The geographic area served by the community prosecution program influences what resources are needed and what kinds are available. The challenges and logistical options for community prosecution efforts in densely populated inner-city neighborhoods may be quite different from those of smaller suburban or rural jurisdictions.

The Santa Fe, New Mexico, District Attorney’s Office targets an area of more than 7,000 square miles that comprises 3 rural counties, a few small towns, and about 125,000 residents. Illegal drugs (particularly heroin) pose a major problem, to the extent that two of the counties are classified as part of a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. The large area and dispersed population make community outreach one of the great challenges of the program, which is still in an early stage of implementation.

Community prosecution programs define their geographic target areas in various ways. In Washington, D.C., community prosecution zones were matched to police patrol service areas to enhance the ability of prosecutors to serve neighborhoods and work with Metropolitan Police Department community policing teams.⁴ By contrast, the Denver target areas are neighborhoods in which residents often share ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds and are likely to have a sense of common interest—or of “community.”⁵ In Multnomah County, Oregon, prosecutors in the Neighborhood DA Unit are linked to seven defined districts. The East Portland District combines several principal neighborhoods. The Gresham District is a separate city within the county, and the Tri-Met District covers the three-county transit system.⁶

Role of the Community

How community prosecution sites define the community’s role and which individuals or groups will represent the community determine the level of community involvement. In some jurisdictions, community activists identify the pressing crime-related problems affecting neighborhoods, but the prosecutor’s office orchestrates the response, often with the help of community police or other agencies. In New York, Manhattan, Kings County, and the Bronx have community affairs bureaus headed by nonattorney community organizers who do most of the outreach (in Kings County, attorneys also participate), attending community meetings and talking with neighborhood leaders, residents, and other stakeholders to determine issues and priorities, and linking the community with prosecutors and other agencies to address specific issues.

In other locations, community representatives play a central role in identifying problems, deciding priorities, assessing needs, and planning strategies to employ the resources that the prosecutor’s office can bring to bear. The approach to community prosecution that District Attorney William Ritter has implemented in Denver is distinctive in that the community prosecutors provide legal guidance and assist with access to city and county resources, but the process of identifying and solving problems is largely carried out by and within the community.⁷ Nonattorney community justice advocates from the targeted communities are selected to reach out to the community and facilitate the problem-solving process. In each area, active neighborhood community justice councils of residents, teachers, school administrators, business owners, and faith leaders identify and prioritize problems and meet monthly with community prosecutors and representatives of relevant agencies to educate themselves and to devise strategies for overcoming problems. One benefit of the community justice council approach is that some quality-of-life issues are resolved without formal action by the state or city prosecutor.

The nature of the responses to the problems identified varies among community prosecution efforts. Strategies have taken many forms, ranging from targeted prosecution of cases the community is concerned about (e.g., drug dealing, nuisance establishments or properties, illegal vending) to development of community-operated crime prevention or service improvement efforts, such as Indianapolis’s Street Level Advocacy Program. When residents of an Indianapolis neighborhood identified open prostitution as a problem, a community representative took an active role in designing the Patronizing Diversion Program, which aims to discourage prostitution by focusing on patrons of prostitutes. First-time offenders can avoid conviction by admitting to the charge, performing community service, and meeting with a panel of volunteers from the community who confront offenders with the impact of prostitution on their neighborhood. The public nature of this approach—and the face-to-face interaction with residents of the neighborhood—is a powerful deterrent to people who are considering patronizing prostitutes in the area. Examples of many other strategies used in response to community crime problems are discussed in more detail in the full report Community Prosecution Strategies: Measuring Impact.⁸

Organizational Adaptations in the Prosecutor’s Office

Depending on the size and resources of the prosecutor’s office, a community prosecution program may be run by one or two prosecutors, lay employees, or an entire unit of community-oriented prosecutors, investigators, community relations specialists, and clerical staff. Many programs began by addressing single sites and were staffed by one attorney or staff member. The best-known example of this approach is the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Neighborhood DA Unit, which began in 1990 with a single prosecutor posted to Portland’s Lloyd District. By 1996, the Neighborhood DA Unit had grown to seven community prosecutors covering almost the entire county.⁹

