The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia has learned some important lessons from its long involvement (the program began in 1996) with community prosecution. Here are three highlights.

To get better ‘buy-in,’ start teaching staff about community prosecution early in their careers. 
Kathleen O’Connor not only heads up the office’s community prosecution effort, but also the intake and grand jury sections, where new prosecutors begin their rotation. This allows her to start right at the beginning, educating new hires about the value of community prosecution as soon as they walk in the door.

“I have these junior-level prosecutors in my hot little hands for nine months," said O'Connor, "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.” 

One sign that community prosecution has become mainstreamed is that more prosecutors are expressing an interest in joining O’Connor’s elite 10-member team. “We 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,” O’Connor said.

Know your limits—and the limits of line prosecutors.
Several years ago, all prosecutors—from a new hire prosecuting misdemeanors to a seasoned veteran prosecuting international espionage cases—were required to attend community meetings or otherwise involve themselves with the D.C. community (like speaking at schools or volunteering with local organizations). This sweeping policy was born out of a conviction that community engagement at all levels was essential to foster greater confidence in the prosecutor’s office and improve the office’s relationship with the community. Whether or not a prosecutor was involved in community activities affected “raises, promotions, everything,” said former Assistant U.S. Attorney DeMaurice F. Smith, who oversaw the team that developed the office-wide community prosecution program.

But the requirement eventually proved unworkable.  Even though prosecutors were being offered time off for the hours spent at community meetings, for many there weren’t enough hours in the day. “The average assistant works 10 to 14 hours a day,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeff Ragsdale, chief of the Homicide/Major Crimes Section. “To ask them to then go out into the community after working those hours [was] a hardship.”

When former U.S. Attorney Roscoe C. Howard Jr. took over, attending community meetings was no longer mandatory. “For some prosecutors, it’s simply not their forte,” Howard said. “One thing I really want is the intelligence out of the community meeting, and we want prosecutors who want to fill that role. What’s the point of being at a community meeting when you’re mad and upset because you’re required to be there? We make sure our prosecutors know when the meetings are, but nobody is made to go. As a result, I think we get better attendance from our assistant U.S. attorneys and they’re there for the right reasons.”

Strong support from top management is required to carry out a community prosecution program as ambitious as D.C.’s.
Community prosecution has enjoyed strong support from the last three U.S. attorneys in D.C., although when Howard came aboard he had to be convinced that it made sense. “I came in here needing to be convinced it was a good way to expend our resources,” Howard said. And what convinced him it was worth the investment?  “I saw it in action. Like the old cliché, the proof is in the pudding. I found it made us more effective as prosecutors,” he said.

Because the philosophy enjoys not only Howard’s support but the support of Cliff Keenan, the chief of the Superior Court Division, O’Connor has been given wide latitude to manage the program. For example, the 10 community prosecutors are drawn from senior staff, and since none of them carry a caseload, it’s an especially “big resource commitment,” O’Connor said.

To maintain the support of top management and other staffers, however, the philosophy must continually generate results, O’Connor said. By creating value for the entire office—for instance, by helping improve communication between the Forensic Unit and other staff—O’Connor is trying to create as broad a base of support for the program as possible.

There is no one way to do community prosecution. This has given jurisdictions around the country the freedom to develop their own approaches. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia has come up with its own unique version, one that emphasizes what it likes to call “smart prosecution.”

“Smart prosecution” shares some of the features of other community prosecution programs, particularly a neighborhood focus and stronger ties to the police and community stakeholders. But “smart prosecution” is not merely a way to boost the public’s confidence in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, or monitor a community’s safety-related priorities. It is also—and this is what makes it unique—an effort to enhance and make more effective the prosecutor’s traditional role of solving crimes and trying cases.

Howard said community prosecution gives his prosecutors much more knowledge than he himself was afforded as a line prosecutor in the very same office back in the 1980s. “Back then, you found a body, a broken piece of property, some dropped drugs. You trusted your officers that you had the right people, and that was your case,” Howard said. “But what I found out was that none of these things happened in a vacuum. Ordinarily, the offender is part of a larger group, a history in that area. Community prosecution puts our prosecutors in the community, so that you understand the history of the community. Maybe someone named in the file is someone you looked at earlier. Instead of looking at them individually you realize that maybe they’re working together. Maybe it’s a precursor to gang activity or a violent act, and you realize you better take a different approach, do something to prevent things from escalating.”

Said former Assistant U.S. Attorney DeMaurice F. Smith, who helped design the community prosecution initiative: “Even if you’re wedded to the old way, the prosecutor as gun-slinger whose only contact with the community is the case, even if that’s all you care about, community prosecution helps you. We have better information, can respond more quickly and build better cases. From purely a law-enforcement standpoint, it makes sense.

In Indianapolis, geographically assigned prosecutors regularly attend community meetings, including crime watch gatherings, block club meetings, business and neighborhood association meetings and meetings under the federal Weed and Seed program, said Michelle Waymire, the unit’s current supervisor.

