Shane Correia

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.