to night meetings and setting up task forces and see work they're not particularly interested in doing... But as an office moves deeper and deeper into community prosecution, everyone begins to see the benefits... It reduces caseloads, improves relations with the community and police, and often improves the actual cases in the system by building cooperation and confidence between the players.

I believe it's a good practice to reward community prosecutors who have done a good job—that leaves an impression on the rest of the office that community prosecution really matters to the elected prosecutor. You don't want the community prosecutors to fall in salary or office status behind their peers who didn't go out in the community. One way to do this is for the elected prosecutor to ask their community prosecutors where they want to go when they are ready for rotation back to a trial unit. Another way is to provide additional compensation and comp time to those who agree to work in the community. 

click here to read full interview

Kathleen O’Connor
Chief, Community Prosecution/Grand Jury/Intake
United States Attorney's Office
Washington, D.C.
I head up the intake and grand jury sections, where new prosecutors begin their rotation, and so I educate new hires about community prosecution as soon as they walk in the door. I have these junior-level prosecutors in my hot little hands for nine months, which allows me to show them the ropes and help them think outside the box. They see community prosecution as an integral part of our office from the beginning. We also have a professional development office that keeps track of people’s wishes and desires, and over the past year and a half there have been many more people who are adding to their wish list that they want to be a community prosecutor.

click here to read full article

Scott C. Newman
Former Marion County District Attorney
Indianapolis, Indiana
I choose respected deputy prosecutors to serve in the unit: people with some experience and credibility throughout the office. I give direct access to that unit: the supervisor of that unit reports directly to me. I've invited that unit to my house and had meetings with them on the back deck to strategize. They have a few little perks and cool stuff, like their own note pads and their own jean shirts. We give them a certain amount of flexibility in their hours and so on.

Inside the agency I try to personally broadcast the achievements of the community prosecutors—we call them Street Level Advocates, or the SLA program. I try to emphasize, first of all, that when an SLA comes to you with a strategic need in a case, that those people have clout—both because they are credible people with some experience in the office and because I think their work is important. If they give direction to a line prosecutor on a case about revoking a bond or seeking a type of sentence or a certain type of community input, I'm going to be very unhappy if they don't listen. I also try to emphasize an ethos throughout everything I do in the office that we're not just case processors, we're law enforcement strategists. 

click here to read full interview

Dr. Catherine Coles
Researcher and Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
...an important first step is an emphasis on education within the office. I find the most useful strategy in getting prosecutors to think differently is to send them out to other community prosecution sites because prosecutors really learn from each other. So, if you have an office that hasn’t done much yet, and the leadership wants to move into community prosecution, one of the things that they need to do is to bring experienced community prosecutors from other locations in to talk to their staff. Staff will also need to visit other sites where community prosecution is going on. Another key is improving the capacity and training of your prosecutors in civil law and encouraging them to think more broadly about using and applying remedies other than criminal case processing.

click here to read full interview

How important is it to develop partnerships with local police?

Dr. Walter Dickey
Professor
University of Wisconsin Law School
Community prosecution seems to work most effectively when it’s in synch with community-oriented policing and problem-oriented policing. To do it unilaterally as prosecutor without the police already engaged is almost impossible. ... [One successful initiative was] in Kalamazoo, Michigan, [where] the prosecutor’s office surveyed community members about problems and learned that dilapidated housing was a matter of great concern to them. What the prosecutors did was trace an enormous amount of the rundown housing being rented at excessive rates to three slum landlords, and then commence action against the three slum landlords in ways that would result in far greater possible penalty than if they had simply prosecuted a particular case of a code violation. Prosecutors were working closely with police, who had already established community offices in neighborhoods that were most affected by these problems. In working in concert with the police I think they were much better able to get information about the problems than they otherwise would have. Then they were able to work with community groups, too, because the police had established themselves very well.

click here to read full interview

Scott C. Newman
Former Marion County District Attorney
Indianapolis, Indiana
Community policing was being successfully implemented at that time [in the early 1990s] in parts of the city, and as I was going around to neighborhood meetings I saw police and citizens being drawn closer together. I also saw that they—both the police and the ordinary citizens—were feeling thwarted increasingly by the justice system. To the extent that their projects and initiatives weren't working, they tended to blame, in some cases rightly so and in some cases not, the justice system. It struck me that the prosecutor wasn't at the table and that many of the projects that the police and the community were contemplating would need legal input for them to work.

