Title: Community Prosecution Strategies Series: Monograph Authors: John S. Goldkamp, Cheryl Irons-Guynn, and Doris Weiland Published: August 2003 Subject: prosecution, case processing, court management 127 pages 323,584 bytes ---------------------------- Figures, charts, forms, and tables are not included in this ASCII plain-text file. To view this document in its entirety, download the Adobe Acrobat graphic file available from this Web site. ---------------------------- U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs Bureau of Justice Assistance Community Prosecution Strategies Monograph August 2003 BJA Bureau of Justice Assistance ---------------------------- U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs 810 Seventh Street NW. Washington, DC 20531 John Ashcroft Attorney General Deborah J. Daniels Assistant Attorney General C. Camille Cain Acting Director, Bureau of Justice Assistance Office of Justice Programs Home Page www.ojp.usdoj.gov Bureau of Justice Assistance Home Page www.ojp.usdoj.gov/BJA NCJ 195062 This document was prepared by the Crime and Justice Research Institute (under the working title Community Prosecution Strategies: Measuring Impact), under grant number 1999-DD-BX-K008, awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. The Bureau of Justice Assistance is a component of the Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and the Office for Victims of Crime. ---------------------------- Community Prosecution Strategies by John S. Goldkamp Cheryl Irons-Guynn Doris Weiland August 2003 ---------------------------- Acknowledgments Arizona Phoenix City Attorney's Office: We are grateful to Hon. Kerry Wangberg for his staff's help in preparing our report. We also wish to thank division head Arron Carreon-Ainsa for taking the time to describe the program in depth. Pima County Attorney's Office: We are thankful to Hon. Barbara LaWall, Pima County Attorney, for allowing us to speak with her staff. We greatly appreciate the assistance of Deputy County Attorney Christine Curtis, who responded enthusiastically to our requests for information. California Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office: Our thanks to Hon. Gil Garcetti, former Los Angeles County District Attorney, for the cooperation provided by his office. We are grateful to Assistant District Attorney Nancy Lidamore for taking the time to answer our questions and provide information. Oakland City Attorney's Office: We greatly appreciate the kind invitation to visit the office of City Attorney John Russo. We are very grateful to Paralegal Sandra Marion for providing us with insight into the process of starting up a community prosecution program and taking us on a tour of the pilot site in Oakland. We also thank Deputy City Attorney Charles Vose for his informative presentation at the Community Prosecution Conference-2000, for taking the time to respond to our followup questions, and for facilitating our observation of the pilot site. Placer County District Attorney's Office: We thank Hon. Bradford R. Fenocchio, Placer County District Attorney, for the cooperation provided by his office. We wish to thank Assistant District Attorney Suzanne Gazzaniga for her cooperation in spending valuable time answering questions about the unique elder-abuse target of their program, and sending written program information promptly. Sacramento County District Attorney's Office: We wish to thank the office of Hon. Jan Scully, where Assistant District Attorney Karen Maxwell generously shared her time and expertise on their community prosecution program. Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office: Our thanks to Hon. George Kennedy, Santa Clara County District Attorney, for the gracious attention of his office. Our observation of the Santa Clara Community Prosecution site was eye opening. Deputy District Attorney Chris Arriolla was generous with his time and provided an invaluable glimpse of community prosecution at work. We are grateful to Assistant District Attorney Marc Buller for his kind invitation to observe, and the answers and information provided. San Diego District Attorney's Office: We appreciate the cooperation received from the staff of San Diego District Attorney Casey Gwinn. We are grateful to Assistant District Attorney Joan Dawson, head of the community prosecution program, who provided valuable indepth information. Colorado Denver District Attorney's Office: Our thanks to Hon. William Ritter, Denver District Attorney, for the cooperation of his staff. We appreciate the assistance of Susan Motika, Director of the Community Justice Unit, for providing written information and taking the time to discuss the program. She and her staff did an admirable job of hosting APRI's Community Prosecution Workshop in April 2000, giving us an opportunity to see Denver's community justice program in action. Our thanks to Community Justice Advocate Erin Sullivan Lange and Community Justice Coordinator David Mrakitsch for answering our questions. We also thank Christine Talley, co-chair of the Capitol Hill Community Justice Council, for welcoming us to observe the council in action and answering our questions. District of Columbia U.S. Attorney's Office: We are grateful to Hon. Wilma A. Lewis, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, for the assistance we received from her staff. We thank Assistant U.S. Attorney Clifford Keenan for providing written materials and valuable information on the U.S. Attorney's Office community prosecution program in Washington, D.C. Florida Brevard/Seminole County State Attorney's Office: We are grateful to Hon. Norman Wolfinger and to division head Phil Archer for the indepth interview and materials they so generously provided in response to our many questions. Palm Beach County State Attorney's Office: Our thanks to Hon. Barry Krischer, Palm Beach County State Attorney, for the cooperation of his staff. Assistant State Attorney James Martz volunteered considerable time answering our questions and explaining the process and policies of COMBAT. Our thanks also to Assistant State Attorney Terrance Nolan for the informative discussion. Hawaii Prosecuting Attorney for the City and County of Honolulu: We wish to thank Hon. Peter Carlisle, Prosecuting Attorney for the City and County of Honolulu. Our first contact with a community prosecution site was with staff member Claire Merry, whose enthusiasm about the project and responsiveness to followup calls were very helpful. Illinois Cook County State's Attorney: We are grateful to Hon. Richard Devine, Cook County State's Attorney, for the courtesy of his staff. Conversations with Assistant State's Attorney Neera Walsh provided information about community prosecution in Chicago today, and insight and contacts for background research on the original project from the 1970s. We are indebted also to former Cook County assistant state's attorneys, Hon. Nancy S. Salyers and Ray Grossman, Esquire, for describing what we believe to be the first community prosecution effort in the United States. Indiana Marion County Prosecutor's Office: We are grateful to Hon. Scott Newman, Marion County Prosecutor, for the assistance provided by his staff. We especially appreciate the time and information provided by Program Supervisor Diane Burleson and former Supervisor Melinda Haag. St. Joseph's County Prosecutor's Office: We thank Hon. Christopher A. Toth, St. Joseph's County Prosecuting Attorney, for the cooperation we received from his office. Khadijah Muhammad, co-director of Strategic Prosecution, took the time to explain the startup process of their project, and in a later conversation, its implementation. Maryland Howard County State's Attorney's Office: We thank Hon. Marna McLendon, Howard County State's Attorney, for the time she took to discuss community prosecution generally and her project specifically. Her insights were invaluable. Montgomery County State's Attorney's Office: We are grateful for the assistance and cooperation of the staff of Hon. Douglas Gansler, Montgomery County State's Attorney. We also appreciate the assistance and cooperation of Assistant State's Attorney Tom Eldridge. Massachusetts Plymouth County District Attorney's Office: We appreciate the cooperation of the staff of Hon. Michael Sullivan, Plymouth County District Attorney, and particularly Assistant District Attorney William Asci, who responded so promptly to our calls. Middlesex County District Attorney's Office: We extend our thanks to Hon. Martha Coakley, Middlesex County District Attorney. We also appreciate the help provided by Assistant District Attorney Kerry Ahearn, who explained the structure and functioning of the distinctive program operating in her county. Suffolk County District Attorney's Office: We thank Hon. Ralph Martin, Suffolk County District Attorney, for the courtesy extended by his office. The dedication of Deborah McDonnah, head of Community Affairs for the community prosecution project in Suffolk County, was evident in our discussion. Michigan Kalamazoo County Prosecuting Attorney's Office: We are grateful for the assistance provided by the office of Hon. James Gregart, Kalamazoo County Prosecuting Attorney. Senior Neighborhood Prosecutor Karen Hayter was extremely helpful and informative, both in phone conversations and in person. Minnesota Hennepin County Attorney's Office: We appreciate the cooperation of the staff of Hon. Amy Klobuchar, Hennepin County Attorney. The time spent with us by Martha Holton-Dimick, Ericka Mozangue, and Terri Froehlke, assistant county attorneys, provided great insight into the life of a community prosecutor, and the types of issues that arise in the field. Missouri Jackson County Prosecutor's Office: We appreciate the cooperation of the office of Hon. Robert Beaird, Jackson County Prosecutor. Chief Trial Assistant Kathy Finnell's knowledge about community justice and her commitment to the community were evident in our conversations, and we appreciate her input. New York Bronx District Attorney's Office: We thank Hon. Robert T. Johnson, Bronx District Attorney, and Susan Sadd, Director of Planning and Analysis, who provided us with valuable information. Erie County District Attorney's Office: We are grateful to the staff of Hon. Frank J. Clark for taking the time to describe community prosecution as it is practiced in their office. Thanks to Assistant District Attorney Michael Drmacich for patiently answering our many questions. Kings County District Attorney's Office: We are grateful to Hon. Charles J. Hynes, Kings County District Attorney, for the information given by his staff. We thank Lee Hudson, Director of the Community Relations Bureau, and Deputy District Attorney Michael Vechionne, for providing information about Kings County's program. Manhattan, New York County District Attorney's Office: Our thanks go to Hon. Robert Morgenthau, New York County District Attorney, for the cooperation we received from his office. We would like to thank Executive District Attorney Kristine Hamann and Community Affairs Department Head Connie Cuchiarra for information about Manhattan's project. Nassau County District Attorney's Office: We are grateful to Hon. Denis Dillon, Nassau County District Attorney, for the assistance provided by his office. We appreciate the input of Assistant District Attorney Rene Fiechter, who spent a great deal of time answering our questions, on more than one occasion. Westchester County District Attorney's Office: Our thanks go to Hon. Jeanine Pirro, Westchester County District Attorney, for the courtesy of her staff. We extend our appreciation to Community Justice Coordinator Yolanda Robinson and Assistant District Attorney Robert Maccarone, with whom we engaged in several discussions about community prosecution generally and their program specifically. Ohio Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office: We appreciate the cooperation of the staff of Hon. William Mason. Assistant Prosecutor Richard Neff generously shared his time to answer all our questions. Oregon Multnomah County District Attorney's Office: We are indebted to Hon. Michael Schrunk, Multnomah County District Attorney, for the cooperation provided by his office, and to Deputy District Attorney Jim Hayden for answering our many questions about the pioneering program in Portland. Our thanks also go to Staff Assistant Judy Phelan for her help. Pennsylvania Lackawanna County District Attorney's Office: Our thanks go to Hon. Andrew Jarbola III and to Christine Tocki for taking the time to describe community prosecution as it operates in their office. Philadelphia District Attorney's Office: We wish to thank Hon. Lynne Abraham, Philadelphia District Attorney. We are grateful to George G. Mosee, Jr., Deputy District Attorney and Chief of the Narcotics Division, for inviting us into his office to learn about community prosecution in Philadelphia. Tennessee Knox County District Attorney General's Office: Our thanks go to Hon. Randy Nichols, whose staff generously took the time to describe community prosecution in their county. We appreciate Program Coordinator Rhonda Garren taking the time to share her expertise with us. Texas Travis County District Attorney's Office: We appreciate the cooperation of the office of Hon. Ronnie Earle, Travis County District Attorney. Assistant District Attorney Meg Brooks provided us with valuable information about community prosecution in Austin. Washington Seattle City Attorney: We are grateful to the office of Hon. Mark Sidran for taking the time to speak with us and to Criminal Division Chief Robert Hood for his kind cooperation. We are extremely grateful to Barbara Boland and Catherine Coles, pioneers in community prosecution research, for generously sharing their knowledge, insights, and extensive research into community justice. We also wish to thank Cynthia Tompkins, then-project manager and senior attorney at the American Prosecutors Research Institute, for welcoming us to the first APRI-sponsored Community Prosecution Workshop and APRI Community Prosecution Program Director Michael Kuykendall for his interest in our efforts. ---------------------------- Contents Executive Summary o Introduction o Prosecution and the Community o Emergence of Community Prosecution o Typology of Community Prosecution Strategies o Summary Descriptions of Community Prosecution Sites o Measuring Impact: Challenges of Community Prosecution Strategies Introduction Chapter 1. The Prosecutor and the Community o Community and Criminal Justice o Relevance of the Community Justice Movement o Community Prosecution as a Community Justice Strategy Chapter 2. Emergence of Community Prosecution Strategies Chapter 3. Chicago's Community Prosecutions Unit: An Early Community Prosecution Prototype Chapter 4. Common Elements of Community Prosecution Strategies: A Working Typology o Target Problems o Target Area o Role of the Community o Content of Response to Community Problems o Organizational Adaptations in the Prosecutor's Office o Case Processing Adaptations to Community Prosecution o Interagency and Collaborative Partnerships in Community Prosecution Chapter 5. Community Prosecution in the United States: Descriptive Overview of Sites o Limitations of This Preliminary Overview o Purpose of the Preliminary Overview of Sites o Manhattan, New York o Multnomah County (Portland), Oregon o Kings County (Brooklyn), New York o Middlesex County, Massachusetts o Philadelphia, Pennsylvania o Marion County (Indianapolis), Indiana o Suffolk County (Boston), Massachusetts o Los Angeles County, California o Seattle, Washington o Howard County, Maryland o Plymouth County (Brockton), Massachusetts o Washington, D.C., United States Attorney's Office o Denver, Colorado o Erie County (Buffalo), New York o Phoenix, Arizona o Santa Clara County, California o Pima County (Tucson), Arizona o Jackson