MENU TITLE: Communities: Mobilizing Against Crime  
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Series: NIJ Journal

Published: August 1996

110 pages

197,818 bytes



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U.S. Department of Justice

Office of Justice Programs

National Institute of Justice



National Institute of Justice Journal

August 1996



Communities: Mobilizing Against Crime 

Making Partnerships Work



------------------------------



The Latest Criminal Justice Videotape Series From

NIJ: Research in Progress



Learn about the latest developments in criminal

justice research from prominent criminal justice

experts.



Each 60-minute VHS tape presents a well-known

scholar discussing his or her current studies and

how they relate to existing criminal justice

research and includes the lecturer's responses to

audience questions.



Law Enforcement



NCJ 159739

Joel H. Garner, Ph.D., Use of Force By and Against

Police.



NCJ 153273

Wesley Skogan, Ph.D. Community Policing in Chicago:

Fact or Fiction?



NCJ 153730

Lawrence W. Sherman, Ph.D. Reducing Gun Violence:

Community Policing Against Gun Crime Drug Abuse

Treatment



NCJ 152692

James Inciardi, Ph.D. A Corrections-Based Continuum

of Effective Drug Abuse Treatment.



High-Risk Youth/Child Abuse



NCJ 153270

Adele Harrell, Ph.D. Intervening With High-Risk

Youth: Preliminary Findings From the Children At-

Risk Program.



NCJ 153272

Cathy Spatz Widom, Ph.D. The Cycle of Violence

Revisited Six Years Later.



NCJ 156923

Orlando Rodriguez, Ph.D. The New Immigrant Hispanic

Populations: Implications for Crime and Delinquency

in the Next Decade.



NCJ 157643

Benjamin E. Saunders, Ph.D., and Dean G.

Kilpatrick, Ph.D. Prevalence and Consequences of

Child Victimization: Preliminary Results from the

National Survey of Adolescents.



Sentencing Policy



NCJ 159740

Kim English, Ph.D. Managing Adult Sex Offenders in

Community Settings: A Containment Approach.



NCJ 152236

Peter W. Greenwood, Ph.D. Three Strikes, You're

Out: Benefits and Costs of California's New

Mandatory Sentencing Law.



NCJ 152237

Christian Pfeiffer, Ph.D. Sentencing Policy and

Crime Rates in Reunified Germany.



Violence Prevention



NCJ 152235

Alfred Blumstein, Ph.D. Youth Violence, Guns, and

Illicit Drug Markets.



NCJ 152238

Arthur L. Kellermann, M.D., M.P.H. Understanding

and Preventing Violence: A Public Health

Perspective.



NCJ 153850

Scott H. Decker, Ph.D., and Susan Pennell.

Monitoring the Illegal Firearms Market.



NCJ 153271

Marvin Wolfgang, Ph.D. Crime in a Birth Cohort: A

Replication in the People's Republic of China.



NCJ 154277

Terrie Moffitt, Ph.D. Partner Violence Among Young

Adults.



NCJ 156924

Robert Sampson, Ph.D. Communities and Crime: A

Study in Chicago.



NCJ 156925

John Monahan, Ph.D. Mental Illness and Violent

Crime.



NCJ 160766

Michael Tonry, Ph.D. Ethnicity, Crime, and

Immigration.



Individual titles are available for only $19 in the

United States and $24 in NTSC Format for Canada and

other countries. To order, call the National

Criminal Justice Reference Service at 800-851-3420.



------------------------------



The National Institute of Justice Journal

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the National Institute of Justice, the research arm

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Opinions or points of view expressed in this

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Statistics, Office of Juvenile Justice and

Delinquency Prevention, and Office for Victims of

Crime. 