The first thing I knew we had to do was to be there, in the neighborhoods, and a natural place to be, it seemed to me, was the district police stations. So I approached the Police Department and basically tried to give them something in exchange for what I wanted. What I could offer them was the convenience of being able to screen cases at the police district instead of coming downtown… [it gave] our criminal prosecutors a good finger on the pulse of what kind of crime was occurring in that district. It also gave them an opportunity to work with the police and the neighborhoods. 

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Dr. Catherine Coles
Researcher and Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
[…] where you have community policing and prosecution going on alongside each other, both police and prosecutors work directly with the community; both are involved in problem solving and devising strategies for crime prevention; and the need to work together is continual. The relationship is a close one, but each obviously has particular roles that only it can play—only prosecutors can prosecute cases, although with a great deal of assistance from police. Police do more work on the streets and in the community. There are limits on the extent to which prosecutors can be involved in investigations that police conduct. 

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Susan Motika
Former Director of the Community Prosecution Division
Office of the Denver District Attorney
Denver, Colorado
… Community police and prosecutors should be allied. You don't want community prosecutors and police officers going to separate meetings, or maybe going to the same meetings and not knowing what the other's strategy and approach is and not develop a supportive and coordinated approach.

What are some considerations to be kept in mind when hiring for community prosecution programs?

Paul L. Howard, Jr.
District Attorney
Atlanta, Georgia
I think that [for a community prosecutor] you’ve got to have somebody who can take a vision and plan a systematic way to realize it, and not everyone has the ability to do that. Our community prosecutors will also actually prosecute some of the cases in the zone that are of interest to the community and the Police Department, so I think you need a person who can do that, too, because that develops confidence and rapport in the community. That’s when people start saying: “That’s our prosecutor. We’ve got our own prosecutor who can prosecute our crimes.” You also need someone with a personality that allows them to walk around the community and talk and get along with people. Our first couple of lawyers would go to a meeting and no one would even know they were there. You need somebody who’s willing to walk to the front of the room, even if everybody there is complaining about the district attorney, and say, “Hey guys I understand, but we’re trying to get better. Can you help us?” And not everyone has that type of personality.

click here to read full interview

Dr. Catherine Coles
Researcher and Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
The increased hiring of non-lawyer specialists in prosecutors’ offices is an important part of change in the organization. Elevating representatives of those staff to senior executive-level positions and developing new expectations for the role of prosecutors is very important. New recruitment criteria and performance measures have to be pursued, as well, and not very many offices have done that. They are doing a better job of recruiting than developing performance measures. These are just a few of the things that go into organizational change. 

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Mike Kuykendall
Former Manager of the Community Prosecution Program
American Prosecutors Research Institute (APRI)
Alexandria, Virginia
A lot of really good trial attorneys are guard-dog types. They tear into a case, and drive and push and never take no for an answer; those people typically make good courtroom prosecutors, but don't always make good community prosecutors; good community prosecutors need to be able to listen, to not necessarily lead from the front but lead from behind. They also need to have good people skills and be willing to go the extra mile, even if it means going to community meetings until 10 at night. They need to be real problem-solvers who are self motivated and don't require a lot of supervision. They need to be creative thinkers capable of utilizing the law, both criminal and civil, to the communities' advantage. 

click here to read full interview

Charles J. Hynes
Kings County District Attorney
Brooklyn, New York
… I’ll tell you this, that I’m committed to hiring with a keen eye to diversity. And that’s what I’ve done. You can walk around this building and it will be readily apparent. There are many more women working here than when I started. There were also virtually no people of color, and I changed that… If you are running an office that doesn’t reflect the diversity of your community you have no credibility at all. And you have to work on it constantly, obviously.