County (Kansas City), Missouri o Honolulu, Hawaii o San Diego, California o Kalamazoo County, Michigan o Cook County (Chicago), Illinois o Nassau County, New York o Knox County, Tennessee o Travis County (Austin), Texas o West Palm Beach, Florida o Hennepin County (Minneapolis), Minnesota o Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), Ohio o Brevard/Seminole County, Florida o Montgomery County, Maryland o Sacramento County, California o Placer County, California o St. Joseph's County (South Bend), Indiana o Lackawanna County (Scranton), Pennsylvania o Westchester County, New York o Oakland, California Chapter 6. Community Prosecution: Thinking About Evaluation o A Conceptual Framework for Evaluating Community Prosecution o Identifying the Roles of the Prosecutor and the Community o Using the Typology To Organize Evaluation Questions o Distinguishing Between (Early-Stage) Implementation and Outcome Questions o Target Problems o Target Area o Role of the Community o Content of Community Prosecution Strategy o Organization of Prosecution o Collaboration and Partnerships in Identifying Problems and Effecting Solutions Conclusion References ---------------------------- Executive Summary Introduction Community prosecution strategies signal a major milestone in changing the culture and role of the prosecutor by developing partnerships and collaborative, problem-solving approaches with the community to improve the quality of life and safety of citizens. The most innovative community prosecution initiatives pose fundamental questions about the function of the prosecutor, the ways in which the prosecutor seeks justice, and the organization and operation of the prosecutor's office. These strategies suggest an important shift in traditional prosecutorial philosophy, as prosecutors emphasize community-focused crime strategies and adapt values and methods of other community justice innovations, particularly those relating to community policing, court, corrections, and restorative justice initiatives. This monograph describes the emergence of community prosecution strategies. It identifies some of their common elements in a working typology based on features of innovations operating in diverse settings in the United States. This discussion of community prosecution strategies draws on examples from 36 sites across the nation. The monograph concludes by proposing a conceptual framework for evaluating and describing some of the challenges posed by community prosecution strategies for assessing impact and measuring performance. Prosecution and the Community Since the 1960s, the concept of community, variously defined, has continued to surface as an important criminal justice element. For example, community corrections, a concept dating back more than a century, was important in correctional innovation during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s (Harris, 1995). In the late 1960s, the relationship between the community and the police became a primary focus of justice reform strategies (President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, 1967; U.S. National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, 1970). Problem- oriented and community-policing initiatives of the 1980s and 1990s were developed to ensure that community concerns were fully addressed by police agencies (Davis, 1975; Goldstein, 1990; Rosenbaum, 1994). More recently, the traditional posture of the courts, purposefully aloof from the problems of the community, was challenged with the establishment of the Midtown Community Court in 1993. The Midtown Community Court sought a closer working relationship with the community and served as a catalyst for diverse community-oriented justice initiatives. All of these and other community-oriented crime and justice foci form the background against which current community prosecution strategies have emerged and can be understood. Emergence of Community Prosecution Community prosecution has been described as a "grassroots approach to law enforcement involving both traditional and nontraditional prosecutorial initiatives" (Weinstein, 1998: 19). In several jurisdictions, community prosecution initiatives were sparked by the implementation of community policing and were logical, complementary extensions of the focus on community issues to the prosecutor's function (Hankins and Weinstein, 1996). In locations without community policing programs, community prosecution strategies were developed to respond to community crime and public safety issues that the police were not sufficiently addressing. In many instances, community prosecution involves deploying prosecutors or nonlegal staff in the community to identify residents' concerns and invite their participation in developing strategies for addressing problems of crime and social disorder that are their highest priority. Prosecutors involved in these outreach efforts often find that community residents do not share the traditional prosecutor's concern with the prosecution of serious crimes. Although the community may assume that such matters always will be a priority, their immediate concerns more often focus on the nuisance or quality-of-life crimes that make life in the neighborhood unsafe or unpleasant. In short, prosecutors have discovered--like policing and community court leaders--that problems identified by residents as most important to them in their daily lives are generally not the serious crimes that the criminal justice system appears most ready to handle. The emergence and diffusion of community prosecution as an innovation is difficult to reconstruct because many prosecutors have been dealing with community issues in various ways for some time. A good historical case can be made that community prosecution preceded rather than followed from community policing reforms, drawing its substance instead from the community organization innovations of the 1960s. The establishment of Cook County State's Attorney Bernard Carey's 1973 community prosecution program in Chicago predates the first community policing program and was clearly influenced by the active community organization initiatives in Chicago in the 1960s. Current estimates vary as to the number of prosecutors' offices in the United States that have adopted some version of a community prosecution strategy. Certainly, the problems thrust on the criminal justice system by drug crimes and drug enforcement during the 1980s and 1990s forced creation of new strategies to cope with the overwhelming criminal caseload, including ways to free neighborhoods of the problems related to crime. In 1985, for example, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau instituted a community- focused approach through a Community Affairs Unit in response to the advent of crack cocaine in New York City, sending an experienced nonattorney employee into the community to improve community relations and gather intelligence to better prosecute drug crimes. The origin of the contemporary community prosecution movement in the United States is most often traced to the pioneering efforts of Multnomah County District Attorney Michael Schrunk. In 1990, he established the Neighborhood District Attorney Unit in Portland, Oregon, in response to the concerns of business leaders that quality-of-life crimes impeded development of a central business district (Boland, 1998a). Other community-oriented prosecution innovations followed in 1991 in Kings County (Brooklyn), New York, under District Attorney Charles J. Hynes and in Montgomery County, Maryland, under then-State's Attorney Andrew Sonner. Both initiatives involved major reorganization of the prosecutors' offices along geographic lines and established new working links with the communities in each area. Also in 1991, the Community-Based Justice Program began operation in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, and in 1993, the Street Level Advocacy Program was instituted in Marion County (Indianapolis), Indiana. After the early 1990s, the innovation was adapted in additional jurisdictions and spread more rapidly. Table 1 lists community prosecution sites and the years they began implementing community prosecution. Typology of Community Prosecution Strategies The forms that community prosecution has taken across the United States are evidence that there is no one-size-fits-all community prosecution model. As with other community justice innovations, community prosecution strategies have taken different forms in response to the needs and circumstances of specific localities. They have been tailored to the problems of neighborhoods, commercial districts, or other specific geographic locations within cities and rural areas. Despite their diverse approaches, however, community prosecution strategies share some underlying dimensions. This monograph proposes seven critical dimensions focusing on common features that appear to define community prosecution strategies and to provide an organizing framework or working typology of community prosecution strategies. They include: o The target problem bringing about the need for the community prosecution strategy. o The geographic target area addressed by the initiative. o The role of the community in the community prosecution strategy. o The content of the community prosecution approach to the community problems addressed. o The organizational adaptations made by the prosecutor's office for community prosecution. o Case processing adaptations. o Interagency collaboration or partnerships relating to community prosecution initiatives. ---------------- Table 1: Chronology of Community Prosecution Sites Manhattan, New York 1985 Multnomah County (Portland), Oregon 1990 Kings County (Brooklyn), New York 1991 Montgomery County, Maryland 1991 Middlesex County, Massachusetts1991 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania1991 Marion County (Indianapolis), Indiana 1993 Suffolk County (Boston), Massachusetts 1993 Los Angeles, California 1993 Seattle, Washington (City Attorney) 1995 Howard County, Maryland 1996 Plymouth County (Brockton), Massachusetts1996 Washington, D.C. 1996 Denver, Colorado 1996 Erie County (Buffalo), New York 1996 Phoenix, Arizona (City Prosecutor) 1996 Santa Clara County, California 1996-97 Pima County (Tucson), Arizona 1997 Honolulu, Hawaii 1997 Jackson County (Kansas City), Missouri 1997 San Diego, California (City Attorney) 1997 Kalamazoo County, Michigan 1998 Cook County (Chicago), Illinois 1998 Nassau County, New York 1998 Knox County, Tennessee 1998 Travis County (Austin), Texas 1999 West Palm Beach, Florida 1999 Hennepin County (Minneapolis), Minnesota 1999 Seminole County, Florida 1999 Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), Ohio 1999 Sacramento County, California 2000 St. Joseph's County (South Bend), Indiana 2000 Placer County, California 2000 Westchester County, New York 2000 Oakland, California 2000 Lackawanna County (Scranton), Pennsylvania 2000 ---------------- By focusing on the core ingredients of community prosecution strategies, this framework can illustrate the shared structural elements of these initiatives and highlight significant variations or differences as common elements are adapted to meet local needs. Table 2 details common elements that fall under these critical dimensions. Summary Descriptions of Community Prosecution Sites By the end of 2001, the Crime and Justice Research Institute (CJRI) identified and contacted 36 prosecutors' offices that appeared to be operating community prosecution or community-oriented strategies (see table 3 on page xvii).[1] The full report briefly describes the features of these programs. The descriptive overview illustrates the differences among community prosecution strategies on dimensions identified as critical in the working typology of community prosecution sites. The description of community prosecution initiatives is inclusive. We defer, for now, discussion of whether community prosecution is an umbrella concept for all prosecutorial activities directed at crimes located in the community or whether it has a narrower meaning tied to a new, collaborative, and problem-solving relationship with the community. The summary in the full report is illustrative and descriptive rather than complete. We identified prosecutors' offices involved in what appeared to be community prosecution strategies from lists of grants awarded, available literature, participants and presentations at conferences, and word of mouth among prosecutors involved in community-oriented innovation. After candidate programs were identified, representatives were interviewed to determine what sorts of community prosecution initiatives were under way, if any. The descriptions presented in this monograph rely on self-reported interview information provided by representatives of each site. The 36 highlighted community prosecution sites are described for two principal reasons. First, the summaries illustrate common key ingredients of diverse community prosecution strategies and provide the fundamentals of a community prosecution model. Second, the descriptions serve as a draft accounting to the field of current community prosecution programs for soliciting feedback and additional information from sites that have been included and others that have not. In short, we expect to develop more complete descriptive summaries with supplemental and critical input from community prosecution sites, whether they are in planning or operational stages. ---------------- [1] Since an earlier version of this report (under the working title Community Prosecution Strategies: Measuring Impact) was released in February 2000, CJRI has contacted and profiled nine additional community prosecution initiatives, which are included in this monograph. ---------------- Table 2: Critical Dimensions of Community Prosecution Strategies 1. Target Problems o Quality-of-life offenses. o Drug crime. o Gang violence. o Violent crime. o Juvenile crime. o Truancy. o Prostitution. o Housing and environmental issues. o Landlord/tenant issues. o Failure of the justice system to address community needs. o Community alienation from the prosecutor and other justice agencies. o Improving community relations for better cooperation of victims/witnesses. o Improving intelligence gathering for traditional prosecution of serious cases. 2. Target Area o Urban/inner city. o Rural/suburban. o Business districts. o Residential neighborhoods. 3. Role of the Community o Recipient of prosecutor services. o Advisory role. o Core participants in problem solving. o Core participants in implementation. o Community justice panels. o Sanctioning panels. o Ad hoc. o Targeted. 4. Content of Response to Community Problems o Facilitating community self-help. o Crime prevention efforts. o Prosecution of cases of interest to the community. o Receiving noncriminal as well as criminal complaints. 5. Organizational Adaptations/Emphasis in Prosecutor's Office o Field offices staffed by attorney(s). o Field offices staffed by nonattorney(s). o Attorneys assigned to neighborhoods. o Special unit or units. o Officewide organization around the community prosecution model. 6. Case Processing Adaptations o Vertical prosecution. o Horizontal prosecution. o Geographic prosecution. o Community prosecutors do not prosecute cases. 