As Chief Community Prosecutor of the Fulton County District Attorney's Office from 2001 until 2005, Wanda Dallas acquired a wealth of first-hand knowledge about solving neighborhood problems. Perhaps the most important lesson she learned is about how to engage the community—a critical feature of any community prosecution program and one whose importance was underscored for her when the community protested the seizure of a drug house. She talked about that particular experience and others with Robert V. Wolf of the Center for Court Innovation while she was in Brooklyn, New York, attending a community prosecution conference sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice.
As a neighborhood prosecutor, I know you’ve put a lot of energy into getting to know the community. When you first got the assignment, how did you take the community’s pulse?
We held seven different focus groups facilitated by students from Georgia State. We had groups of senior citizens, youth, the business community, local leaders, law enforcement, homeowners and apartment dwellers. There were between 15 and 25 per group.
I also went on my own to a lot of meetings and I just listened to people. And what I gathered from the focus groups and the meetings I attended was that drugs were the biggest problem in this particular neighborhood. So I started doing some research on crack houses and found six different legal approaches to closing them. Eventually, we settled on the forfeiture statute because that was the one that gave our office the most control.
So what happened when you put the forfeiture statute into play?
We selected a particular house. The case was pretty good because the owner’s two sons had been very active in selling drugs for 2½ years and there had already been 11 different incidents of drug sales over there. We partnered with police and executed a couple of search warrants, and in January [of 2002] we filed a petition of forfeiture.
After we filed that petition, on May 8, an undercover officer went over there again and was able to secure more drugs. Clearly, this family was not getting the message. So we went to court in May and the judge gave us possession of the house, and so I started going to the meetings and I said, “OK, this house on Atwood Street, this is the house we’re going to close.” And everyone said, “Yea, great!” But later, when we finally seized the property, there was a backlash and the community was upset.
Why were they upset? You were responding to a problem they had identified and you even kept them updated on your progress.
It was a real lesson for me. Here I was, with an office in a Wynn Dixie shopping center, and neighborhood residents were coming in to see me everyday, and I was making a point of meeting with people, talking to them. I went over there during the course of this whole foreclosure process and I talked to people, to the neighbors, just to say, “This is what’s going on. If you have any problems let me know or let the police know.”
I thought that we were OK. Well, once the house was forfeited and [the owner] had to move, which was in July, I went over to the neighborhood. It’s a real close neighborhood with narrow streets, and once you get there, people start coming out. “Why did you take her house?” That’s what I heard as soon as I got there. [The owner] had been talking to the neighbors saying, “I didn’t know my son was selling drugs. Now they’ve taken my house. Where am I going to go?” She was using every opportunity to shape the attitude of the community to the point where they sent a petition around saying “Don’t take her house.” These are the same people who were saying, “We’re tired of her and her drugs and her sons.”
Clearly, you were surprised by the community’s reaction. How did it make you feel?
I don’t want to say it hurt me, but it took me back. I felt, my goodness, what kind of loyalty is this? So I took a step back to try to figure out what was going on. I went back over there and started talking to the neighbors: “Do you really know what she’s been doing?”
A couple of people on the block were pretty educated, including a teacher that lives next door and a working family. These were people who I thought would understand and appreciate that we’re trying to help them save their neighborhood. But they said, “Well, she didn’t know her sons were selling drugs.” And I said, “She knew.”
I sensed that what they needed was more information. If you’re dealing with an emotional response, you’ve got to educate people. An emotional response is based on lack of facts, and the facts equip you to put the emotional stuff in context….
We had a meeting at a church. About 50 people attended and we let them ask questions. We had a big chart that we used at the court hearing, and we showed them how there had been 13 drug sales in 2½ years. We also showed them how the woman was given notice. She got a letter that she signed for that said in 1999, “Please stop the drug activity or we’ll have to pursue other options.” And they didn’t know she had gotten this letter, so her claims that she didn’t know anything about the drugs were not true. She had posted bond for her sons. She put her house up for them to get out of jail, so we just gave them all this information.
That meeting was a turning point. Now we’re OK. I know we’re OK because on Halloween they had a little festival and invited me over there, so now I feel like we’re at a good place. They’re back to trusting me. But before that they were just mad—and they were mad at me, so it was real personal.
How do you carry the lesson of that experience to the next project?
Give the community as much information as you can. And don’t say, “I’m going to change your neighborhood. Our office is going to do this and that.” The community needs to maintain ownership of the problem. I could see how I took their ownership away because it was my first time doing it. You need to say, “This is your problem. We’re just here to help you. This is the information you need and this is what we’re doing for you.” That way if it doesn’t go the way they want it to go, they don’t put responsibility for the failure on you….
Also, we’re going to create a citizen advisory committee that will help us with every crack house that we try to close, and members of the advisory committee will help us talk to community members about what’s going on. It’s better if it comes from someone who’s equally situated, who works where you work and lives where you live.
Do you have any strategies that you’d like share?
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 use 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.
November 2002