The key, though, is to have a hiring committee that really understands how critical it is to go out there and get qualified people who reflect each community; and, to remain responsive to all the individual communities.

click here to read full interview

A "virtual roundtable" of experts answers questions about community prosecution.

What are some ways the community gets involved in community prosecution programs?

Dr. Catherine Coles
Researcher and Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Prosecutors can work with the community at different levels. They might work with a neighborhood, cultural or ethnic groups across different neighborhoods, the faith community, business interests, a chamber of commerce or business improvement district. These all represent interests within the community. I think the community can be defined in different ways at different levels from very small at the neighborhood level to a much larger level where you don’t have involvement of every single person in that community. 

Roxann Pais
Chief Community Prosecutor
Dallas City Attorney's Office
Dallas, Texas
One of the things that became quite clear to me when I got out into the neighborhood and attended different community meetings—neighborhood association groups, crime watch groups, faith-based meetings, school meetings, etc.—is that they all wanted a safer neighborhood but weren’t working together to make it happen. I also noticed that while each neighborhood had an assigned fire inspector and code inspector and housing inspector and various assigned police officers, they didn’t work together, either. In fact, they didn’t even understand each other’s roles. So I had a government and I had a community of people who weren’t communicating amongst or between each other.

So I created ACTION (All Coming Together In Our Neighborhood) teams, and now each one of our target neighborhoods has a government ACTION team and a citizen ACTION team. The government ACTION team consists of all those people I told you about—street, fire, police, probation, parole, crisis intervention teams, all the people who are assigned to work in that neighborhood. They come together once a month to strategize about a particular problem property or problem issue. They share neighborhood intelligence with each other and develop strategies by which they can work together to solve problems. It is phenomenal. It is why community prosecution grew as quickly as it did.

Susan Motika
Former Director of the Community Prosecution Division
Denver District Attorney’s Office
Denver, Colorado
The Community Justice Councils draw together a broad cross section of neighborhood residents to help shape the law enforcement response to crime and neighborhood problems. These are residents that are part of official civic associations but also informal leaders who have tremendous respect in the eyes of other community members.

But a Community Justice Council doesn't stop there. We also look at recruiting other people who have a stake in creating a safe neighborhood, the community center directors, faith leaders, public school teachers, community police, business leaders, community prosecutors and elected city and state representatives. We bring them to the table because very often community organizations may identify quality-of-life problems and have an idea for a solution but then ask, ‘How do we get this funded? Maybe the businesses could fund it or maybe the community center could stay open longer? The benefit of the Community Justice Councils is that those key people are already at the table and not being called later. They're all working side by side. When you have all these people working side by side month after month, the barriers and expectations they have about what it means to be a business leader or City Council member break down and people tend to work in a collaborative, less hierarchical way. 

Rosemary Lehmberg
First Assistant District Attorney
Austin, Texas
[We organize] Neighborhood Conference Committees [in] neighborhoods [that] come to us and want to start dealing with juvenile crimes. What we usually do is help them with the structure. We help recruit, we help with the first meeting, we tell them what the juvenile system is like and then they, with the help of a case manager and a coordinator, get together in panels of three and they consider cases we send them of juveniles who either committed crimes in the neighborhood or live in the neighborhood. There has to be some tie to their area... And the neighbors decide what those kids ought to do to make it right. And they kind of have him on neighborhood probation for a while. And he has to do things: He has to do community service, he has to write papers and do apologies and those kinds of things.

I think we’re heading toward a place where we hope that neighborhoods have everything to say about the people who are offending in their neighborhoods. And that they have the ability to set the priorities for police, prosecutors, city workers, about what they want the quality of life in their neighborhood to look like. It’s pretty idealistic.

How can a community court fit into a community prosecution strategy?

