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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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