7. Interagency and Collaborative Partnerships in Community Prosecution o Police. o City attorney. o Housing authority. o Community court/other court. o Other justice agencies (probation, pretrial services). o Other social service agencies. o Other regulatory agencies. ---------------- Table 3: Highlights of 36 Community Prosecution Initiatives in the United States, 1985-2000 is not included in this ASCII plain-text file. To view this document in its entirety, download the Adobe Acrobat graphic file available from this Web site. ---------------- Measuring Impact: Challenges of Community Prosecution Strategies The problem of measuring the impact of community prosecution--particularly given its diverse adaptations--begins with understanding what the innovation is (and is not) and what it proposes to accomplish. The community prosecution "model" represents a philosophy as well as an innovation. The shared philosophy seeks to connect the prosecution function more directly with the community, to develop a new and more collaborative working relationship, and to be more responsive to the community's crime-related concerns. The form this idea takes varies considerably from location to location and from prosecutor to prosecutor along the dimensions outlined in the working typology of community prosecution strategies. Many of the elements of community prosecution--attorneys dispersed to different geographic locations, vertical prosecution, cases assigned to reflect the geography of the community, considerably more time spent interacting with the community--represent notable departures from traditional modes of functioning, depending on the level of commitment a prosecutor's office has to the philosophy, and raise difficult questions about impact and resource allocation. Prosecutors who lead these efforts and their funding sources have begun to demand evaluation of whether and how community prosecution works. The challenges for research in measuring the strengths and weaknesses of community prosecution are commensurate with the challenges posed by community-oriented strategies to traditional prosecution functions. This monograph proposes a multidimensional framework for conceptualizing community prosecution evaluation measures that recognizes the distinct and joint roles played by the prosecution and the community and, in addition, defines areas of impact based on key dimensions in the typology shared by community prosecution initiatives across the nation. The framework differentiates between measures appropriate for assessing the implementation of community prosecution and measures reflecting outcomes or impact of community prosecution programs, after they have been effectively implemented (see table 4.) ---------------- Table 4: Conceptualizing Measures of Community Prosecution Impact is not included in this ASCII plain-text file. To view this document in its entirety, download the Adobe Acrobat graphic file available from this Web site. ---------------------------- Introduction With increasing frequency over the past decade, prosecutors across the United States have been developing community-focused strategies to address crime problems, using methods that depart dramatically from their traditional roles. Taken at their most challenging, community prosecution strategies may signal a major milestone in changing the culture and role of the prosecutor by developing partnerships and collaborative problem-solving approaches with the community to improve the quality of life and safety of citizens in their neighborhoods. The most innovative community prosecution initiatives pose fundamental questions about the prosecutor's function, the ways in which the prosecutor seeks justice, and how the prosecutor's office is organized and operated. These strategies suggest an important shift in traditional prosecutorial philosophy, as prosecutors emphasize community-focused crime strategies and adapt some of the values and methods of other community justice innovations that relate to community policing, court, corrections, and restorative justice initiatives. This monograph describes the emergence of community prosecution strategies. It identifies some of their common elements in a working typology based on features of innovations that are operating in diverse settings across the United States. Discussion of community prosecution strategies is illustrated with examples from sites across the nation.[2] The monograph concludes by describing some of the challenges posed by community prosecution strategies for assessing impact and measuring performance. ---------------- [2] Officials in the following 36 locations were interviewed about community prosecution programs: Manhattan, New York; Portland, Oregon; Kings County, Brooklyn, New York; Montgomery County, Maryland; Middlesex County, Massachusetts; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Marion County, Indiana; Suffolk County, Massachusetts; Los Angeles, California; Seattle, Washington; Howard County, Maryland; Plymouth County, Massachusetts; Washington, D.C.; Denver, Colorado; Erie County, New York; Phoenix, Arizona; Santa Clara, California; Pima County, Arizona; Honolulu, Hawaii; Kansas City, Missouri; San Diego, California; Cook County, Chicago, Illinois; Kalamazoo, Michigan; Nassau County, New York; Knox County, Tennessee; Bronx, New York; West Palm Beach, Florida; Hennepin County, Minnesota; Brevard/Seminole County, Florida; Cuyahoga County, Ohio; Sacramento County, California; Providence, Rhode Island; St. Joseph's County, Indiana; Placer County, California; Westchester County, New York; Oakland, California; Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania. Additional sites are included in this report based on written materials and/or information provided at conferences or workshops. ---------------------------- Chapter 1 The Prosecutor and the Community Traditionally, a local prosecutor's office would have little direct contact with the public. Its work focused on preparing criminal cases generated by arrests for formal adjudication in court. Neighborhood-level crime problems were not an immediate focus of the prosecutor's staff. The family, neighborhood, and institutions such as churches and schools normally exerted effective social control over nuisance crime problems. Law enforcement was called on primarily to deal with the more serious matters (Pound, 1930). A substantial body of literature on American cities documents that, for various reasons, neighborhoods changed because of larger social changes in family structures and institutions, gradually exercising less informal constraint on the behavior of their residents. As early as 1930, Roscoe Pound described a theme that has pervaded criminal justice thinking until recently, the unreasonable expectation that formal criminal justice agencies should somehow be responsible for social order and replace the informal mechanisms (e.g., family, church, school) that had become less effective. According to Pound, "This complete change in the background of social control involves much that may easily be attributed to the ineffectiveness of criminal justice, and yet means only that it is called on to do the whole work, where once it shared its task with other agencies and was invoked, not for every occasion, but exceptionally" (Pound, 1930: 14-15). For more than 2 centuries, the prosecutor's role has been transformed from a rather unimportant one--as a judicial adjunct presenting cases to the grand jury, filing information, dismissing cases filed by the police, plea bargaining, and prosecuting cases at trial--to a powerful executive branch function with considerable discretion in the contemporary justice system (McDonald, 1979; Gottfredson and Gottfredson, 1987; Jacoby, 1980). Although police have traditionally taken criminal complaints from victims, investigated crimes, and interacted with the community, the prosecutor's role grew to include the power to investigate. This power evolved particularly during the early 20th century (Pound, 1930: 182; National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, 1931: 12) with a rationale dating back to a 1704 statute in Connecticut, the first state to codify the office of the prosecutor. That statute provided that the county attorney should prosecute criminal offenders and do "all other things necessary or convenient . . . to suppress vice and immorality." Whether through historical interpretation of the prosecutor's evolving powers or the prosecutor's broad discretion in pursuing justice, the rationale for a community prosecution function can be traced to an interpretation of the prosecutor's role to include responsibilities to suppress or prevent crime. Community and Criminal Justice The topic of "community" has long been at the core of crime theory and criminal justice policy, variously defined in a substantial body of literature in terms of location, physical environment, residential or commercial land use, class, race, and ethnicity (Massey, 1985; Anderson, 1990; Squires, 1994; Taylor and Covington, 1988). From the earliest days of criminology the connection between community and crime has been an important theme, from Ferri's (1896) discussion of "telluric" and environmental causes of crime, through the work of the Chicago School in considering the urban environment's relation to crime (Park et al., 1925; Burgess, 1926; Shaw and McKay, 1969 [1942]), to current discussions of the relationships between crime, social organization, and physical attributes of communities (Newman, 1980; Sampson and Grove, 1989; Bursik, 1986; Taylor, 1995, 2000). The emphasis on community in discussions of criminal justice administration and policy also has a long history. In the early part of the century, Pound argued that one of the most important problems of criminal justice in the United States was to "apply and enforce law in a heterogeneous community, divided into classes with divergent interests, which understand each other none too well, containing elements hostile to government and order, containing elements ignorant of our institutions . . . where conditions of crowded urban life and economic pressure threaten the security of social institutions" (Pound, 1913: 311). Pound argued that the administration of justice should be based on "thorough knowledge of the social conditions . . . for which law must be devised and to which it must be applied" (1913: 327). Since the 1960s, the concept of community, variously defined, has continued to surface as an important criminal justice focus. For example, community corrections, a concept with origins dating back more than a century, was an active area of correctional innovation during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s (Harris, 1995). During the 1960s War on Poverty, empowering the poor in the United States was a principal focus of community organization strategies that dealt with fundamental societal and community justice issues (Brager and Purcell, 1967; Kramer and Specht, 1969). As the civil disorder and urban riots of the late 1960s manifested the alienation and disenfranchisement of poor and minority communities, the relationship between the community and the police became a primary focus of justice reform strategies (President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, 1967; U.S. National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, 1970). Problem- oriented and community policing initiatives of the 1980s and 1990s were developed to better ensure that community concerns were fully addressed by police agencies (Davis, 1975; Goldstein, 1990; Rosenbaum, 1994). More recently, the traditional posture of the courts, to be less connected to the problems of the community, was fundamentally challenged with the establishment of the Midtown Community Court in 1993, which sought a much closer working relationship with the community and was a catalyst for increasingly diverse community-oriented justice initiatives. All of these and other community-oriented crime and justice foci form the background against which current community prosecution strategies have emerged and can be understood. Attempts to characterize, analyze, or measure the impact of this emerging innovation will have to consider the specific meaning of "community" for community prosecution, including how the community is involved and how the prosecution focus on the community differs both from other approaches in criminal justice and from traditional prosecution. Relevance of the Community Justice Movement Community justice innovation has taken many forms across the country and is spreading across different governmental agencies. It has resulted in the development of innovative programs that include community policing, probation, courts, and prosecution, all sharing the goal of making the justice system more relevant and accessible to the community, and making better use of the community as a resource to address the crime problem. Starting with community policing, the criminal justice system has reoriented itself to seek contact with, and input from, neighborhood residents on issues of importance to them and to address issues of civil disorder. Foot patrol, which had been discredited by criminal justice officials since the 1940s (Wilson and Kelling, 1989), reemerged as a sound policing method when special units were created to solve community problems. Community policing has gained such popularity that a majority of America's police departments have reportedly adopted some version of the approach (Peak and Glensor, 1996: 68, in Karp, 1998: 5). Many of these programs have garnered the favor of community members, reduced fear of crime, and purportedly contributed to reductions in crime (Wilson and Kelling, 1989). Community justice issues began to be addressed by courts as an indirect result of the establishment of drug courts in the early 1990s, but they were the fundamental emphasis of the Midtown Community Court experiment when it began operation in Manhattan in 1993 (Sviridoff et al., 2000). The creative reforms and leadership demonstrated in the Midtown Community Court have been adapted by jurisdictions across the country as localities tailor community court approaches to quality-of-life offenses and related issues that community members identify as disruptive to their community. The collaboration between judicial leaders and the community that is at the core of the community court model has demonstrated techniques and strategies that are valuable for a variety of community justice initiatives, including community prosecution. Community Prosecution as a Community Justice Strategy Community prosecution has been described as a "grassroots approach to law enforcement involving both traditional and nontraditional prosecutorial initiatives" (Weinstein, 1998: 19). In some jurisdictions, community prosecution initiatives were sparked by the implementation of community policing and were logical, complementary extensions of the focus on community issues to the prosecutor's function (Hankins and Weinstein, 1996). In locations without community policing programs, community prosecution strategies were developed to respond to community crime and public safety issues that were not being addressed sufficiently by the police. In several locations, community prosecution strategies are linked to community court initiatives. In many instances, community prosecution involves deploying prosecutors or nonlegal staff in the community to better identify residents' concerns and to invite their participation in developing strategies for addressing problems of crime and social disorder that are their highest priority. Prosecutors involved in these outreach efforts often find that community residents do not share the prosecutor's traditional concern with the prosecution of serious crimes. Although the community may assume that these matters will always be a priority, their immediate concerns more often focus on the nuisance or quality- of-life crimes that make life in the neighborhood unsafe or unpleasant. As other community justice initiatives have revealed, this community focus on crime issues differs strikingly from the general orientation of the justice system. Scarce resources and an increasing volume of serious, particularly drug-related, criminal cases have caused law enforcement agencies to try to handle the most serious matters, by default deemphasizing the more numerous minor offenses in the community. With this