Roxann Pais
Chief Community Prosecutor
Dallas City Attorney's Office
Dallas, Texas
We opened our first community court on October 7, 2004, in one of the nine target neighborhoods. We have a municipal court judge who is now the community court judge, and we renovated a beautiful area in one of our community centers that houses about 25 different social service agencies. So the way I see it, community policing was step one, before we ever became involved. Then community prosecution was step two, and now our community court is step three. It would not surprise me if our community courts grow just as quickly as our community prosecution program did.

Scott C. Newman
Former Marion County District Attorney
Indianapolis, Indiana
I think that community courts are really the next step in power sharing with the community: it provides visibility for community prosecution and policing and encourages accountability for quality of life in the neighborhoods. It's a way to involve the courts and get their buy-in. Frankly, it's a way to make sure that we have the right kind of judges, who are community-minded, who aren't afraid to put a criminal case, even a low-level criminal case, in context, and to think a little more strategically in their sentencing. 

Charles J. Hynes
Kings County District Attorney
Brooklyn, New York
Look at Red Hook [a neighborhood in Brooklyn] after the anger and frustration people felt after [local school principal] Patrick Daly was killed [by drug dealers in 1992]. I went to the wake and the funeral and I spoke to a lot of people, and they kept telling me, ‘You don’t care about us. We got cut off years ago, with that horrible monstrosity [the Gowanus Expressway] that divided us from the city.’

Today ... if you speak to any people of color in this county, they will tell you that when justice moved downtown, they became suspicious of it. You’ve got to break down that suspicion. You’ve got to have people see what a justice program looks like. And that’s why Red Hook [Community Justice Center] works so well. You’ve got talented people like Gerianne [Abriano, chief of the prosecutor’s Red Hook Bureau] and Judge [Alex] Calabrese. He’s incredible. 

Bart Dickinson
Former Community Prosecution Coordinator
Frayser County Community Court
Memphis, Tennessee
[In the Frayser County Community Court] we ask that people who have been in violation of the city or county environmental code sign a court order to keep the property in compliance. If they let their property fall out of compliance again, then at my discretion, I can file a motion for contempt based on the court order. And if they are guilty of contempt then the judge can actually sentence them to jail time. Sometimes we use community service but very rarely because … we are having them do community service for themselves in picking up their property and bringing it into compliance.

Neighborhoods can almost completely turn around when you have people who have for years tried to get someone to do something about their neighbor who keeps their property in disarray and creates a nuisance and now all of a sudden they have been ordered to keep their property up. 

Robyn Gregory
Prosecutor, Portland Community Court
Portland, Oregon
The neighborhood district attorneys are the community courtroom deputies. The neighborhood D.A’.s, as a group, have done a lot of the planning for the Community Court. They're the ones who sat down and figured out the sentencing grid, the negotiation policies and the eligibility requirements. So they have worked on this project a lot. 

Tom Becht
Former Coordinator, West Palm Beach Community Court
West Palm Beach, Florida
The traditional roles are changing. [In the West Palm Beach Community Court, ] the prosecutor—assistant state attorney—advocates substance abuse treatment and community service. They will frequently waive community service if the defendant agrees to go into treatment directly from court. The assistant public defender does not try to just get their client off but to advise them to get help that is being offered. The judge acts as a social worker and coach in frequently persuading a defendant to go into treatment rather than opt out and plea not guilty. The defendant is always advised of their legal rights and options but all are working as a team to point the defendant towards treatment and help.

What are some of the challenges of planning and implementing a community prosecution program?

Scott C. Newman
Former Marion County District Attorney
Indianapolis, Indiana
We stick to what we're good at. That's another piece of direction I always give to the unit. There's a tendency to expand the charter or engage in what I call mission creep, where you want to do everything for everybody and if another agency isn't doing their job you want to do their job for them. If we expand, and get outside what we're really good at, I think we start to lose credibility and we spread ourselves too thin. So I try to remind people, ‘Don't do other agencies' jobs for them. Try to collaborate with them to get them to do a more effective job. Leverage your resources and remember what kind of things prosecutors are particularly good at and uniquely situated to do and emphasize those things.