---------------------------------------------



JOURNAL CONTENTS (Issue No. 231)



## Director's Message ##



## Linking Community-Based Initiatives and

Community Justice: The Office of Justice

Programs ##



## Grassroots and Persistent: The Chicago

Alliance for Neighborhood Safety ##



## Neighborhood Revitalization: Lessons from

Savannah and Baltimore ##



## The Federal Role in Revitalizing Communities

and Preventing and Controlling Crime and

Violence ##



## The Community's Role in Community

Policing ##



## What Is Community Prosecution? ##



## Community Defense and the Challenge of

Community Justice ##



## Toward a Corrections of "Place": The Challenge

of "Community" in Corrections ##

-----------------------------------------------



## Director's Message ##



Communities and Criminal Justice: A Powerful

Alignment



"It is impossible to overemphasize the enormous

importance of people's doing things themselves."

Saul Alinsky made that observation more than 50

years ago in writing about community organizing,

and his words still ring true. The community

mobilization he wrote about is particularly evident

today in the responses people are making to crime

in cities and towns across the country. These

responses have attracted a great deal of interest

in what the fully realized potential of community

involvement--of people "doing things themselves"

to fight crime--might be. 



This issue of the National Institute of Justice 

Journal is an expression of that interest. It is 

devoted to a discussion of the role of communities 

in responding to crime and disorder. It also reports 

on the emerging, sustained alliances that communities 

are forging with the various components of the criminal

justice system as partners in that response.



The potential within communities is best understood

in the accomplishments of the many brave people

living in crime-plagued neighborhoods around the

country who through their own concerted action are

saying they have suffered enough and are determined

to take back their streets. They march, collect

signatures on petitions, pressure public officials,

organize block watches, open youth recreation

centers, establish shelters for battered women, and

call the attention of the public to the very real

toll that crime exacts on the quality of their

community's life. In short, these organized

communities have become powerful, constructive

forces for public safety.



The criminal justice system has begun to recognize

this power and to discover the potential for

working with these communities. The philosophy of

community policing, which envisions the community

as a partner in problem solving, has led the way in

reinventing this core governmental function. Other

criminal justice agencies are following this lead.

Prosecutors are assigning attorneys to

neighborhood-based offices and police precincts to

bring legal expertise closer to community

residents. Public defenders are exploring the

potential of offering more direct community access

to legal representation. The courts are opening up

their processes, creating a new legal culture that

sees crime as eroding the quality of life of the

communities where it is committed. Correctional

agencies, which have long dealt with the

communities into which offenders are released, are

considering the consequences of viewing communities

as partners in the imposition of criminal

sanctions.



Within the Federal Government, public safety

initiatives featuring community involvement as an

organizing principle have been set in motion. The

investment of Federal dollars in anti-crime

programs is now thought most effective if the

resources are devoted in part to creating a

communitywide, comprehensive response to crime

problems affecting a jurisdiction. The private

sector has weighed in on a number of fronts,

particularly with foundation support for anti-

violence programs.



In preparing this issue, we were inspired in large

part by the upcoming conference, "Communities,

Crime, and Justice: Making Community Partnerships

Work," sponsored by the Office of Justice Programs,

to be held in September. Our intention is to offer

a stimulus for discussion as conference presenters

and other participants make their preparations. For

the long term, we hope this issue of the Journal

will be instrumental in disseminating the

innovative practices the authors describe here, in

promoting critical examination of the theories

underlying these practices, and in contributing to

a broad discussion of practice and theory.



The authors represented in this issue speak in

distinctive voices, reflecting the perspectives of

public officials, community organizers,

researchers, and practitioners. Laurie Robinson,

Assistant Attorney General for the Office of

Justice Programs (OJP), opens the discussion by

presenting the role of the Justice Department and,

within it, of OJP, urging us to think boldly and

creatively about the justice system and above all

to listen to what communities are saying.



The articles are organized into two categories: The

first presents the perspectives of the communities

themselves; the second illustrates the perspectives

of the various components of the criminal justice

system. Warren Friedman, executive director of the

Chicago Alliance for Neighborhood Safety, relates

the key role his organization has played in

involving community residents in community

policing. David Kennedy recounts the experiences of

two neighborhoods in Savannah and Baltimore that

have undertaken broad-based community responses to

crime through an emphasis on economic development.

Deborah Weisel and Adele Harrell set forth a

theoretical framework for understanding

neighborhood crime prevention strategies. Catherine

Conly and Daniel McGillis analyze the Federal role

in supporting communitywide anti-crime initiatives.