focus on punishing serious crime, few deterrent measures have been available to address nuisance-level offenses, for which jail sanctions are usually inappropriate and generally not imposed. As with policing and community court leaders, prosecutors have discovered that problems identified by the community as most important to them in their daily lives are generally not of the serious-crime type that the criminal justice system appears most ready to handle. As an example, even when community leaders are concerned with drug dealing in the neighborhood, prosecution of the dealers has little immediate impact on the neighborhood. As the slow process of adjudication of their cases is carried out, drug dealers are often back on the street, or new dealers quickly take their place. Even if prosecution is successful, community residents may be frustrated because of their perception that law enforcement is not responsive to their calls for help (Boland, 1998a: 253-54). Community prosecution strategies have grown as the result of a need, partly political, to be more responsive to community issues and to expand the prosecutor's role beyond its traditional one of prosecuting cases. As prosecutors' offices have attempted to devise strategies that are more responsive to community concerns, problem solving has become a major focus of community prosecution programs. From developing plans to clean up and better maintain public parks to using civil sanctions to attack nuisance issues, many prosecutor's offices have implemented procedures that depart from their traditional focus on prosecuting criminal cases to seeking ways to prevent and reduce crime. These community-oriented strategies have in common a new collaboration with community members in identifying problems and devising solutions. The value of this collaboration has been demonstrated in successful community prosecution sites and other community justice initiatives, empowering the community to define its problems, participate in solutions, and bring informal social control mechanisms of the community into play in ways that complement the efforts of law enforcement and the justice system. Both prosecutors and police derive benefits from a collaborative partnership with the community. The community's respect for, and trust in, official agencies is enhanced; potential witnesses for trial may cooperate better; and residents may be more helpful in providing the intelligence needed to address serious crime problems. The collaboration that characterizes community prosecution initiatives is not limited to new working relationships with community partners. It extends to new working relationships with other government and social service agencies outside the criminal justice system with responsibilities in areas that affect community crime and quality-of-life problems. The resolution of problems identified in various jurisdictions has involved agencies with responsibilities in areas such as street lighting and repair, licensing and regulating bars, housing and building code enforcement, parks and recreational services, drug treatment, health care, mental health care, childcare, and family and indigent services. In jurisdictions focusing on youth-related issues, schools, juvenile justice agencies, and other organizations that serve the needs of young people have also become involved. ---------------------------- Chapter 2 Emergence of Community Prosecution Strategies The emergence and diffusion of community prosecution as an innovation is difficult to reconstruct with accuracy because many prosecutors across the nation have been dealing with community issues in various ways for some time. A good historical case can be made that community prosecution preceded rather than followed community policing reforms, drawing its substance instead from community organization innovations of the 1960s. The establishment of Cook County State's Attorney Bernard Carey's community prosecution program in Chicago, in 1973, predates the first community policing program and was clearly influenced by the active community organization initiatives in Chicago in the 1960s. More recently, although in many jurisdictions the prosecutor's office took the lead in initiating community-oriented strategies, in others the success of local community police programs nearly demanded prosecutorial changes. In Indiana, Marion County District Attorney Scott Newman has indicated that the favorable relationship he saw growing between community police and the residents of Indianapolis challenged him to change the organization of his office. He feared that if he did not make direct and favorable contact with the community, residents would focus on the prosecutors as the "bad guys" responsible for any system failures (Coles and Kelling, 1999: 74). In discussions of his groundbreaking innovations in Portland, Oregon, beginning in 1990, Multnomah County District Attorney Michael Schrunk stressed the importance of community policing reforms in catalyzing his community prosecution initiatives. Although community prosecution strategies have adapted some of the same principals and techniques seen in community policing, the prosecution focus on community strategies adds a distinctive dimension to community justice initiatives. Ronald Goldstock (1992: 3, 49) argues that the prosecutor's office is best suited to take the lead in creating criminal justice policy based on problem- solving methods for a number of reasons. One is that the prosecutor's legal expertise is needed to make use of civil methods such as forfeitures, injunctions, and civil damage actions, which can be effective alternatives to criminal prosecution in addressing a wide range of neighborhood problems. Another, Goldstock suggests (1992: 8-9), is that because the jurisdiction of most prosecutors' offices is geographically broader than that of individual police or other law enforcement agencies (sometimes encompassing many police precincts or districts), policy set by prosecutors is likely to have a more widespread impact. In addition, prosecutors have greater access to and political influence on judges and legislators than do police and their support is essential to creating and implementing policy changes. Finally, as elected officials, prosecutors have greater power to "sell" alternative, nontraditional responses to crime to the public (Gramckow, 1997). Estimates vary as to how many prosecutors' offices in the United States have adopted some version of a community prosecution strategy.[3] Certainly, the problems thrust on the criminal justice system by drug crimes and drug enforcement during the 1980s and 1990s forced prosecutors and other officials to think of new strategies to cope with the overwhelming criminal caseload. This included ways to free neighborhoods of problems related to drug crime, dealing, and use. In 1985 for example, in response to the advent of crack cocaine in New York, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau instituted a community-focused approach through a Community Affairs Unit that sent an experienced nonattorney employee into the community to improve community relations and gather intelligence to better prosecute drug crimes. The origins of the contemporary community prosecution movement are most often traced back to the pioneering efforts of Multnomah County District Attorney Michael Schrunk. In 1990, Schrunk established the Neighborhood District Attorneys Unit in Portland, Oregon, in response to the concerns of business leaders that quality-of-life crimes would impede development of a central business district (Boland, 1998a). Other community-oriented prosecution innovations followed, in 1991 in Kings County (Brooklyn), New York, under District Attorney Charles J. Hynes and, in 1992 in Montgomery County, Maryland, under then-State's Attorney Andrew Sonner. Both initiatives involved major reorganization of the prosecutors' offices along geographic lines and established new working links with the communities in each area. Also in 1991, the Community-Based Justice Program began operation in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, and, in 1993, the Street Level Advocacy Program was instituted in Marion County (Indianapolis), Indiana. After the early 1990s, additional jurisdictions adapted the innovation and it spread more rapidly (see table 1). Recognition that the prosecutor's responsibilities should or could include a crime reduction or community crime prevention function is not new. Discussion of the importance of the prosecutor's responsibility to work to prevent crime and to address problems associated with minor crimes has been in evidence for much of the last century, considerably earlier than the quality-of-life emphases of recent community justice initiatives. In the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement: Report on Prosecution of 1931, Alfred Bettman indicated that the more serious cases were not "necessarily, from the point of view of crime reduction or crime prevention, the most significant" (Bettman, in Wickersham, 1931: 82-83). Bettman cited the 1922 report of the Cleveland Crime Commission which noted that "[T]he general peace and security are more dependent on society's treatment of the regular flow of ordinary crimes than on the results of the few great murder cases which attract public attention and create public excitement" (Fosdick et al., 1922). ---------------- Table 1: Chronology of Community Prosecution Sites Manhattan, New York 1985 Multnomah County (Portland), Oregon 1990 Kings County (Brooklyn), New York 1991 Montgomery County, Maryland 1991 Middlesex County, Massachusetts 1991 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1991 Marion County (Indianapolis), Indiana 1993 Suffolk County (Boston), Massachusetts 1993 Los Angeles, California 1993 Seattle, Washington (City Attorney) 1995 Howard County, Maryland 1996 Plymouth County (Brockton), Massachusetts 1996 Washington, D.C. 1996 Denver, Colorado 1996 Erie County (Buffalo), New York 1996 Phoenix, Arizona (City Prosecutor) 1996 Santa Clara County, California 1996-97 Pima County (Tucson), Arizona 1997 Honolulu, Hawaii 1997 Jackson County (Kansas City), Missouri 1997 San Diego, California (City Attorney) 1997 Kalamazoo County, Michigan 1998 Cook County (Chicago), Illinois 1998 Nassau County, New York 1998 Knox County, Tennessee 1998 Travis County (Austin), Texas 1999 West Palm Beach, Florida 1999 Hennepin County (Minneapolis), Minnesota 1999 Seminole County, Florida 1999 Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), Ohio 1999 Sacramento County, California 2000 St. Joseph's County (South Bend), Indiana 2000 Placer County, California 2000 Westchester County, New York 2000 Oakland, California 2000 Lackawanna County (Scranton), Pennsylvania 2000 ---------------- In the 1971 draft "Standards for Criminal Justice, Standards Relating to the Prosecution Function and the Defense Function," the American Bar Association discussed the prosecutor's crime prevention function, as well as the prosecutor's accountability to the public in noting that "[T]he prosecutor is the leader of law enforcement in the community. He is expected to participate actively in marshalling society's resources against the threat of crime" (American Bar Association, 1971: 18-21). In the same year, Evelle Younger, then-Attorney General of California, wrote of the prosecutor's responsibility as a community leader in directing and enlisting the community toward the goal of crime prevention and order maintenance. According to Younger, "A prosecutor worthy of the position must use the mantle which has been placed on his shoulders to assume a role of leadership in the entire community and help bring what has been characterized as a 'sick community' back to a condition where decent people can live peacefully in the enjoyment of their rights and property without the fear of molestation or attack from the criminal element . . . . The prosecutor must encourage citizen participation by convincing the people in his community that the war on crime cannot be won until all responsible persons become involved . . . . There is a great untapped resource of public activity which, if properly guided by a prosecutor who is a true leader, can accomplish much more in suppressing crime than a series of arrests and successful prosecutions . . . . The district attorney . . . is challenged by that responsibility to take affirmative steps to marshal the community resources and actively work at crime prevention" (Healy and Manak, 1971: 4-6). Younger also believed that the prosecutor must be willing to innovate and experiment and "must constantly be on the lookout outside the traditional scope of the prosecutor's office for new ways to improve the system and to suppress crime" (Healy and Manak, 1971: 4-5). The use of civil remedies as a crime prevention weapon seen in some contemporary community prosecution strategies also has earlier origins. The report of the American Bar Foundation (Miller, 1969: 241-252) devotes a chapter to the use of civil sanctions as a more effective tool for addressing certain types of crime. It discusses the civil procedure of padlocking premises, combined with securing injunctions to prevent property owners from performing similar illegal actions in the future, as a method for nuisance abatement. "Law enforcement officers have pointed out that prostitution, gambling and liquor violations are not controllable if the only control device used is arrest of the violators followed by prosecution, even if convictions are relatively easy to obtain. The sentences are so light that the violators are not deterred from returning to the same type of illegal conduct . . . . To prevent the necessity for those arrests and prosecutions in the future, the alternative of padlocking the premises is utilized" (Miller, 1969: 242). Other civil sanctions long in use by prosecutors as alternatives to prosecution are forfeiture of vehicles used in crime and revocation of liquor licenses to prevent future illegal conduct in establishments where alcohol is sold. Like many police agencies in the aftermath of the 1960s, some prosecutors specifically incorporated community relations sections into their offices during the 1970s. In 1977, Harris County, Texas, District Attorney Carol Vance, who also served as president of the National District Attorneys Association, wrote an article discussing the importance of the relationship between the prosecutor's office and the community (Vance, 1977: 131-43). Vance stressed the importance of positive community relations and emphasized the need to educate the community about what the prosecutor's office does. Vance's office implemented community-oriented educational programs in Harris County targeting middle and high school age children and adults. These efforts included speakers' bureaus through which prosecutors were sent to give talks at schools on criminal justice issues. Vance used the press to encourage public participation in anticrime programs. In addition, a citizen advisory committee was formed in his community, made up of former grand jurors, minority community leaders, the board of the Chamber of Commerce, criminal justice professionals, church leaders, and other concerned citizens who were representative of the community. The committee was kept informed of office activities through a semiannual report that described major accomplishments and the operations of each division in the office and was used as a sounding board for office priorities. For example, Vance writes, "the reaction of the committee to pornography indicated the vast majority wanted our office to aggressively prosecute in this area" (Vance, 1977: 140). Vance stressed the value of interagency collaboration as part of a community focus. He noted the importance of coordinating the operations of law enforcement agencies to achieve mutual goals, conduct effective interagency operations, and enhance public confidence in the entire law enforcement community. His assistant prosecutors provided training for the police on issues of law and procedure. Vance also discussed the importance of positive relations with the Governor's office and the legislators in the interest of promoting anticrime legislation. ---------------- [3] The American Prosecutors Research Institute reports that about one-third of prosecutors responding to a national survey indicated that they were doing community prosecution. APRI estimates that 80 sites in the United States are operating some type of community prosecution program, 33 sites received targeted federal funding in 1999-2000, and 176 jurisdictions have pending applications for funding (see www.ndaa.org/apri/Community_Prosecution). These estimates do not include city attorneys' offices that are running such efforts in some jurisdictions. Some operating programs have gotten under way without federal funding specifically targeted toward community prosecution, using Local Law Enforcement Block Grants, open solicitation grants, or other sources that make them more difficult to identify. ---------------------------- Chapter 3 Chicago's Community Prosecutions Unit: An Early Community Prosecution Prototype Possibly the earliest direct precursor to current community prosecution initiatives was the Community Prosecutions program created in 1974 by Cook County State Attorney Bernard Carey in Chicago, Illinois, to respond to particular citizen complaints.