A broader obstacle has been that many judges are reluctant to contextualize a problem. They take a very narrow view of what sentencing should be about in low-level criminal cases and they're very reluctant to find out the importance of a particular case to a particular neighborhood to place it in context. When we try to submit neighborhood impact statements, for example, some judges will disregard them and categorically refuse to hear that kind of evidence.

I think my fellow prosecutors who either have programs or are thinking of starting them need to keep an eye on the fact that local law enforcement block grants may be shrinking or going away. We need to start looking at institutionalizing what community prosecutors do and selling that to our local city/county councils and other officials because in the next few years it may not be so easy to fund a community prosecution program. I would issue a warning to prosecutors to start to measure what your units are doing because you're going to have to start to market this to get continued funding. 

Dr. Catherine Coles,
Researcher and Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
I guess the biggest concern for me in talking and thinking about the community and the work that prosecutors do within the community is the danger of excluding. The community that prosecutors work with, for the most part, needs to be an inclusive community that does not seek to exclude any particular group. 

Susan Motika
Former Director of the Community Prosecution Division
Office of the Denver District Attorney
Denver, Colorado
A big obstacle is resources and funding. This work is very time intensive. To lay the foundation right you don't just go in and announce the results of your burglary task force and leave. When you're building a proactive partnership you have to have an ongoing relationship with people that involve continued research and follow through on a consistent basis. So when people talk about community prosecution, they might underestimate the time it takes to do that.

I think that with community policing and community prosecution, we're dealing with institutional changes in large organizations that haven't been structured to respond to the community in this way. So having these organizations understand the community prosecution mission and the community justice mission is an important goal. You have to change your institution and make this a way of life, and it doesn't happen overnight.

Thomas K. Cullen
Former Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney
Alexandria, Virginia
The main thing is you’ve got to have some sort of connection with the community. If you attend only one community meeting every other month, you’re doing better than you’ve ever done. But the main tip is that when you go to those meetings, most of the people are going to want you to be the man or the woman in charge and run the meeting. You become the focus, and that’s a mistake. The focus has to be on the people. So you have to make it clear, “I’m just here to listen today. Maybe at the end of the meeting if you have some particular questions I can answer, that would be fine.” If it becomes apparent that one of the questions that they have constantly is what’s happening with cases, what you do is talk to the police department and ask them if they can send an agent over there to give them a rundown. Again, that takes the focus off you, so that you can do the listening.

How do you measure the effectiveness of a community prosecution program?

Thomas K. Cullen
Former Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney
Alexandria, Virginia
It’s a big challenge. We have a lot of anecdotal stuff from city agencies, from the community groups that have formed and from individual citizens who’ve written letters who say thanks for doing what you’ve done. One of my colleagues has statistics that show that the failure to appear rate for witnesses is way down, so people are starting to come to court. We also have more calls for service from the community, and that’s one of those good and bad things. Someone might say: “Wait a minute, the calls for service are up. You’re not doing a good job.” But when you had none before and now there are some, and one of the main problems was the fear and distrust of government and now the community is calling government, I think it’s a good sign. We also track the number of contacts we have of people coming to the office.

Mike Kuykendall
Former Manager of the Community Prosecution Program
American Prosecutors Research Institute (APRI)
Alexandria, Virginia
The hard thing, like so many programs in criminal justice, is that people want to know, 'Did crime go down, and if so, was it because of this program or that program?' And that's one of the most difficult things we deal with. The mark of a successful community prosecution program isn't necessarily a drop in crime numbers; the numbers might actually increase because citizens are more involved, and reporting more crimes... There are a lot of other measures of success; the most important is the overall feeling of safety and security in the community and you can measure that easily by surveying the community before and after your program has been implemented. You can also quantify the number of meetings your prosecutors attended, the number of citizens involved in crime prevention committees, etcetera, to determine if your office has met its goal of more community input into public safety concern.