The second set of articles relates the ways

criminal justice agencies are working with

communities and promoting community involvement.

The potential and limitations of community

partnership with the police are examined by Wesley

Skogan. Barbara Boland explains how the legal

expertise of the prosecutor's office in Portland,

Oregon, is being tapped to address quality-of-life

issues. Christopher Stone reflects on the issues

involved in operating an innovative, neighborhood-

based organization in Harlem that represents

criminal defendants. David Rottman details the

historical roots of the new community-based courts

and examines three models. Finally, a theory and

rationale for a community-centered approach to

corrections are explored by Todd Clear.



We thank the many contributors to this issue, and

we wish especially to recognize the work of the

concerned, engaged citizens and practitioners whose

stories are told on these pages. They would be the

first to acknowledge they have not found the

definitive answers to the challenges of crime and

justice. We recognize, however, that they have

defined important new questions, and we applaud

their work.



Jeremy Travis



-------------------------------------------------



## Linking Community-Based Initiatives and

Community Justice: The Office of Justice

Programs ##



by Laurie Robinson, Assistant Attorney General 



Justice in the life and conduct of the state is

possible only as first it resides in the hearts and

souls of the citizens.



This inscription over the entrance to the U.S.

Department of Justice building is a constant

reminder to those of us at the Department that

justice begins in the local communities we serve.

Since its creation in 1984, the Office of Justice

Programs (OJP) has worked to build partnerships

with States and local communities to reduce crime

and improve the criminal justice system.



Over the past 3 years--with the strong support

and encouragement of Attorney General Janet Reno --

OJP has increased its efforts in this area,

developing and funding a wide range of new

initiatives to help local communities take a more

coordinated, comprehensive approach to crime

control and prevention. Through these efforts, many

communities are now thinking more strategically

about crime. They are bringing together government

officials, service providers, business people, and

residents themselves to attack crime by identifying

crime-related problems and mobilizing a broad

spectrum of community resources--including law

enforcement, the business community, schools,

housing, and medical and mental health care--to

reduce crime and restore community vitality.



OJP's community-based initiatives



Reflecting this Department priority, OJP funding is

supporting a number of community-based

comprehensive initiatives. For example, more than

76 communities across the country are implementing

Weed and Seed programs with financial and technical

assistance from OJP and several other Federal

agencies. Weed and Seed is a neighborhood-based,

multiagency approach to law enforcement and

community revitalization in high-crime areas. The

Weed and Seed strategy integrates Federal, State,

and local law enforcement and criminal justice

resources with corresponding human services to weed

out crime and prevent it from reoccurring. U.S.

Attorneys are integrally involved in this

initiative.



Project PACT (Pulling America's Communities

Together)--which was launched shortly after

Attorney General Reno arrived at the Department --

builds on the Weed and Seed strategy. Its goal is

to empower local communities to address youth

violence by developing broad-based, coordinated

anti-violence strategies--on a jurisdictionwide

basis--that incorporate the resources of Federal,

State, and local government agencies, law

enforcement, schools, businesses, and community

organizations.



The 4 PACT sites--Atlanta, Denver, Washington,

D.C., and the State of Nebraska--are

participating with 14 other jurisdictions in

another OJP effort--the Comprehensive Communities

Program (CCP). Under CCP, which is funded and

administered by the Bureau of Justice Assistance,

communities are developing and implementing

comprehensive strategies for preventing and

reducing violent crime. Community policing is an

important element.



The SafeFutures program of the Office of Juvenile

Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) focuses

specifically on youth violence. Six sites are

developing this community-based, multidisciplinary

effort to provide a continuum of services and

graduated sanctions for at-risk and delinquent

juveniles. The programs include a broad range of

components, such as afterschool, mentoring, and

family strengthening programs; mental health

services; gang prevention, intervention, and

suppression for schools; and initiatives for

serious, violent, and chronic offenders.



OJP also is working with the Department of Housing

and Urban Development to help revitalize

communities designated as Empowerment Zones (EZ) or

Enterprise Communities (EC). Like Weed and Seed,

designation as an EZ/EC opens up a wide range of

Federal funding and technical assistance

opportunities for these communities.



