Shane Correia

Since launching its community prosecution program in 1996, the Denver District Attorney’s Office has been able to sustain a far-reaching program on a relatively tight budget. The key has been to leverage scarce resources both in and outside the office. Probably the most important way that the office has leveraged resources is by encouraging the community to play an active leadership role. The Denver District Attorney’s Office has developed a number of ways to nurture and sustain community involvement: through community justice councils, which bring stakeholders together to set priorities and develop new problem-solving strategies; through community accountability boards, which use community volunteers to determine restorative sanctions for offending youth; and through a community court, which has worked closely with local stakeholders in shaping its mission and programs. One of the Denver D.A.’s Community Justice Unit’s first initiatives was establishing community justice councils. Interestingly, the councils have evolved over time, demonstrating how important it is for community prosecutors to be flexible and adapt to the needs of different neighborhoods. The first justice councils were organized in the Denver neighborhoods of Globeville and Capitol Hill by former Community Prosecution Division Director Susan Motika, whom Ritter hired in 1997. Motika’s assignment, as she describes it, was to “develop a constructive, proactive relationship with community residents to help them identify crime and quality of life problems and develop strategies for addressing them.” Motika, a Denver native, brought a diverse background to the work—she had been at the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, working on elder protection litigation, juvenile justice, and victims’ rights issues. And before law school, she had worked as a community organizer. From the beginning, Motika met whomever she could. “What I did was meet as many key neighborhood stakeholders as possible. I also met with the neighborhood police officers and got a history of the strategies and approaches that have been used—what’s been effective for them and what hasn’t been effective.” Motika sought to build partnerships with local organizations, but found that it wasn’t always possible. While some community organizations were strong and democratic others were fledgling or less representative of a cross-section of the neighborhood. As an alternative, she came up with an idea to create an entirely new committee representing a broad range of stakeholders—residents, business leaders, community center directors, faith leaders, school teachers, community police officers, prosecutors and elected city and state representatives. “I had done community organizing and been in law enforcement work. I’d been in both worlds. It made sense to me to bring all the people together,” Motika said. Since the first committees in Globeville and Capitol Hill, similar committees—which came to be known as community justice councils—were organized in several other Denver neighborhoods. Each council has 20 to 35 members who are chosen by community prosecutors through in depth interviews. “We ask people a series of open ended questions about problems in the neighborhood, what approaches have been helpful in the neighborhood, what their role has been, what their hopes and dreams for the neighborhood are,” Motika says. “We’re looking at selecting people with a common vision for neighborhood safety. This is not a popularity contest where the most popular or powerful person wins. People are chosen for their belief in working toward a safe and unified neighborhood.” Over time, the Community Justice Unit’s use of community justice councils has evolved. While they were originally envisioned as an essential partner to any successful community prosecution effort, the unit has come to see them as useful in only certain neighborhoods, particularly those that lack strong community infrastructure. In neighborhoods with strong local organizations, prosecutors have found that creating a council is redundant. “In some neighborhoods it may make sense for the prosecutor to create an opportunity for people with widely divergent views and an interest in public safety to come together,” Motika said. “But where you’ve got a strong resident organization, you want to try and complement them and support them, not say ‘Your organization is no good, government is going to do its version instead,’” Motika said. “The prosecutor could spend time creating community justice councils, but that’s not always a fertile use of his or her time,” Motika said. Or, a council may be useful for a few years until another resident organization becomes more vibrant, at which time the prosecutor’s office might disband the justice council in favor of the home-grown group, Motika said. Ultimately, prosecutors’ experience with justice councils reinforced two lessons:  first, that the prosecutor’s office can sometimes be just as effective—perhaps even more so—leveraging existing resources rather than creating new community resources from scratch; and second, that different communities require different approaches—a single cookie-cutter model won’t do the trick.  Motika feels it’s vital to include young people on the community justice councils—and in any community prosecution initiative. “That’s extremely important because adults in many distressed neighborhoods are complaining about juvenile crime. Young people should be part of shaping the plan for making a safe neighborhood and not merely talked about as ‘you kids’ and ‘those people.’ ”

Regardless of which groups the prosecutor’s office partners with, it helps to have tools for identifying local priorities and concerns. The Denver District Attorney’s Office Community Justice Unit has developed just such a tool, which it calls the “dots exercise.” This is how the dots exercise works: Before a meeting, the community prosecution staff meets individually with dozens of people who live and work in the neighborhood and asks them to talk about local concerns. Based on information gathered through these individual conversations, the community prosecutor creates large posters listing all the issues raised by the community members. Room is left on the charts so that additional issues can be added during the meeting.  After a brief introduction to the exercise, participants review the problems listed on the charts and discuss possible additions. Everyone at the meeting then receives an unlimited number of green dots and two red dots. Council members place a green dot next to any issue they feel is a neighborhood problem. They then place their two red dots next to the issues they feel are the most important. Participants are allowed to place both their red dots on a single issue.  The number of red dots next to each issue gives the group a concrete measure of which issues are of greatest collective concern. The green dots help ensure that issues of lower priority are also noted and not pushed aside entirely. In the Capitol Hill neighborhood, the community justice council used the dots exercise to identify drug sales and crimes connected to alcohol abuse as the top crime issues. The dots exercise isn’t simply about tallying up the numbers and then focusing on the top concerns, cautions Tom Knorr, a member of the Capitol Hill Community Justice Council. “Counting red dots and green dots is, in a sense, looking for a majority, but you’re also looking for what we can all live with. You don’t just say, ‘These are the winners; too bad losers.’  You have to fashion it in a way that respects everyone,” he says. “You want to have discussions about how to prioritize. ‘This got the most red dots, how do you feel about that?’ I think when neighbors can hear neighbors talking about a particular issue, you try to have that discussion help people see that this is the place to focus first. It isn’t like there’s an announcement that one issue is the winner.”

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.