Susan Motika
Former Director of the Community Prosecution Division
Denver District Attorney’s Office
Denver, Colorado
We’re doing recidivism studies on Community Accountability Boards [where juveniles who commit offenses meet with their victims and representatives of the victimized community to develop sanctions that are restorative to the victim and community as well as being constructive for the offender]. We are going to re-administer a community justice survey we did at the inception to measure attitudes about safety and the criminal justice system. This will allow us to compare two years ago to today. We’re also working on developing outcome measures. 

Scott Newman
Former Marion County District Attorney
Indianapolis, Indiana
For now, the results are largely anecdotal, but they're powerful anecdotes. For example, in a particular neighborhood called Meridian-Kessler, the deputy prosecutor identified residence burglaries as a major neighborhood problem. The street level prosecutor in that area brought together detectives who had each investigated separate burglaries to identify distinctive modus operandi of these groups of burglaries. These diverse detectives from different agencies found commonalities and developed the threads into probable cause for search warrants. We were able to convict three major burglars working on the north side of the city. One of them was a heroin addict who confessed to some 200 residence burglaries. We immediately reduced burglaries in this neighborhood by about half. It was staggering what taking these three burglars of the streets did and it wouldn't have happened if not for the community prosecutor.

Another example would be a gang on the west side called the Ponds. It was the kind of gang that was scaring residents in a couple of apartment complexes but it wasn't big enough or bad enough to come to the attention of a metro gang task force. A young man was being pressed to join that gang and his mother went to her apartment complex manager, who is also a local minister, to express concern about that. Well, he knew our west side district prosecutor and went to her. We were able to get with this mother and child to help them relocate, to debrief the young man about the activities of that gang and were able to disassemble that gang through conventional vertical prosecution. It made a big difference in that neighborhood.

We have blocks of the city reporting that they sleep better at night, that they hear less shooting. You may call these anecdotal ways of measuring success, but I would just say we are measuring new things. We're taking less of a ‘911’ approach and more of a quality-of-life approach, measuring the number of evening walks a couple can take in a neighborhood, for example.

Charles J. Hynes
Kings County District Attorney
Brooklyn, New York
The easiest thing we do is put people in jail. That is not a difficult thing, if you’ve got your prosecutors trained well. The real challenge is to keep public safety at a level that is acceptable to the people you represent, and I believe that fundamentally you do that by recidivism reduction. Every time you reduce recidivism you knock down another layer of crime problems.

Complainants in domestic violence cases have unique needs, so the prompt and effective provision of services to victims is of paramount importance. What follows are key principles for ensuring victim safety gleaned from the operation of domestic violence courts in New York.

One of the guiding principles of domestic violence courts—misdemeanor, felony, and integrated—is victim safety. Complainants in domestic violence cases have unique needs and concerns; they are often dependent economically on their assailant, have children in common, and may be threatened by the defendant or the defendant’s relatives during the course of a case.  Therefore, the prompt and effective provision of services to victims is of paramount importance.

What follows are key principles for ensuring victim safety gleaned from the operation of domestic violence courts in New York:

Provide victims with immediate access to advocates. Every victim should be given immediate access to an advocate who can provide safety planning and explain court procedures. Comprehensive victim advocacy should include access to counseling, job training, immigration services, child services, and other programs aimed at improving self-sufficiency. A victim should remain paired with her advocate throughout the case (i.e., from police response through post-disposition).

Quickly link victims with social services. Advocates should  link victims with social service agencies, emergency shelter, food, and civil legal services, as necessary. This makes sense in human terms (providing people in crisis with help as soon as possible) and in terms of improving court outcomes. Studies have shown that when victims receive assistance early in the court process, they are much more likely to remain engaged in their cases. Victims are also more likely to follow through with a case when they clearly understand the legal process.