Improving community services



To coordinate and expand these efforts, the Justice

Department has created a Community-Based

Initiatives (CBI) Working Group headed by Associate

Attorney General John Schmidt and OJP Deputy

Assistant Attorney General Reginald Robinson. The

CBI Working Group is looking at ways the Federal

Government can further help communities attack

crime through comprehensive, community-based

programs--and also ensure that the variety of

initiatives within the Department of Justice are

well coordinated.



One critical element of any comprehensive crime

control effort is community policing. Hundreds of

communities have implemented or expanded community

policing over the past 2 years as a result of the

Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program

authorized by the 1994 Crime Act. The Justice

Department's COPS Office last year awarded more

than $1.5 billion under this program, enabling

communities to hire more than 31,000 community

police officers to work with citizens in solving

the problems that contribute to crime. The program

has $1.6 billion this year, and the President has

requested additional funding for fiscal year 1997

to help fulfill his pledge to put a total of

100,000 additional community police officers on our

Nation's streets.



To complement these efforts, OJP--through OJJDP  

-- is working with the COPS Office and the

Department's Community Relations Service to train

community teams in implementing youth-focused

community policing. This new program targeting

youth violence is being tested in 14 cities and 15

EZ/EC sites.



The Department also is continuously exploring, on a

number of fronts, how it can help improve the

delivery of criminal justice services to better

meet the needs of community residents. For example,

to improve our outreach to Native Americans, OJP

has created the American Indian and Alaska Native

Desk to respond more effectively to the needs of

tribes in addressing crime and delinquency in their

communities. Native American Desk Director Ada

Pecos Melton, a member of the Pueblo of Jemez in

New Mexico, is working to ensure that OJP programs

are culturally sensitive and appropriate for Native

American communities. OJP has asked tribal leaders

to participate in meetings on such issues as

juvenile justice, crime victimization, and violence

against women to ensure that the viewpoints of

their communities are represented in our program

planning efforts.



Attorney General Janet Reno--in a first for the

Department of Justice--also has asked the United

States Attorneys to work more closely with their

local communities to combat crime through both

enforcement and prevention strategies and to use

their leadership role and resources in new ways to

address community problems, in close alliance with

State and local officials.



Community justice



At the same time that communities across the

country are mustering broad-based coalitions to

tackle crime and youth violence, innovative efforts

are under way to "reinvent" the justice system

itself. "Restorative"--or community--justice

experimentation is taking place in jurisdictions

across the country. Restorative justice is based on

an ancient form of justice that traces its roots to

the Code of Hammurabi in 2000 B.C. It holds the

offender accountable--not to the state but to the

victim who has been harmed and to the community

that has been disrupted. Restorative justice seeks

not to punish for punishment's sake but to right

the wrong, to repair the damage to the extent

possible, and to restore both the victim and the

community.



Restitution and community service are two common

forms of community justice. More and more

communities, however, are experimenting with other

programs based on the concept of community justice,

such as community-based victim-offender mediation

in which victims and offenders discuss the impact

of the crime and a means of reparation.



Other jurisdictions are expanding court services

provided to the community. The Midtown Community

Court in Manhattan is one example. An evaluation

conducted in 1994 found that this new concept in

court services resulted in more community service,

increased completion rates, quicker arraignments,

greater community satisfaction, and a reduction in

targeted crimes such as street prostitution and

unlicensed vending.



A Bureau of Justice Assistance-funded program in

Vermont is taking this concept one step further by

aggressively establishing restorative justice in a

correctional setting through a two-tier probation

system--a "risk management" track for more

serious offenders and a "reparations" track for

minor first-time offenders. These reparative cases

are referred to trained community boards that

determine the details of the sentence, which

usually includes community service and restitution.

Still early in its implementation, the program

hopes to directly involve the victim in the process

as well.



Community justice also is being incorporated into

community policing programs, such as in Harrisburg,

Pennsylvania, where police refer some cases to a

Citizen Dispute Settlement program, and into

juvenile justice programs, like the program in

Australia that replaces formal prosecution with a

"family group conference" designed to shame the

offender and explain the full impact of the crime

on the victim and the community.