[4] Many of the elements found in community prosecution programs today were evident in Carey's pioneering initiative. The Cook County State Attorney's program focused on ways to work more closely with the community and to improve relationships between the criminal justice system and the citizens it served. It provided residents with more direct access to the prosecutor's office and the criminal justice system, and improved the effectiveness of the prosecutor's office in responding to the crime problems in the community. The Cook County program appears to have been the first community-oriented prosecution program to geographically assign to community offices attorneys committed to spending a large proportion of their working day in community outreach, attending community meetings and problem-solving sessions with community groups. This unit provided educational presentations for the community, used vertical prosecution, and demonstrated a commitment to having unit attorneys handle cases of importance to the community in addition to acting as liaisons for the community in cases handled by the traditional case processing units. Carey believed that consumer fraud was a particular problem for the community and, in 1973, established pilot offices staffed by consumer fraud attorneys assigned to take citizen complaints in the three Chicago neighborhoods of Northside, Westside, and Southside. The residents in each of these areas, however, asked instead for attorneys who could deal with other types of neighborhood crime problems. In 1974, Carey placed a second attorney in the Northside office, along with the consumer fraud attorney, to provide full felony and misdemeanor prosecution for cases that were significant to the community, initiating what was probably the first community prosecution program. On March 1, 1976, due to the success of the pilot program, the Illinois Law Enforcement Commission began funding the offices and, by May, supported four criminal attorneys, two at Northside and one at each of the other two offices, as well as three administrative assistants and four clerks. In 1977, one of the Northside attorneys was designated program supervisor but continued to work in the Northside office and a part-time fifth attorney was added to the Northside staff. By 1978, a staff of four full-time attorneys, a program supervisor, and four clerks were needed to build on the success of the pilot effort. As a harbinger of later community prosecution initiatives, Carey's approach featured vertical prosecution of cases of particular concern to the communities served and a commitment to focus more closely on issues relating to the experience of crime victims and witnesses in the criminal justice system. In addition, the Chicago prototype featured close collaboration with community groups and other criminal justice agencies to maximize successful prosecution efforts. The Carey program also anticipated the community prosecution programs of the 1990s in its consideration of lesser criminal matters. Although 70 percent of the cases prosecuted by the community units involved felony charges, misdemeanor cases were also considered important because "the volume of misdemeanors in these high-crime communities demoralize and decay communities when left unattended" (Chicago, Cook County Criminal Justice Commission, 1978: V-11). Because each community office was able to handle only a small portion of the cases that came from its area, cases were pursued selectively, based on consideration by the program supervisor of their impact on the community. The selection was influenced by input from community groups on which types of cases would be most important to their neighborhoods and included cases related to gangs, drugs, arson, hate crimes, and crimes against elderly victims. A brief evaluation of the Chicago community prosecution prototype drew on interviews with officials, community members, and police who served those districts (Chicago, Cook County Criminal Justice Commission, 1978: V-10). The response from community members was supportive, affirming that the community prosecution unit targeted cases that were important to each neighborhood, was responsive to referrals from residents, and aggressively prosecuted cases worthy of prosecution. The evaluation also reported that police characterized the efforts of the unit as productive. An analysis of case processing statistics in the evaluation indicated that felony cases handled by the unit resulted in a higher conviction rate (82 percent) than cases handled by the office in the traditional manner (57 percent) and that cases were dropped at a lower rate by the community prosecution unit (Chicago, Cook County Criminal Justice Commission, 1978: V-11). The report cited a "revival of neighborhood faith in the criminal justice system as a process that responds to community needs" resulting from Carey's community-focused efforts (Chicago, Cook County Criminal Justice Commission, 1978:V-11). Interviews with community groups indicated that they felt that the community prosecutor was "their" attorney, representing their rights and interests in court. According to the evaluation, the Chicago program used less experienced attorneys who rotated through the units for limited periods. This rotation inadvertently became a problem when neighborhood residents became attached to individual prosecutors whom they viewed as "their" lawyers. However, in recent interviews, two attorneys who were assigned to the unit in the 1970s indicated that, although they had had little previous experience when they were assigned, each stayed with the unit for at least 3 years, gaining critical experience.[5] These former community prosecution attorneys described their close relationship with the community, which resulted in access to information about neighborhood crime problems and criminals which the office had never had before. The attorneys also found that having large groups of residents present in court for trials and sentencing hearings made a strong impression on judges. Such a showing alerted the judge to the strong feelings of the community about a particular criminal or crime. Nonlawyer office administrators, who became adept at referring citizens to the appropriate agencies to obtain the assistance they required in noncriminal matters, performed an important problem-solving role for community members, much like the roles ascribed to community policing and community court staff in later community-oriented justice initiatives. The Community Prosecutions Unit also established a mediation unit to deal with community issues such as disputes between neighbors and between landlords and tenants to prevent them from escalating into criminal matters. When funding ran out, many of the functions of the unit were incorporated into the larger Cook County State Attorney's office, including an expanded victim/witness program, a unit focused on crimes against the elderly, and strong advocacy against hate crimes and support of hate crimes legislation. ---------------- [4] Information on the Cook County program was obtained from Chicago, Cook County Criminal Justice Commission, 1978, Section V and from interviews with the Honorable Nancy S. Salyers, presiding Judge, Cook County Municipal Division, District 2, and Skokie and Ray Grossman, Esquire, both of whom were assistant state attorneys in Cook County assigned to the Community Prosecutions Unit between 1974 and 1983. [5] The Honorable Nancy S. Salyers, presiding Judge, Cook County Municipal Division, District 2, Skokie and Ray Grossman, Esquire. ---------------------------- Chapter 4 Common Elements of Community Prosecution Strategies: A Working Typology Since the early 1990s, principally fueled by the innovative efforts of Multnomah County, Oregon, District Attorney Michael Schrunk, the adoption of community prosecution strategies has gained considerable momentum and now represents a movement for change in prosecution in the United States. In the same way that community policing reforms, drug courts, and community courts have grown in number and have become central features of the criminal justice landscape in jurisdictions of all descriptions and sizes, community prosecution has grown from a handful of programs to scores across the country. Considering the forms that community prosecution has taken, it is evident that there is no one-size-fits-all model of community prosecution. Like other community justice innovations, community prosecution strategies have taken different forms in response to the needs and circumstances of specific localities, tailored to the problems of neighborhoods, commercial districts, or other geographic locations in urban and rural areas. Despite their diverse approaches, however, community prosecution strategies share some underlying dimensions. Table 2 proposes seven critical dimensions focusing on common features that appear to define community prosecution strategies and provide a framework or working typology of community prosecution strategies. They include: o The target problem bringing about the need for the community prosecution strategy. o The geographic target area addressed by the initiative. o The community's role in the community prosecution strategy. o The content of the community prosecution approach to the community problems addressed. o The organizational adaptations made by the prosecutor's office for community prosecution. o Case processing adaptations. o Interagency collaboration or partnerships that relate to community prosecution initiatives. ---------------- Table 2: Critical Dimensions of Community Prosecution Strategies 1. Target Problems o Quality-of-life offenses. o Drug crime. o Gang violence. o Violent crime. o Juvenile crime. o Truancy. o Prostitution. o Housing and environmental issues. o Landlord/tenant issues. o Failure of the justice system to address community needs. o Community alienation from the prosecutor and other justice agencies. o Improving community relations for better cooperation of victims/witnesses. o Improving intelligence gathering for traditional prosecution of serious cases. 2. Target Area o Urban/inner city. o Rural/suburban. o Business districts. o Residential neighborhoods. 3. Role of the Community o Recipient of prosecutor services. o Advisory role. o Core participants in problem solving. o Core participants in implementation. o Community justice panels. o Sanctioning panels. o Ad hoc. o Targeted. 4. Content of Response to Community Problems o Facilitating community self-help. o Crime prevention efforts. o Prosecution of cases of interest to the community. o Receiving noncriminal as well as criminal complaints. 5. Organizational Adaptations/Emphasis in Prosecutor's Office o Field offices staffed by attorney(s). o Field offices staffed by nonattorney(s). o Attorneys assigned to neighborhoods. o Special unit or units. o Officewide organization around the community prosecution model. 6. Case Processing Adaptations o Vertical prosecution. o Horizontal prosecution. o Geographic prosecution. o Community prosecutors do not prosecute cases. 7. Interagency and Collaborative Partnerships in Community Prosecution o Police. o City attorney. o Housing authority. o Community court/other court. o Other justice agencies (probation, pretrial services). o Other social service agencies. o Other regulatory agencies. ---------------- By focusing on the core ingredients of community prosecution strategies, this framework illustrates the shared structural elements of these initiatives and highlights significant variations as common elements are adapted to meet the needs of localities. Target Problems Most community prosecution initiatives have been developed in response to crime problems that affect particular neighborhoods or otherwise defined geographic areas within a larger jurisdiction. Ideally, the problems targeted are those community members perceive to be the most detrimental to their sense of safety and well-being. Almost as a matter of principle, recent strategies have been designed from the start to address problems not normally the focus of prosecution. In most instances they involve quality-of-life or low-level offenses, constituting what Taylor (2000: 5) has recently termed social and physical incivilities that contribute to a sense of disorder and lack of safety in particular neighborhoods. The former may include acts such as loitering, street prostitution, public drinking, and public urination; the latter may include graffiti, trash, and abandoned and decaying properties. Community prosecution programs differ in how they have identified their target problems. In some, the community has approached the prosecutor's office with issues for which they are seeking help. Such was the case in Multnomah County's pioneering community prosecution effort in 1990, when business leaders were concerned about the impact of low-level crime on the development of a downtown Portland business district. In other instances, the prosecutor's office has set its own agenda, often reflecting more traditional concerns with drug offenses or gang violence, but recognizing the value of community support and involvement in addressing them. The latter approach has sometimes encountered resistance when community members perceive their most pressing crime problems to involve less serious issues that nevertheless make life intolerable in a neighborhood. This is what happened in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1991, the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office implemented the Local Intensive Narcotics Enforcement (LINE) program in an area of Southwest Philadelphia that was troubled by drug trafficking and drug-related violence.