Keep victims informed. In addition to providing general information and referrals, advocates should provide victims with up-to-date information on their cases. This reduces the burden on the victim to constantly reappear in court to learn the status of her case, and ultimately reduces her chances of being placed in further danger. It also gives the victim the feeling that the system cares about her welfare; this may, in turn, persuade the victim to do all she can to participate in the prosecution.

Schedule cases promptly. Another way to enhance victim safety is to schedule domestic violence cases promptly so that victims can get an order of protection quickly. The longer the victim must wait for legal action, the longer she is at risk. The sooner a case can be heard, the sooner assistance can be provided. In Westchester County, for instance, felonies are transferred immediately to the domestic violence court after the initial filing of an indictment. This allows for the rapid issuance of orders of protection, and sends the message to defendants that the case is being taken seriously. It also allows the court to link victims to services as early in the process as possible. Experience indicates that delays give the batterer more time to convince the victim to become uncooperative.

Create safe places within the courthouse. Court planners should provide security and comfort for victims. Design elements can include providing private space to speak with advocates and separate waiting areas near the victim services office. The Bronx Misdemeanor Domestic Violence Court, in fact, has a separate safe waiting area staffed by victim advocates; victims are escorted to and from the courtrooms when they need to testify.

Recently, the Center for Court Innovation conducted a study at the Bronx Misdemeanor Domestic Violence Court to track the actual impact of judicial monitoring in a high volume court. The study focused on compliance and recidivism for 439 cases mandated either to: (1) batterer intervention alone; (2) batterer intervention with substance abuse treatment; or (3) substance abuse treatment alone.

The Bronx Misdemeanor Domestic Violence Court hears over 5,000 domestic violence cases each year, making it one of the busiest domestic violence courts in the New York state. It is a multi-faceted complex with three court parts—one courtroom for pre-trial appearances, one for trials and one devoted to monitoring defendants' compliance with court orders. Like a growing number of domestic violence courts, the Bronx typically includes a program mandate as a condition of sentence—whether for a batterer intervention program, substance abuse treatment, mental health services, or other program. 

Court administrators have begun to question whether a defendant's likelihood of benefiting from a program and monitoring could be assessed and made a factor of sentencing. Recently, the Center for Court Innovation conducted a study at the Bronx court to track the actual impact of judicial monitoring in a high volume court. The study focused on compliance and recidivism for 439 cases mandated either (1) batterer intervention alone; (2) batterer intervention with substance abuse treatment; or (3) substance abuse treatment alone. 

The study found that initial non-compliance was a strong predictor of ultimate failure. That is, if the defendant was non-compliant at the initial judicial monitoring date, the defendant was at increased risk of complete non-compliance.

Non-compliance with court orders
What does this study mean for domestic violence courts? One lesson appears to be that judicial monitoring, particularly in the early stages of a case, can help reduce non-compliance with court orders.  Here are some concrete steps a court can take to ensure swift response to non-compliance:

• Create standardized forms for compliance that can be faxed or e-mailed to batterers programs.  These forms should include a deadline by which the defendant must contact the program for intake.
• Develop relationships with key stakeholders.  Regular communication between the court, the District Attorney’s Office, defense attorneys, victim advocates and the mandated batterers program will reduce the opportunities for offenders to “play the system.”
• Have a separate compliance calendar and schedule early and regular compliance dates.  This sends an early message to the defendant that the court takes monitoring seriously.  It also allows the court to swiftly sanction a non-compliant defendant.  Having a set time for compliance also accommodates stakeholders who may need to send representatives to the court.

A Judicial Hearing Officer Shares His Experiences with the Harlem Juvenile Reentry Network
by Chris Watler 

As the judicial hearing officer for the Harlem Community Justice Center’s Juvenile Reentry Network, I see first hand the difficulties faced by young people returning from placement to their community. I also see the challenges faced by our juvenile justice system, which is struggling to do right by these kids and the communities they live in.