Marion County District Attorney Carl Brizzi said community prosecutors in effect serve as “emissaries” for the entire office. “We have over 130 prosecutors and most only venture out of the main office, or the city-county building where the courts are located, to look at crime scenes or go out and investigate with law enforcement,” Brizzi said. In comparison, “the community prosecutors are ambassadors. They’re interacting with the public and I think generating a very positive image for the office, which translates into better cooperation with law enforcement.”

Many community residents say that what pleases them most about the community prosecution program is that it gives them better access to the prosecutor’s office. “The prosecutor is so distant in normal cases where they’re in the downtown office. You might see them when you go to court and that’s it. But I know here if I have something that needs to be addressed by a prosecutor, I can call over there [to the district office] and I’m on a first-name basis,” said Pam Cole, vice president of the Northwest Neighborhood Association Cooperative Inc., a coalition of seven neighborhood associations. The Rev. Jay Height, president of a local business association, calls the community prosecutor in his area “a sales rep” for the Prosecutor’s Office, but with all the positive connotations the words imply: someone who offers personal service, putting a face on a potentially anonymous and distant organization.

In addition to working on solving problems in their districts, Brizzi encourages the entire community prosecution team to take “a global approach.”  One result has been the development of a school curriculum called EKG, which stands for “Educating Kids about Gun Violence.”  Community prosecutors are also developing a mentor program in an Indianapolis middle school. “Someone said to me once, ‘Why is a prosecutor spearheading mentoring programs?’ And I said ‘Because mentoring is one of the sure ways to prevent kids from getting involved in drugs and drinking,’” Brizzi said.

Brizzi’s office also works closely with the Indianapolis Community Justice Center, which opened in May 2001. The justice center is housed in a former bank building and houses a community court (which handles cases involving low-level offending), an environmental court, and offices for probation, parole and conditional release. The community court catchment area includes parts of the East and South police districts. Misdemeanor offenders are often sentenced to work in the community and also linked to social services, many of which are housed in the justice center.

The community prosecution team has developed a number of effective solutions to long-standing problems, such as prostitution, nuisance properties, gun violence and juvenile delinquency. What follows are closer looks at how the Community Prosecution Division has addressed two particularly persistent problems—prostitution and nuisance properties.

In Indianapolis, community input played a major role in the development of the Red Zone Program, which addresses prostitution in the city’s East District. Community prosecutor Michelle Waymire and administrator Diane Hannell, who were both originally assigned to the East District, launched the program in response to numerous complaints from both business leaders and community residents. “Prostitution was hurting businesses. [Their] employees couldn’t walk across the street without fear of being propositioned. The same was true for their customers,” Hannell said. “Indianapolis had the highest rate of syphilis in the country, so it was part of a significant health problem, too.”

 

Representatives of the District Attorney’s Office, police and community members sat down together to hammer out a response. “There was a recognition that many prostitutes do it because they have addictions, so we thought we had a better chance of having an impact if we focused on the customers,” Waymire said.

The resulting diversion program offers first-time offenders a chance to avoid a conviction by participating in a full Saturday of activities. 

Participants must first admit that they’ve patronized a prostitute. They are tested for syphilis and then spend a morning listening to a Health Department presentation about sexually transmitted diseases and participating in a neighborhood impact panel, in which area residents talk about the effects prostitution has on their community. “The panel is basically volunteers from the neighborhood who get to say things like, “Hey, I live here. My kids have to deal with it. You’re using our park where our kids play,’ ” said the Rev. Jay Height, who participated in the planning of the program. At the first impact panel, offenders also heard a woman describe how the arrest of her husband several years ago for patronizing a prostitute hurt her family.

District Attorney Carl Brizzi himself sometimes speaks to offenders. “I tell them it’s not a victimless crime.  The women are victims and the community is a victim, and they’ve violated the trust of their families, kids, girlfriends. I tell them this is an opportunity to get their lives together,” Brizzi said.

Waymire, Height and others who developed the Red Zone Program felt it was important that offenders “pay back” the community for the harm caused by their offending. Thus, in the afternoon, the offenders, wearing orange vests to identify them as program participants, pick up trash as part of clean-up crews. “We have them clean up major thoroughfares in our area, pick up garbage, and local community groups supervise,” Height said. Offenders also agree to stay outside a one-mile radius from where they were arrested, with waivers available for those who live, work or otherwise have a valid reason to be there. Offenders must avoid committing any additional criminal offense over the next two years or face the possibility of being re-charged in the prostitution case.

Police conduct regular stings to arrest offenders, and the prosecutor’s office usually sets aside one Saturday a month for the Red Zone Program with anywhere from six to 30 offenders participating on a given day. Participants frequently begin the day “arms crossed and grumbling,” Waymire said, but by the end of the day many express contrition. In a survey completed at the end of the day, one participant wrote:  “I’m glad I got caught. It kept me from a deviant lifestyle. The guilt and shame has been excruciating, yet beneficial. Thank you.”

