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.