Open since August of 2003, the Juvenile Reentry Network serves juveniles recently released from state placement. Participants and their families are linked to an expansive network of services and monitored by an aftercare counselor and partner agencies under my supervision. The Juvenile Reentry Network is not Family Court, nor is it technically part of the judicial system. Rather, it acts as an administrative court within the New York State Office of Children and Family Services to enhance the supervision of youth in aftercare. Some of its innovative elements include a high level of family engagement, a strength-based approach to case management, youth development programming through three Boys & Girls Clubs in Harlem, access to mental health and drug treatment services, and intensive court monitoring.

I work with juveniles and their families every other week in the court. The highlights for me include working with a committed group of partners, and with kids and their families. The lives of these young people tell a story of hope and struggle in the face of family dysfunction, poverty, negative peer pressure and institutional neglect.

How does a young person returning from placement find the motivation and discipline to live a constructive life free from further offending? The Juvenile Reentry Network attempts to answer this question, but it is not easy. Gang involvement, learning disabilities, conflict at home, lack of resources (money and people), and low expectations are all part of the context within which these kids operate.

While in placement most of these kids attended school, obeyed rules, were drug free, and engaged in positive activities. Returning home afterward presents a set of incredible challenges that strike at the core of their identity in their family and in their neighborhood. Asking them to trust that a court will work with them to create change in their lives, and convincing them that change will involve creating a new identity, choosing new friends, and developing better habits and a rigid routine is daunting. Yet the alternate option of doing nothing to address their needs is a sure formula (and an expensive one) for failure.

I want to briefly describe two cases that highlight the challenges. The first case was a young woman who had been caught shoplifting at Macy's twice and brought to the Midtown Community Court. Her mother had been complaining that the child was leaving the house after curfew late at night and sitting in cars in front of the building. From her counselor at the Boys and Girls Club we learned that she was being called constantly by a male "acquaintance" who indicated that he wanted her to leave the Club to go "earn some money." Through these various conversations, the picture that emerged was of a female participant being lured into prostitution.

On the first occasion when she was caught shoplifting she was sanctioned to community service. She was failing to complete the community service when she was picked up the second time. Her aftercare counselor and I confronted her about our suspicions during a sidebar conversation. We informed her that we were going to send her to a residential program that helped young women understand the risks and realities of prostitution and helped teenage prostitutes get out of the business. We also talked to her mother at the hearing about our deep concern for her. It was during this process that the participant re-offended (the second shoplifting offense) and had to be sent back into state placement.

Normally, this case might have looked like a typical parent-child conflict with curfew violations and minor re-offending. The suspected prostitution, a more troubling issue, would most likely have gone unnoticed, but we were able to connect the dots by using information from the partners, and from the information gleaned from conversations in court with the participant and her mom. This young person is now back before me again, having been released from placement, and is applying to college and has an interview for a job. My last meeting with her in court included a mock interview from the bench. I had her practice responding to interview questions and gave her feedback. In the long run, we are hoping to get her on a different track that will increase her sense of self worth and empower her to see the possibilities for her life away from crime.

Another case involved a 16-year-old girl who had previously failed to complete aftercare four times. She was referred to Juvenile Reentry Network last fall and was returned to placement within four weeks! On her second go round with Juvenile Reentry Network (and her fifth time in aftercare) she was placed on electronic monitoring for the first four weeks of her release and given a tighter curfew. From January through May her school attendance improved, she was more engaged in Boys and Girls Club programming, and she participated more in the hearing process. Her mother indicated that she made it this far because of the Juvenile Reentry Network. Through the intense attention and structure she was given through the Network, she was able to complete the program and end the cycle of recidivism. She continues to attend her Boys and Girls Club program.

It is still much too early to say if the Juvenile Reentry Network will reduce recidivism among program participants. However, what we are seeing in the program is highly encouraging—over 90 percent of hearings involve a parent or guardian, all Juvenile Reentry Network kids are engaged in youth development programming, and we are better able to respond quickly and accurately to problems as they arise. And, with respect to recidivism, what we can say at this early stage is that, as of September 30th, 2004, only 22% (eight of the 36 program participants) have been removed from the program and returned to placement.