In Maryland’s Howard and Montgomery counties, and in a growing number of other locations, the community prosecution philosophy governs the way business is conducted in the prosecutor’s office overall. The emphasis on this new community-based problem-solving philosophy is reflected in the reorganization of some prosecutors’ offices along geographic lines and in the perspectives of individual attorneys who view community assignments as part of the career ladder complementing, rather than detracting from, the more traditional assignments and paths to advancement.

Case Processing Adaptations

Methods of prosecuting cases from targeted neighborhoods differ among community prosecution programs. Cases may be referred to the central office, or neighborhood prosecutors may prosecute them “vertically” (the same prosecutor handles the case at every stage). In Kings County, New York, teams of attorneys assigned to each of the borough’s five judicial zones vertically prosecute the cases that originate in their zone. The Kings County prosecutors are physically located in the central office to handle trial caseloads efficiently; however, they meet regularly with residents and hear concerns about crime and quality-of-life issues. The rationale for this approach is that these attorneys will understand the community context associated with their criminal cases and will develop more productive working relationships with the community and precinct police. The familiarity with the community fostered by vertical prosecution of cases is believed to facilitate the pursuit of community public safety goals, help prosecutors respond to community priorities, and generate neighborhood support in prosecuting criminal cases.

In some community prosecution programs, community prosecutors do not try cases themselves. Instead, community cases are assigned to the trial division for litigation, and community prosecutors act as liaisons between trial attorneys and community residents. This allows community prosecutors to immerse themselves in the community, participate in neighborhood meetings and events, and facilitate problem-solving strategies. In other jurisdictions, community prosecutors carry the same caseloads as other attorneys in the office and must add outreach and problem solving to these responsibilities.

Collaborative Partnerships

Community prosecution strategies often involve efforts that are not strictly or exclusively within the prosecutor’s domain and may be only tangentially related to criminal justice. Programs vary in how much they participate in interagency planning, enforcement, and service delivery, and in how much they collaborate with other initiatives such as community courts and community policing. In many locations, community prosecution and community policing go hand in hand, encouraged to work collaboratively by federal policy and funding. Police can provide enforcement support and, at times, a degree of safety in situations that even a seasoned prosecutor may be ill equipped to handle. In turn, community prosecutors can offer the legal expertise and authority to bring creative community policing solutions to fruition.

Some sites have combined community prosecution with community courts. Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle has been the force behind various community-based initiatives in Austin, Texas, including a community court, a drug court, and programs to prevent juvenile crime and truancy.

To solve their target problems, community prosecutors often find it helpful to join forces with other agencies, combining resources that community members might otherwise access in a piecemeal manner, if at all. In nuisance abatement efforts, community prosecutors have relied on the civil justice system and housing and licensing agencies. In Philadelphia, the Local Intensive Narcotics Enforcement (LINE) program was piloted in 1991 to prosecute serious drug offenders. When LINE prosecutors learned what most troubled community residents—nuisance bars, neglected properties, crackhouses, houses of prostitution, and “weed stores”—they called on the police; Philadelphia’s departments of law, public health, licenses and inspections, and liquor control enforcement; the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board; and the Philadelphia Legislative Delegation for help. When LINE became the Special Narcotics Prosecution Unit in 1998, its community role was assumed by the District Attorney’s Public Nuisance Task Force, which pursued the same nuisance abatement strategies.

Some community prosecution initiatives are purely collaborative, functioning as part of a task force with other agencies. The CLEAR program in Los Angeles, California, was created in 1996 by an interagency gang task force to address the community’s gang problems by targeting specific geographic areas or gangs and using suppression, intervention, and prevention tactics. It is a partnership of law enforcement agencies (the police, sheriff, district attorney, city attorney, and probation department), public officials, and community residents.