[6] The office sought the aid of the community to prosecute serious drug offenders. When assistant prosecutors began attending neighborhood meetings and talking to residents, they discovered that for residents the problems that contributed to the disorderly, unsafe, and blighted condition of their neighborhood were equally pressing. They wanted help in closing down nuisance bars and the convenience stores that sold malt liquor and were a focus of public drinking, public urination, street fights, and similar offenses. They wanted help with neglected properties that attracted drug activity and made the neighborhood unsafe and unattractive. The Philadelphia prosecutors found that by mobilizing city resources--such as the City Department of Licenses and Inspections and the Liquor Control Board--to address these issues they could simultaneously improve the neighborhood and gain the cooperation of its residents in their original objective of fighting drug crime. Washington, D.C.'s community prosecution program similarly began with the goal of more effectively prosecuting major drug offenders to stem the rising tide of violent crime in the District. These community prosecutors also found that, to more effectively meet this traditional prosecutorial goal, they had to gain the community's confidence and support. They did this by paying closer attention to the cases that were important to residents and soon were dealing with "tagging," nuisance properties, and other issues that affected the residents' quality of life.[7] Community prosecution programs have been implemented to address a wide variety of target problems in an equally wide variety of settings. In Placer County, California, with an estimated population of more than 200,000 inhabitants, the district attorney's office created a community prosecution unit early in 2000. It focused primarily on elder abuse--crimes committed against individuals ages 65 or older and crimes against dependent adults ages 18 to 64 involving the infliction of pain or mental suffering, endangerment of health, theft, or embezzlement of property.[8] Elder abuse was chosen as the target problem because of the county's large and growing elderly population and because elder abuse crime had increased over the past 5 years from about 12 cases per month in 1997 to about 40 new cases per month. As the county experiences growth in the number of nursing and assisted-living facilities as well as retirement communities, the prosecutor's office has identified elder abuse as a problem that had to be dealt with through a more effective, community- oriented approach. Often, juvenile issues have emerged as important elements of the problems targeted by community prosecution. The crime prevention aspect of community prosecution is seen as particularly appropriate in dealing with youthful offenders and at-risk youth, and a large number of community prosecution programs focus on youth to prevent and respond to juvenile crime. Jurisdictions that devote substantial resources to juvenile issues include Middlesex, Suffolk, and Plymouth counties in Massachusetts; Howard County, Maryland; Denver, Colorado; Honolulu, Hawaii; Kalamazoo County, Michigan; Nassau County, New York; Brevard/Seminole County, Florida; Knox County, Tennessee; Cuyahoga County, Ohio; and Hennepin County, Minnesota. Some of these initiatives have targeted the more serious problems associated with gang violence. In Middlesex County, Massachusetts, the district attorney's office administers the Community Based Justice (CBJ) program, implemented in 1991 to respond to violent juvenile gangs.[9] The CBJ task force is a collaborative effort that includes prosecutors, police, school and juvenile probation officials, and neighborhood leaders, who meet weekly at participating schools or police stations. The group identifies a priority prosecution list of violent juveniles to receive special attention, including graduated sanctions for those who continue to offend, and discusses children believed to be at risk of entering the juvenile system. The purpose and strength of the task force is that members share information from various perspectives about school-age offenders and children at risk, which allows informed decisions on interventions that take into account the behavior of the youth in various settings, including school and the neighborhood. The decisions of the task force on appropriate interventions or sanctions depend on the level of a child's involvement, and the ability of the school, parents, and other support systems to supervise and manage the youth's behavior. The prosecutor's office has about 50 attorneys who have been trained to work in the CBJ program. The program also has been adopted by Suffolk and Plymouth Counties. In Los Angeles County, California, gang crime is a major problem and the focus of the community prosecution effort. The Los Angeles District Attorney's Office operates two programs with community-based orientations. The Community Law Enforcement and Recovery (CLEAR) program is a collaborative, community-based program in which the district attorney's office is mainly involved with targeted case processing. Prosecutors play a broader role in the Strategies Against Gang Environments (SAGE) program, which officials characterize as targeting gang violence, drug dealers, and other public nuisance problems that destroy neighborhood quality of life. Administered through the Hardcore Gang Unit of the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office, SAGE started in the city of Norwalk with a gang injunction in 1993. In 1994, the program was given its name and has continued to evolve over time. Today, SAGE has five sites, with one assistant district attorney located at each, generally in a city-owned building such as a city hall or a police station. The sites are located in unincorporated cities outside the city of Los Angeles, but within the county. Here, the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office has jurisdiction over misdemeanor offenses in addition to the felony caseload it normally handles within the city of Los Angeles, where the city attorney has jurisdiction over misdemeanors. These cities pay most of the expenses for the programs in their locations. SAGE attorneys are primarily problem solvers and try cases only occasionally. One SAGE attorney works with the city attorney, focusing exclusively on gang injunctions wherever they are needed in the county. SAGE uses civil injunctions to prohibit gangs from engaging in activities that create a public nuisance. For example, members of drug-dealing gangs are prohibited from carrying pagers or cell phones and congregating in public places. SAGE attorneys support trial prosecutors by providing them with intelligence about gangs and their members, helping law enforcement agencies with prefiling issues, reviewing arrest reports, and evaluating problem cases. They also coordinate training for police on special issues, organize curfew sweeps, provide case law and training for judges on gang-related issues, coordinate information sharing among agencies, assist with information and training on the relocation of endangered witnesses, and help draft gang-related legislation. Projects include drug abatement; antiprostitution efforts; school truancy programs; legal education for elementary school children; and public nuisance projects (including researching and drafting ordinances) that target issues such as public drinking and urination, gambling, and loitering, in addition to coordinating an antigraffiti project. The attorneys' community outreach efforts include preparing training materials about gang prevention, intervention, and suppression for community-based organizations, meeting with Community Police Advisory Boards to help develop community-based antigang strategies, and assisting with planning and training sessions regarding antigang measures that community members can use. Because the attorneys are stationed in the neighborhood, they can establish a rapport with the community and other criminal justice and social service agencies.[10] Kalamazoo County's Neighborhood Prosecuting Attorney Program targets domestic violence, substance abuse, housing issues, and youth problems, working with schools, community organizations, and other government agencies to enhance community safety. All program goals are set by the neighborhood. One of the first projects identified the owners of deteriorating rental units in the neighborhood and enlisted the housing authority to handle the problem. Criminal prosecutions were also initiated and landlords were court ordered to sell the properties that they could not afford, or had no desire, to repair. Youth issues revolved around truancy and curfew violations, with youth hanging out in the neighborhood drinking, using drugs, and making noise. A curfew/truancy program was created in 1999, known as the Center for Leadership Options for Community Kids (CLOCK) and operated through the Boys & Girls Club. Police cite young violators of state curfew laws and repeat truants, take them to the club, and contact their parents and/or teachers. The center operates a voluntary diversion program. Youth who refuse the program are referred to juvenile court. Program participants are assessed for personal, school, family, and employment issues, and are referred to appropriate agencies for help with these issues. Participants are taught leadership skills and provided with positive activities. Youth who stay out of trouble for a period of time are able to avoid formal involvement with the juvenile justice system. Drugs and youth issues are the focus of the community prosecution strategy being implemented by the district attorney's office in Santa Fe, New Mexico. One of the problems the program seeks to address is a deeply entrenched drug trade that has involved some of the area's families for several generations. Another is a high level of heroin use. An important objective of the Santa Fe program will be to find recreational outlets for young people, whose quest for "something to do" frequently leads them into trouble. One of the focal points of community prosecution in Honolulu, Hawaii, is a prostitution abatement program. In Waikiki, the tourism industry was suffering because of the prostitution problem. The prostitution abatement task force filed a nuisance abatement action to impose geographic restrictions against known prostitutes in the Waikiki district. Upon conviction, prostitutes are banned from the area as a condition of probation. The prosecutors also introduced legislation to prohibit prostitutes from the district, which was passed in 1998.[11] In addition, women who want to leave the profession can enter a 12-week prostitution intervention program. Free workshops are held on topics related to health, building self-esteem, and access to community resources.[12] Target Area Another common feature of community prosecution strategies is that their target problems have a geographic component. Target areas, like target problems, may be identified through careful planning, needs analyses, and feasibility studies. They also may be self-selecting, such as when community residents or other stakeholders approach the prosecutor's office for help. How the target is configured geographically has important implications for the logistics of the initiative, such as how the community will be engaged, how the office will be organized, and how the objectives will be measured. The nature of the target area--urban, suburban, rural, large city, or small city-- may have important implications for both resource needs and the resources available to the community prosecution strategy. The challenges and logistical choices faced by community prosecution efforts targeting inner-city neighborhoods in large, densely populated urban areas may be quite different from those of smaller, rural, or suburban jurisdictions. With high levels of the serious crimes that are still the business of prosecutors' offices, the resources that can be dedicated to community prosecution may be limited and require careful definition of the target area. Suburban and rural jurisdictions are facing many of the same problems that many community prosecution strategies have been designed to respond to in the inner city. These problems occur in commercial and residential neighborhoods and include both serious, often drug-related, crime and the less serious quality- of-life criminal matters. The Santa Fe District Attorney's Office has targeted an area of more than 7,000 square miles with a permanent population of only about 125,000 residents (and the sizeable tourist population of Santa Fe). The area encompasses the primarily rural counties of Santa Fe, Los Alamos, and Rio Arriba, and includes several small towns. The town of Chimay¢, straddling the Santa Fe-Rio Arriba county line, leads the nation in deaths from heroin overdose. According to Santa Fe District Attorney Henry Valdez, Chimay¢ is a rural community with city problems (Santa Fe and Rio Arriba together are designated a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area). Madrid, a small town south of Santa Fe, was an abandoned mining town that was repopulated and rebuilt in the 1960s to become a thriving community. Residents now find their quality of life declining because of growing drug use and violence. Although Santa Fe's community prosecution initiative faces target problems related to drugs and youth that are not so different from many urban programs, it faces the additional challenges of a rural setting. The large geographic area and the dispersed population make community outreach one of the greatest challenges faced by the program. Canvassing residents and getting them involved is literally a door- to-door effort. The involvement of three counties presents additional logistical issues, such as the inability of the various sheriffs' department vehicles to communicate with each other due to incompatible communications equipment.[13] Sites also vary in their selection of business districts or residential neighborhoods, or a mix of both, as targeted areas for community prosecution strategies. In Kalamazoo County, Michigan, the first community prosecution site was in Edison, one of its oldest cities. The neighborhood has both residential and commercial zoning, with factories and businesses located near homes.[14] In Portland, Oregon, three of seven Neighborhood DA units serve areas that are primarily residential. The pilot Lloyd District is a mix of commercial and residential properties, and the West District is commercial. One unit serves Tri-Met, the Portland public transit system.[15] The community prosecution program in Santa Clara, California, has three sites within its jurisdiction. One is located in the San Jose/Burbank area, which has a mixture of commercial and residential properties. Its population is primarily Hispanic, most of Mexican origin or descent, and long-time Caucasian residents. Its residents range from the very poor families who live in high- density, substandard housing with numerous code violations, such as open sewers and nonfunctional plumbing, to the very wealthy residents of Rosemont. The target area presents some unusual challenges to the community prosecution effort. Approximately half of it, although located within the boundaries of San Jose/Burbank, is unincorporated, that is, not legally a part of the city of San Jose and therefore not governed by city ordinances and zoning regulations, nor subject to law enforcement by the city's police force. In addition, the unincorporated pockets of the San Jose/Burbank area have less access to services such as trash collection, and provision and maintenance of street and traffic lights. These areas have no parks, playgrounds, or other recreational areas. Teens hang out on the streets, many of which have no sidewalks and pose a safety hazard. The children who live in the unincorporated area attend a high school located several miles away, despite a "Blue Ribbon"-designated high school located in the center of their neighborhood but open only to city residents. The area also has a serious gang problem, which has resulted in numerous fights, assaults, and a homicide. The unincorporated areas were farmland when the city was founded, and the residents did not want to be included in it. To this day, residents resist incorporation. They prefer to be left alone because they do not trust the city government and, specifically, the San Jose police. The local sheriff's office polices these areas with officers from the neighborhood whom the residents have known for years. The office is far too small and ill-equipped to handle the gang activity, drug dealing, and prostitution that plague the area. With no zoning ordinances, commercial establishments such as liquor stores are located on residential streets, attracting teens, alcoholics, and drug dealers to the neighborhood. There are no ordinances to limit "red-light" types of establishments, such as strip clubs, many of which are on the main road that runs adjacent to residential housing and attract prostitutes and drug dealers.