Although these initiatives hold, I believe,

enormous promise, we still have a long way to go to

attain real "community justice." The challenge for

those of us at the Federal and State and local

levels is to be willing to step back and think more

broadly--and boldly--about the justice system

in America and to start to develop a new framework

for how we think, most fundamentally, about

"justice"--what it means and what it should mean.

We need to think of new ways to combine criminal

justice resources, such as teaming community

policing officers with probation services to keep

better track of probationers and parolees in the

community, and to think perhaps in terms of

"community justice officers" rather than simply

community policing officers.



Combining justice resources and using new tools



More attention is needed, however, if we are to

think creatively about combining justice resources.

In order to identify and develop these ideas, we

need to end the isolation of our individual

disciplines, talk more with each other, and do a

better job of sharing information. One key

frustration of practitioners in the field is the

difficulty of getting information about what is

going on in other jurisdictions and finding out

about effective and innovative criminal justice

programs.



To fill this gap, OJP, through the National

Institute of Justice, developed PAVNET--the

Partnerships Against Violence Network--an

information search and retrieval system available

on the Internet and on diskettes. Representing the

resources of more than 30 Federal clearinghouses,

PAVNET includes information on promising federally

and nonfederally funded programs, sources of

Federal and private funds, and technical

assistance. We are working to get the word out

about this resource so it will be more widely used

as a tool for planning and resource sharing.



We need to make better and more widespread use of

other technology as well. The computer mapping

technology developed under the Drug Market Analysis

Program of the National Institute of Justice is

just one example. This program uses computers to

identify crime "hot spots" and to target resources

in the areas where they are needed most. Recent

research found this tool effective in reducing

emergency calls for service in high-crime

neighborhoods; contrary to some expectations, crime

was not displaced to surrounding nontargeted areas.

Based on the results of this pilot program,

computer mapping is now being used more broadly.

For example, mapping technology is helping

community police officers track crime trends on

their beats and community planners examine the

nexus of crime trends and social indicators.



A time for meaningful change



In short, the challenge for all of us is to think

creatively about ways we can change the manner in

which we conduct the business of providing justice

in this country. But there are certain precautions

to keep in mind as we approach this task. First, we

have to ensure that this change is concrete, that

it is more than just "lip service." In the past,

the criminal justice system has had a tendency when

encountering problems to respond by repackaging old

ideas with new labels and calling it progress. We

have to be careful to avoid this pitfall when we

talk about community-based initiatives and

community justice.



Second, we have to ensure that we in the Federal

Government listen carefully to local communities as

we work together to implement change. No one

individual or organization has all the answers --

not the Federal Government, not the research

community, not practitioners. If we are to effect

meaningful change, this must be a collaborative

process.



Third, we need to be cognizant of resource

realities. Coordination not only makes common

sense, but in these times of lean Federal, State,

and local budgets, when resources are an issue at

every level of government, it makes economic sense

as well. The pot of gold at the end of the Federal

rainbow is surely gone. State and local officials,

almost without exception, are struggling to find

ways to deliver government services while reining

in spending. These realities mean we have to think

in new ways about how we can use different criminal

justice system components in multiple roles.



Attorney General Janet Reno and the leadership at

OJP are committed to fostering the development of

both community-based initiatives and community

justice efforts and to helping combine them into a

focused attack on crime-related problems. I hope

the upcoming Conference on Communities, Crime, and

Justice--and the thought-provoking articles in

this issue of the National Institute of Justice

Journal--will help to launch a new era of

cooperation, coordination, and meaningful change so

that the administration of justice in our Nation

more truly represents the "hearts and souls" of its

citizens.



Laurie Robinson is Assistant Attorney General for

the Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of

Justice.



