Judge Weinberg became the presiding judge of Midtown Community Court in January 2006. He is the fourth judge to preside over the court since its founding in 1993, when it was the first community court in the country. The court itself has garnered numerous accolades, including, most recently in 2007, the Golden Scroll Award from the Broadway Association, which has represented businesses in Times Square since 1911, in recognition of its enduring contributions to the neighborhood in the form of safer streets and improved quality of life. In June 2007, Judge Weinberg spoke with Carolyn Turgeon about his work at the court.
What brought you to Midtown Community Court?
[Then New York Chief Administrative] Judge [Jonathan] Lippman asked me to do it, and I thought it was a great opportunity because it’s a program that I believe in. I believe in giving people an opportunity to turn their lives around. We’re very effective here in giving them that opportunity, and we have a great success record. We have a broad menu of programs and services that we’re constantly expanding and experimenting with. We have 80 percent compliance with our alternative sanctions. I like the idea of partnering up with the community and having direct contact with the community and community leaders, and ultimately we’re doing what we were established to do—preserve and protect and defend this community—very effectively.
How is being a judge at the Midtown Community Court different from working in a traditional courtroom?
It’s more creative up here. There’s a lot of stuff I can do here that I can’t do in a traditional setting. I can create a program and implement it. I sentence people to perform community service or participate in a social service and they immediately go upstairs to sign up and get started. They’re not lost in the sauce for a few days until they go downtown and register. I take a plea in the centralized court and nobody takes care of them right away. They have to come back and sign up. We lose a lot of folks that way.
Can you talk about some of the changes you’ve made since coming to the Midtown Court?
We’ve expanded some of our programs to different languages. We’ve created a three-day safe driving course for people charged with driving offenses. We’ve created an anti-marijuana program, a pedicab education program that teaches people how to be safe pedicab drivers and abide by the rules, and a responsible vending program that teaches people how to be responsible vendors. We’re in the process of writing a vendor’s manual—nobody’s ever written one before—that will teach the street vendors the rules of the game about how to be a good vendor. We’re going to be creating a vendor’s hotline where people can phone in and get advice and information on what to do and what not to do. I also lecture at trademark infringement panels, speaking about unlicensed vending and the linkage to trademark infringement.
We’ve also expanded our outreach to the homeless, and have created outreach programs to protect young girls from being trafficked in prostitution. We do outreach in Port Authority and Penn Station, and will be moving over to Grand Central Station. We revamped our prostitution options in an effort to make them more organized and more effective. We meet with leaders of advocacy groups who are concerned about the problem of trafficking. Plus we've worked out an arrangement with the Department of Probation where we can now offer probationary sentences.
I’m constantly looking to expand our impact and I’m always asking our excellent staff to come up with ideas and to challenge them, so the programs I just named are illustrative of a lot more programs that we’ve done. Whenever I sit there and see that there’s a problem or a hole in our approach, we look to fill that hole and come up with a solution. We meet with the leaders of the business improvement districts and the community boards and police commands to share information and come up with approaches. Midtown has a very good staff. And because of my background at City Hall—I was General Counsel to the New York City Council for over a decade—I’m constantly out in the community meeting people, going to events, speaking, going to conferences, and having people come in to visit the court. We’ve created a program, Sit on the Bench with the Judge, where people from the community come sit on the bench with me. People from all over the world—including judges, government leaders, attorney generals, mayors of cities—have sat on the bench with me.
What advice do you have for other judges who want to engage their local community more?
Well, it depends where they’re sitting. The real advice is this: you have to create a structure. I'd recommend doing research, including approaches developed by the Center for Court Innovation. I know they also offer technical assistance. You just can’t do this on your own. There’s a lot of learning that the Center has created. When I first came here, I had sat here a couple of times as a visiting judge, but frankly when you’re a visiting judge as opposed to the real deal, here day in and day out, you don’t pay attention to it in the same way. So I read all the Center’s materials. I read Good Courts. I read a lot of criminological studies that had been recommended to me. You need to have a real intellectual curiosity about this and to understand what it’s trying to do. When you understand the mindset, you can do what you need to do: create partnerships, create rehabilitation programs, create protection in the community. You can’t do it without really understanding the mindset.
You have to have someone who believes in this, and you have to have a very high energy level judge, somebody who’s willing to be creative and to go out there and meet with community leaders and have them come to the courthouse. You don’t want a wallflower. You want somebody who is strong enough in terms of running a courtroom—if you’re running a criminal court you have to be tough, you can’t be weak, they’ll eat you up alive—but on the other hand you have to have somebody who’s also empathetic and identifies with the goals and the strategies and the approaches. If you don’t have the right personality here, it will not work. You really have to carefully pick who you put into this job. If you get the wrong person it won’t work.
The bottom line on this for me is: I’m for it because it works. I’m not in the business of trying to be nice just to be nice. I’m here because it’s economically efficient, and it’s public safety efficient, and it’s rehabilitation effective. That’s why I like it.
June 2007