[16] In Kalamazoo County, Michigan, residents were concerned about where the pilot community prosecution site would be located. The prosecutor held an open forum to invite community input into the targeting decision and presented comparative crime statistics to aid in making the decision. Subsequently, residents formed a neighborhood coalition to represent the residents' concerns. The coalition requested that the site be located in Edison, where 60 percent of residents rent their homes. It has a red-light district and one of the highest crime rates in the county. However, the community also had business and neighborhood associations, and it enjoyed a positive relationship with two community police officers assigned to the neighborhood. It gave the County Prosecuting Attorney's Office a solid foundation on which to build a relationship with the community. In Multnomah County, Oregon, the business leaders of the Lloyd District in downtown Portland approached District Attorney Michael Shrunk about providing law enforcement support for this newly created commercial district. The district was struggling to attract customers in an environment plagued by quality-of-life crimes that were largely attributable to a nearby vacant area populated by transients. The area, known as Sullivan's Gulch, is public property adjacent to a highway that had become a haven for homeless people. "Residents" of the Gulch often wandered into the Lloyd District where they panhandled in an aggressive manner and urinated in public, frightening off prospective customers and threatening the efforts to create a new downtown area (Boland, 1996; 1998a: 259). The Lloyd District served as a pilot effort and a point of departure for similar service to other areas of Portland. Although the private funding (by the business community) of a county prosecutor to serve one neighborhood's special needs was viewed by critics as a "hired gun" approach to justice, other neighborhoods saw the positive impact and wanted their own neighborhood prosecutor (Boland, 1998a: 257). The question of where to start can be complicated when competing locations are in great need, or when the best candidate area from a crime perspective offers little community support, interest, or infrastructure. Although an area is identified as critical from a citywide perspective, its involvement may not be viewed enthusiastically by the residents themselves, presenting the prosecutor's office with the added task of overcoming community resistance. This resistance may stem from a mistrust of public institutions in general and perhaps law enforcement and the justice system in particular. It may also reflect that some communities perceive being targeted as a problem area as stigmatizing or respond negatively to the term "community prosecution." Therefore, some jurisdictions have chosen to use the term "community justice" rather than "community prosecution." Target areas may be delimited in various ways. In Washington, D.C., community prosecution zones were matched to police Patrol Service Areas, greatly enhancing the ability of community prosecutors to serve not only a particular neighborhood, but also to work effectively with the Metropolitan Police Department's community policing teams within those service areas.[17] In other jurisdictions, such as Denver, community prosecution target areas are defined by neighborhoods, whose residents tend to share some ethnic and socioeconomic characteristics and are also likely to have a sense of community and common interest.[18] Multnomah County, Oregon, has Neighborhood District Attorney units linked to seven Portland districts variously defined. Some, like the East Portland District, comprise several neighborhoods. East Portland was originally served by the southeast Neighborhood District Attorney, but the area was too large to be served effectively. The Gresham District, a separate city within Multnomah County, is served by one unit, and the Tri-Met transit system district covers a three-county area with various law enforcement agencies.[19] Role of the Community It is perhaps too obvious to state that community prosecution strategies are defined by their emphasis on, and the nature of their involvement with, the community. Kurki (2000: 257) takes the view that, although "community empowerment and participation" are a basic premise of other community justice initiatives, community prosecution initiatives have continued to take a fairly narrow, traditional view of the role of community members, limited to "giving information and providing extra eyes and ears." Certainly, in many jurisdictions, enlisting the eyes and ears of the community to more effectively carry out the traditional business of the prosecutor's office is seen as a benefit, if not an explicit goal, of community prosecution. Initiatives differ in the extent to which they "act upon" the community based on some assessment of problems and needs or "act with" the community in identifying problems and devising solutions to be carried out jointly. Prosecutors' offices that are merely reorganizing how they assign cases on the basis of geographic area may have little contact with the community except to solicit information or testimony from community members in particular cases. Other community prosecution efforts, however, directly involve and collaborate with community members in a wide range of functions from problem identification to problem solving, as well as crime prevention and improvement efforts in the neighborhoods. Nevertheless, sites differ not only in how they define the role of the community but also in terms of who will become involved as representatives of the community. In some jurisdictions, community activists play an important role in identifying problems and calling for effective responses, but the prosecutor's office largely orchestrates the response, often in conjunction with community police or other agencies. Prosecutors in the three New York City jurisdictions of Manhattan, Kings County, and the Bronx have created community affairs bureaus headed by nonattorney community organizers. These individuals do most of the community outreach. They attend community meetings and interact with residents, neighborhood leaders, and community stakeholders to determine the issues and priorities for law enforcement within their areas. They act as the link between the prosecutor's office and the community and facilitate a direct connection with prosecutors and other governmental agencies to address specific issues. In other jurisdictions, the community plays a direct and critical role in assessing its problems and needs and in planning strategies for addressing those problems, with the assistance and resources that the prosecutor's office can bring to bear. Denver's strategy offers a dramatic example of central engagement of the community in its efforts.[20] The Denver District Attorney's Office does not have enforcement jurisdiction over the majority of quality-of-life crimes targeted by its Community Justice Unit; rather, the City Attorney's Office (renamed to shift the focus from prosecution and punishment to more comprehensive solutions) handles most of these cases. Nor does the Denver community prosecution program provide vertical prosecution for cases, in which community prosecutors follow cases through all stages of processing. Denver's effort instead focuses on citizen and community involvement to develop problem-solving strategies that are community driven. To achieve this, Denver's community prosecution attorneys primarily facilitate a process that involves neighborhood-based Community Justice Councils of individuals who have a stake in the community. There are currently two such councils, in the Globeville and Capitol Hill neighborhoods, each consisting of 20 to 35 members chosen by community prosecutors through indepth interviews. The work of a Community Justice Council begins with identifying target problems. Council members list their concerns, which may be anything from stray dogs and inadequate street lighting to street corner drug dealing, and select the three issues that they consider to be of highest priority for the community. The councils meet on a monthly basis with community prosecutors and representatives of other relevant agencies to educate themselves and begin to craft and implement strategies to resolve these issues. Many are neighborhood quality-of-life issues that may, if addressed early, be prevented from escalating to criminal prosecutorial issues. The community prosecutors' role is to facilitate, provide legal expertise, and bring to bear the city and county resources that are at their disposal in a process that is largely carried out by and within the community.[21] In still other jurisdictions, the prosecutor's office establishes neighborhood offices or assigns staff to the community and attends community meetings to become familiar with the neighborhood concerns. In Multnomah County, Oregon, the first Neighborhood District Attorney was stationed in the Lloyd District, where he was able to hear about what troubled neighborhood residents and experience the problems firsthand (Boland 1998a: 259). By contrast, community prosecutors in Kings County (Brooklyn), New York, are assigned geographically by police district but are stationed in the central office. Community prosecution initiatives differ in their approaches to problem solving and the ways in which the community is represented in that process. In sites such as Multnomah County, prosecutors identify problems as they arise through their contacts with the community and attempt to craft solutions with the help of the community. Some problems may require long-term strategies, others can be fairly short-term efforts, and still others may be amenable to quick fixes but ultimately also require longer-term approaches.[22] The list of target problems is long and the solutions are varied, creative, and always collaborative. For example, in response to residents of neighborhoods plagued by open-air drug dealers, Neighborhood District Attorney Wayne Pearson worked with the city attorney to create Portland's drug-free zones. The Drug-Free Zone ordinance provides that anyone arrested for a drug offense within a drug-free zone may be prohibited from entering that zone for 90 days preconviction or up to 1 year postconviction, under threat of a criminal trespass charge. In an area of Southeast Portland, merchants complained of the problems caused by skateboarders--graffiti, litter, loitering, public urination, and unsafe riding. Rather than try to keep out the skateboarders, the Neighborhood District Attorney helped the merchants and skateboarders form a partnership with mutual rights and responsibilities that resulted in a public skateboarding park. Skateboarders enforce the rules on their peers and take responsibility for keeping the park clean. Merchants paid for signs and provided a place to store cleaning equipment. The city provided a toilet facility. Merchants and skateboarders now peacefully co-exist and business patrons appear to enjoy the performances. In Denver, the approach of the community justice councils is to set as their agenda the three or four issues of highest priority to the community. Denver's organizers have determined that this is the best way to set manageable goals and be assured of some successes, which will sustain the process. The problem areas defined in this process may be broad and multifaceted, such as drug sales, crime related to alcohol abuse, and domestic violence (the actual target problems of Denver's Capitol Hill Council), and addressing them may require long-term strategies. Content of Response to Community Problems Community prosecution initiatives differ in the response they deliver to the community, however they define the target problem and however they conceive the community role. In some locations, a principal response is to successfully prosecute cases that have been problematic for particular communities. These can include cases that involve certain drug dealers, bars where prostitution is centered and nuisance behavior often occurs, absentee landlords whose premises are used for crackhouses or by vagrants, or illegal vendors who disrupt access to legitimate enterprises. In Santa Clara, California, one of the Community Prosecution Unit's most visible achievements was a civil nuisance abatement suit brought by the district attorney against an adult movie theater on the main street in San Jose just around the corner from a residential area. Residents complained about prostitutes conducting business in the parking lot and alleys near their homes and finding used condoms and drug paraphernalia left by theater patrons. The suit accused businessowners of creating a public nuisance by permitting unlawful sex acts on the premises that carried over into the streets. Ultimately, the owners voluntarily closed the business after they were unable to correct serious building code violations within the deadlines set by code inspectors, who were partners in this effort. The media publicized the closing of the theater (San Jose Mercury News, March 23, 2000: 1B, 6B), and residents' response to the effort was extremely favorable. Similar suits have been filed against slumlords who rent substandard one-bedroom properties to poor residents at rates as high as $1,500 per month. Because these residents cannot afford such rents, two or more families generally share one unit, which further exacerbates the problem. These properties are closed until the owner can prove that the necessary repairs have been made.[23] In other instances, the community prosecution response involves establishing an empowerment process that centrally involves community residents in specific efforts to prevent crime or improve services. In Indianapolis, the Street Level Advocacy Program engages the community in problem-solving strategies. A problem identified by residents of one neighborhood was open prostitution. The Patronizing Diversion program was created to address this problem by targeting prostitutes' customers in an Eastern District business area. First-time offenders could avoid conviction by admitting that they had patronized a prostitute, doing community service, and participating in an impact panel. The panel consists of volunteers from the neighborhood, who are given the opportunity to confront the offenders and to air their feelings about the damage that prostitution does in their neighborhood. A community member helped design the program, which demonstrates to offenders that prostitution is not a victimless crime it is the neighborhood that is victimized. In Hennepin County, Minnesota, the community is drawn into both the identification of community problems and the sanctioning process in diversion programs in at least two of the sites. In the third precinct, a community council has been created, which includes local stakeholders and neighborhood representatives who provide insight into community concerns, encourage neighborhood participation in cases of community importance, and help decide where community work squad projects should be done. The fourth precinct uses restorative justice through sentencing circles for minor juvenile crime, allowing the community to have a say in sanctions meted out for juvenile offenders, and facilitating face-to-face meetings between victims and offenders. 