----------------------------------------------------



## Grassroots and Persistent: The Chicago

Alliance for Neighborhood Safety ##



by Warren Friedman



In the summer of 1994, more than 600 people

gathered in the auditorium of the State of Illinois

Building in downtown Chicago. With banners

proclaiming the names of neighborhoods they

represented, the racially diverse audience was

celebrating community policing, their role in

launching it, and an AmeriCorps--sponsored

"Summer of Safety." Most of those who cheered the

words of community leaders, the performances of

young people, and the speeches of the police

superintendent and the mayor were wearing bright

yellow buttons. The buttons stated succinctly the

neighborhood safety and community policing strategy

goals of the rally: "Organized Neighbors Make Safe

Neighborhoods."



In another setting, at another time, participants

might have asserted that neighborhood safety was

not their job. "We pay the cops' salaries," was how

people often put it. "Let them do it." But the

dialog about the need for a new model of policing

that had been going on for years in professional

and academic circles was being joined by these

members of block groups, community organizations,

and church and school committees. The shortcomings

of traditional policing were problems in their

daily lives.



The conviction that communities have to be

organized if people want to be safe grew, in part,

as a reaction to these shortcomings. But it was

also the outgrowth of two traditions in Chicago-

community organizing and community crime

prevention. These traditions merged in the Chicago

Alliance for Neighborhood Safety (CANS), the

organization that brought the rally's enthusiastic

participants together and had taken the lead in

advocating community policing in Chicago.



CANS: Its beginnings and its principles



CANS is an independent, nonprofit crime prevention

coalition of community organizations citywide.[1] It

began more than 15 years ago as a program to build

a public-private partnership to combat crime and to

strengthen the capacity of community organizations

to solve problems. A guiding principle, overseen by

its community-based board, is that CANS be run by

and for the citizens in Chicago's communities. Over

the years, CANS has offered training, technical and

organizing assistance, research, and education to

communities around the city.



Early activism and relations with the police



During its early years, CANS assisted groups in

Chicago's neighborhoods and public housing sites.

These groups organized more than 1,000 block

watches, apartment watches, and school safety

zones. The idea was to convince 25 percent of the

households on a block to sign up and work with

their neighbors. People often met each other for

the first time at these watch meetings and

discovered they shared concerns with others--that

they were not isolated.



Much of the initial focus was on getting the police

to respond quickly to their calls, but basic to the

effort was the desire to solve neighborhood crime

problems: to get the drug house off the block and

the liquor store to stop selling to minors; to make

the path to school safer and the business strip

less threatening. Participants were eager to work

with the police, but they often ran into a stone

wall when requesting the cooperation of the

department.



Like most big city departments, Chicago's was

incident driven. Patrol officers spent their time

driving from incident to incident without getting

to know residents or gaining a deeper understanding

of the community's crime problems. People felt the

police did not care about their problems and did

not respect the crime prevention work they were

initiating. Yet they were the ones who cared enough

to get involved, and they were frustrated and

angry. In dozens of meetings around the city --

held in moderate- and high-crime areas and in

black, white, and Latino communities--people made

it clear they wanted something different from the

police.



CANS and community policing



In response to this groundswell from the

neighborhoods, CANS issued a report which argued

that by reducing the number of calls to which

officers were dispatched, their time could be freed

up to work with the community to solve persistent

neighborhood crime problems.[2] Issued in 1988, the

report introduced to the public the idea of

community policing, and the CANS Community Policing

Task Force ultimately began a campaign to bring it

to Chicago.



The message that there was another way to provide

police service was brought to hundreds of community

groups in presentations around the city. Working

with a representative of the police department,

CANS Task Force members drafted a proposal for a

pilot project. In response to the sustained and

growing voice, and in the context of the national

dialog that encouraged police reform, the mayor

announced that the city would embrace community

policing. In 1992 the Chicago Police Department

launched the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy

(CAPS) in five prototype districts.



The nature and scope of CAPS



CAPS was not conceived of as a small program for a

special unit; rather, it was designed to change,

from top to bottom, the country's second largest

police department. The mission of the entire

department was to work in partnership with the

community.



Before launching CAPS, the city and the police

department did their homework. Other cities'

efforts were studied to avoid their mistakes and

learn from their successes. A major management

consulting firm was hired to analyze the department

and recommend a strategy. Seventeen hundred

officers were trained in problem solving. City

services were integrated into CAPS.



