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. “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. 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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