In the East District, where the program began, 152 offenders participated over the course of the program’s first four years. The program has since expanded to the South and West police districts. While the Red Zone hasn’t eliminated prostitution, it does force hot spots to move—and the police stings to move with it. “The community loves it,” Waymire said. “Community members are seeing these offenders come back and do something to make their neighborhoods better.”  Prosecutors also invite the media to attend their Red Zone weekends to help get the word out about the program and hopefully prevent future offending.

Height said the program reflects the fact that the vast majority of people who solicit prostitutes are not from the area. The point of the program, he says, is two-fold—“to show them that it’s not a victimless crime and to discourage them from coming back here.” 

 

 

 

Community prosecutors in Portland have spent a significant amount of their energy addressing problems related to drugs. Because jails were overcrowded, dealers were often released on their own recognizance and were back at the same location, peddling their wares within hours. This reality proved frustrating to police, local stakeholders and prosecutors.

“The police as part of a community policing pilot had set up a public safety work group,” said Wayne Pearson, who supervises Portland’s Neighborhood D.A. Unit and participated in the work group. “And the community was asking me at these meetings why when a police officer arrests a person for drug offending are they back there in hours? Why aren’t they kept away?” 

It was police officers who came up with the idea that offenders be released only on the condition that they not return to the area where they were arrested. But setting such a condition, Pearson realized, was harder than it sounded. Pearson determined that judges had the power to ban dealers from certain areas as a condition of release, but the police didn’t have the power to enforce the bans without returning to court and obtaining an arrest warrant—a complicated and lengthy process that made the proposal unworkable. “All an officer can do is send a memo to a judge and ask him to put out a warrant, and all of that would take days or maybe weeks,” Pearson said.

And yet Pearson’s legal training told him that a solution was possible. “Constitutional rights are not absolute. We know that a felon can have his right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment removed or limited because he has abused that right, even by committing a crime unrelated to gun possession,” Pearson said. “And in free speech, that right is always subject to reasonable time, place, manner restrictions… I said this is not an easy nut to crack, but it’s also something that’s not without precedent. That suggested to me that if we were careful about the way we approached this, it might work.”

Guided by this reasoning, Pearson partnered with the City Attorney’s Office, the Portland Police Bureau and the community to propose a new ordinance to the City Council. The ordinance created a “drug-free zone,” the first of its kind in the country. (The name originally proposed was a “high-vice area restriction” but community members objected, feeling that the words “high vice” denigrated the neighborhood. “They said, ‘We don’t want the whole city to stamp us with a negative name like “high vice.” Why don’t you call it a drug-free zone, so that the implication to the community at large would be that these sorts of behaviors won’t be tolerated here?’” Pearson recalled as an example of the value and need for community involvement.)

Prosecutors spent a good deal of time researching not only the legal underpinnings of the proposed ordinance but also selling it to the entire community. “The commander of the local precinct and I took this draft ordinance around and talked to anybody and everybody who may have wanted input,” Pearson said. “We went to all the needle exchange programs, methadone clinics, social service providers, homeless clinics, to explain what it was, who it was aimed at.” 

In the first iteration of the ordinance, three drug-free zones were created. “The deputies spent hours driving around the neighborhoods just to make sure they got the boundaries right. It took thousands of hours of prep working with the city attorney,” said Judy Phelan, Schrunk’s staff assistant.

“In the end, the ordinance sailed through [the City Council] primarily because we’d gone around to virtually everybody, including the ACLU, who might have an impression about it and given them the opportunity for input,” Pearson said.

The ordinance strives to be “very due-process oriented,” Pearson said, which has thus far allowed it to withstand legal challenges. Offenders, for instance, can appeal the exclusion and get variances if they live or work in the zone.

How Drug-Free Zones Work
This is how the drug-free zone works:  If someone is arrested for a drug offense within the zone, the arresting officer can issue a 90-day notice of exclusion from the zone. If the person enters the zone within 90 days, he or she can be arrested for criminal trespass. This eliminates the cumbersome and time-consuming process of obtaining a contempt warrant for every violation.

When the ordinance sunsets every few years, the City Council, Prosecutor’s Office, Portland Police Bureau, the community and City Attorney’s Office have a chance to make adjustments to the law before renewing it. The biggest part of the process is usually changing the zones’ boundaries. “We go back and see how drug usage and dealing have changed. In some cases, zones or parts of zones have been abolished and taken off the books because the drug dealing has completely gone away,” Pearson said.

At one point, there were as many as five drug-free zones. Currently, the city has two.  Recently, there were 2,000 exclusions in effect in Portland, although many of the exclusions involved multiple citations of the same offender.

The D.A.’s Office says the drug-free zones have proven highly effective. The drug market was eradicated in one area of town and drug arrests significantly reduced in two of the zones. In one, drug arrests dropped 48 percent the first year and 51 percent the second year. In the same period citywide, drug arrests increased by 20 percent the first year and 21 percent the next. The District Attorney’s Office has kept a close eye on displacement; while there has certainly been some, arrest statistics seem to indicate that dealers haven’t simply picked up and moved wholesale to areas without drug-free zones.

 

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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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