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, by lay employees, or by a unit containing many community-oriented prosecutors, investigators, community relations specialists, and clerical staff. Since 1997, in Pima County, Arizona,[24] one prosecutor has been assigned to address the problems in the community. A former civil attorney, she has created several programs using civil remedies, such as forfeiture and eviction procedures, to deal with nuisance properties, and has teamed up with local criminal justice agencies and citizens to identify problems and create legal strategies to deal with them. The prosecutor attends neighborhood association meetings and participates in Operation Spotlight, which teams the probation department, the community, local police, and the county attorney's office. The group meets once a week to discuss community issues and develop solutions, participate in team training sessions on problem-solving techniques, and share information. The prosecutor's involvement in officer training at the police academy helps solidify her relationship with the officers in the target area. Accompanying police on "ride-alongs" further facilitates her relationship with both the community and the police. Through these collaborative relationships and community outreach, one attorney has been working to have an impact on the quality-of-life issues in the community. Many programs began with a single site operated by a single attorney or staff person and, after some initial success, they were able to expand. District Attorney Michael Schrunk started the Neighborhood DA program in Multnomah County, Portland, Oregon, in 1990 with a single prosecutor assigned to the Lloyd District. The pilot effort was so successful that a second neighborhood office was established the following year and others soon followed. By 1996, Portland had seven community prosecutors, with almost total coverage of the county (Boland, 1998a: 258). In some locations, the community prosecution concept has served as a framework for organizing the prosecutor's office. District Attorney Charles J. Hynes started his community prosecution program in 1991 in Kings County (Brooklyn), New York. He divided the borough into five geographical zones based on police precincts, each zone encompassing four or five precincts, and assigned teams of attorneys to handle the cases that originated in each zone. In both Howard and Montgomery Counties in Maryland, community prosecution has been implemented throughout the prosecutor's office. In these sites, community prosecution is a philosophy that governs the conduct of all business coming through the prosecutor's office rather than merely a single program or geographic reorganizational framework because of the impact the focus on specific community areas has had on overall operations. The reorganization of some prosecutors' offices according to geographic areas has often reflected a new perspective on the overall aims of prosecution and changes in the perspectives of individual attorneys rather than just an organization of criminal caseload responsibilities. Howard County State's Attorney Marna McClendon institutionalized the community prosecution philosophy in her office by rewarding the successes of her community prosecution attorneys within the office. She makes it clear that the community prosecutor position is a valuable one. These attorneys are offered rewards and promotions when they complete a satisfactory period as community prosecutors. In addition, it is not assumed that office attorneys possess the skills to create effective relationships with the community. Individuals assigned to community prosecution are trained to reach out to the community and to deal with community issues. According to McClendon, they are not the least experienced prosecutors in the office. Community prosecutors must have enough experience to understand what the office has to offer the neighborhood and to be skilled in litigation. Case Processing Adaptations to Community Prosecution Community prosecution programs may differ in the way they prosecute cases from targeted neighborhoods. Cases may be referred from neighborhood units to the central office for prosecution, or the neighborhood prosecutors themselves may prosecute them "vertically" (one prosecutor manages the case from beginning to end). In Kings County, New York, all attorneys are located in the central office to facilitate their ability to handle their trial caseload efficiently, even though the office caseload is divided into geographic zones that correspond to the organization of the court system. Geographic assignment is desirable in a community prosecution strategy because it allows trial assistants to become familiar with their assigned area, whereas random case assignment tends to isolate attorneys from the communities they serve. It is not practical in every jurisdiction, however, particularly in locations where the organization of the court system is incompatible. When court clerks control the assignment of cases to multiple criminal courtrooms on a random basis, it may not be possible to use geographic case assignment. If a prosecutor has no control over which cases are called in which courtrooms, a trial assistant may be assigned to cases in different courtrooms at the same time. Organizational strategies such as assigning trial teams to handle the cases in a certain courtroom without regard to their geographic origin may be the only efficient way to handle the caseload. Both Howard County, Maryland, and Denver, Colorado, cited this as the reason that their community prosecutors are geographically assigned to work with certain communities, but do not necessarily prosecute the cases that arise from them. Community prosecution strategies also differ with regard to whether the prosecutor assigned to the community actually tries cases. In jurisdictions such as Multnomah County, Oregon, and Pima County, Arizona, the community prosecutors do not try cases themselves. Instead, cases are assigned to the trial division for litigation, with the community prosecutors acting as liaisons between the trial attorneys and the community residents. This leaves the attorneys free to immerse themselves in the community, participate in neighborhood meetings and affairs, and create responsive problem-solving strategies as their primary responsibility. At the opposite extreme, in other jurisdictions, the attorney assigned to the community carries the same caseload as any other attorney in the office and must handle outreach and problem solving in addition to these responsibilities. Offices in Howard County, Maryland, Hennepin County, Minnesota, and Denver, Colorado, are structured in this manner. The majority of the jurisdictions noted in this report fall somewhere between these extremes, assigning to community prosecutors a reduced caseload of cases that are important to the community. The cases that these attorneys cannot handle are assigned to the trials division. Community prosecutors who retain a significant caseload may find that they are overwhelmed by the demands of the position. The trial caseload requires a great deal of case preparation time during the day, and much of the community contact must be accomplished in the evening hours when neighborhood residents are not at work. Community meetings are almost always scheduled during the evening, so community prosecutors may find themselves working long hours and feeling as if there is not enough time to deal with the issues that are brought to their attention. Offices with smaller caseload demands or more financial resources may have the ability to relieve these attorneys of their case processing responsibilities so that they can devote all of their time to community outreach and problem solving. Offices with large caseloads or less financial backing may not have enough personnel to afford this luxury. Vertical prosecution is a case processing strategy that has been adopted by many jurisdictions in their community prosecution efforts.[25] It appeals to the public because a single assistant prosecutor manages criminal cases from beginning to conclusion. The process is reassuring because of the belief that an attorney's familiarity with a case will translate into a greater commitment to achieving a successful conclusion. Theoretically, an attorney's interaction with community members and the knowledge that residents are closely following the progress of a case will increase the prosecutor's feeling of accountability. Some anecdotal evidence supports this perception. For example, Palm Beach County Prosecutor James Martz, who heads the Palm Beach Community-Based Anti- Crime Task Force, recounted that an assistant community prosecutor in West Palm Beach resigned after losing a case, because he felt that he had let down the residents of the community.[26] In some offices, vertical prosecution is not practical because of limited resources and it is not viewed as an efficient use of attorneys' experience and talents. Later stages of prosecution require more experience and expertise than the initial filing of a case. Having a seasoned attorney handle all stages of prosecution, despite its intuitive appeal to observers, may not increase the probability of a successful result. In urban jurisdictions with large caseloads, vertical prosecution simply may not be feasible. Interagency and Collaborative Partnerships in Community Prosecution In most community prosecution jurisdictions, community problem-solving strategies involve initiatives that do not fall strictly within the prosecutor's domain or involve solutions that are only marginally related to criminal justice. Community prosecution programs differ in the degree to which they collaborate in multidisciplinary planning, enforcement, and service delivery strategies, and the extent to which they cooperate or are integrated with the related efforts of other agencies and community-focused initiatives such as community courts or community policing. Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle has been the driving force in creating numerous community-based initiatives in Austin, Texas, including the community court and drug court programs, and programs focusing on preventing juvenile crime and truancy. He recently added a specific community prosecution program which takes an individual prosecutor directly out into the community. In Austin, representatives of various agencies that support the community justice initiatives interact cooperatively to accomplish the similar goals of various programs that draw the public into the business of crime prevention. In many locations, community prosecution and community policing go hand in hand. They are encouraged by federal policy and funding to coexist and work collaboratively.[27] For community prosecutors, police support in their efforts provides the enforcement support and, at times, a measure of safety in situations that even a seasoned prosecutor is ill-equipped to handle. For community police, the prosecutor can provide the legal expertise and authority to bring creative policing solutions to fruition. In Multnomah County, police noted that before the advent of community prosecution they often failed to act on promising ideas because of uncertainty about their legality (Boland, 1998a: 275; Wolf, 2000: 1). Depending on the target problems they have sought to address, community prosecutors have found it helpful and necessary to get other agencies involved in community initiatives, combining forces that community members would only access piecemeal. Community prosecutors have become creative in their reliance on the special roles of other agencies. For example, they may involve the civil justice system and housing and licensing agencies in nuisance abatement proceedings. Philadelphia's Local Intensive Narcotics Enforcement (LINE) program was implemented in 1991 as a pilot program in one Southwest Philadelphia police district that prosecuted serious drug offenders. When assistant district attorneys with the LINE program learned of the issues that really troubled community residents--nuisance bars, neglected properties, crackhouses, houses of prostitution, and "weed stores"--they called on other city agencies such as the police, the Bureau of Licenses and Inspections, the Bureau of Liquor Control Enforcement, the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board, the Department of Public Health, the City Law Department, and the Philadelphia Legislative Delegation to help address these issues and gain the cooperation of the residents. They found what other community prosecution efforts have also discovered, that nuisance abatement using civil remedies such as housing and licensing code enforcement can be effective in crime reduction.[28] Some of the community prosecution initiatives are purely collaborative, functioning as part of a task force with other agencies. The CLEAR program in Los Angeles, California, which was created in 1996 by an interagency gang task force, is a collaboration of law enforcement agencies, public officials, and community residents that addresses the community's gang problems by targeting geographic areas or specific gangs, using suppression, intervention, and prevention tactics. The program was created by statute under Penal Code Section 14000, and includes five funded partners on the originating task force-- the police, the sheriff's department, the district attorney's office, the city attorney's office, and the probation department. The CLEAR program is headed by an executive committee made up of representatives from these agencies, who meet monthly to set policy and make budget decisions. Each agency has a different role to play. Police and sheriffs take the lead in enforcement and intelligence gathering and make tactical decisions for certain enforcement programs. The district attorney is responsible for vertical prosecution of serious gang-related felonies, advising police on investigations when needed, handling probation violations, and providing input on community impact teams. The CLEAR strategy is proactive, targeting the most active gang members and aggressively filing probation and parole violations and gang enhancements. The city attorney vertically prosecutes gang-related misdemeanors and uses nuisance abatement to address quality-of-life issues. Probation officers track members of targeted gangs who are on active probation to ensure compliance and ride along with police to arrest gang clients observed in violations. There is also a community impact team consisting of businessowners, residents, and stakeholders, who meet regularly with the team to share concerns and notify them about hotspots in their neighborhoods. CLEAR operates in six sites throughout Los Angeles County. Prosecutors are located within the community, sometimes in space donated by local businesses. A city attorney is assigned to each office to handle quality-of-life misdemeanors. The goal is to locate all of the partners in one office space. The attorneys handle as many cases from their areas as they can, giving priority to serious felonies and cases that are of special significance to the community. Office trial teams covering that particular geographic area take cases that cannot be handled by these attorneys. Denver's neighborhood Community Justice Councils, organized by the district attorney's office as part of that city's community prosecution initiative, often identify target problems that involve misdemeanor offenses that do not fall within the jurisdiction of the district attorney's office. Denver's program therefore not only brings the district attorney's community prosecutors to the table but also calls on the city attorney to help neigh