As with any effort at large-scale change, there

were problems. Much was done poorly; there was

resistance and cynicism in the department and

skepticism and suspicion in the community. Yet

despite the rumors and the shocks that agitated and

jarred department personnel and community members,

despite the push and pull, despite the maneuvering

and power plays, enough of what was being done went

right.



The evaluation of CAPS, conducted at the end of a

year of operation of the prototypes, produced

promising findings, and CAPS is going forward in

all 25 police districts. But there are many steps

between a promising startup year in prototypes and

the long-term, citywide transformation of the

department and Chicago's communities. (See "Evidence

of Success: The CAPS Evaluation.")



-----------------------------



Evidence of Success: The CAPS Evaluation



A consortium of Chicago area universities evaluated

CAPS in the prototype districts after a year of

operation. Northwestern University professor Wesley

Skogan, a seasoned evaluator of community policing

experiments who led the study, noted that the

prototypes produced the "single most impressive set

of outcomes I've seen yet....There is no

comparison."



Compared to areas where the prototypes had not been

in operation, there were significant improvements,

especially in two high-crime, low-income police

districts. Based on residents' perceptions, major

crimes and drug and gang activity appear to have

declined. In addition, in two of the three high-

crime districts, people perceived that officers

treated citizens less aggressively. Trust between

officers and the community increased, as did the

flow of information between the department and the

community. City services also improved. People said

they were more optimistic about their neighborhoods

and policing.[3]



-------------------------------------



After the training of police began, community

members realized they also needed to be trained.

They knew that unless they learned how to become

partners in restoring and maintaining the safety of

their neighborhoods, community policing would fail.

The consensus of those from the community who had

worked to put CAPS on the city's agenda was that

they needed to know what they were doing. In 

late 1994, the city contracted with CANS to

introduce residents to CAPS and train them in the

problem-solving process. (See "CANS Trains the

Community.")



------------------------------



CANS Trains the Community



The city-funded project to train the community--

Joint Community-Police Training (JCPT)--is the

largest and most serious commitment in the country

to developing the community's capacity to play its

role in community policing. Eventually, training

will be conducted in all 279 Chicago police beats.



JCPT brings neighbors together, trains them to work

with each other and the police, and provides them

and the officers with experience in the

collaborative problem solving necessary to develop

leaders who can sustain the process of transforming

the police-community relationship.



Through hours of meetings in which the parties

struggled to understand each other's language and

concerns, a curriculum was developed by

representatives of CANS, the police department, and

the city. The orientation introduces residents to

CAPS, a five-step problem-solving process, and the

community role in both. The training is delivered

by both CANS and police officers.



The trainers are preceded in each beat by CANS

outreach workers, who introduce the program to

groups and by going door-to-door. Their aim is to

recruit 50 people to participate in the 2-hour

orientation and in problem-solving groups that will

work with officers on real crime and disorder

problems.



------------------------------



Grassroots organizing



Training is crucial, but without stable community

organizations with adequate resources, even twice

the training time may be inadequate to build the

volunteer base necessary to sustain and make

community policing a powerful crime-fighting and

prevention strategy. Because volunteer efforts

attract broader participation and are more

effective and more likely to be sustained when

coordinated and staffed, CANS has worked to bring

organizing resources to the community groups on the

front line of the struggle for neighborhood safety.



AmeriCorps' Volunteers in Service to America

(VISTA) serves in many communities as the

organizing staff. CANS commits most of its 23

VISTAs to work with neighborhood groups. They go

door-to-door and hold meetings, getting young

people and adults together to work on problems.

With VISTA's help, the hard-pressed community-based

organizations can do their part and sustain their

efforts to overcome entrenched problems and make

their neighborhoods safer.



A citywide coalition to sustain community policing



Having an organizing staff, even when coupled with

training, is not enough. Neither are organized

communities. Even with Federal funding incentives,

enlightened leadership, and considerable rank-and-

file interest, it is unrealistic to expect that

police agencies will, on their own, develop a

version of community policing that truly addresses

the needs and concerns of neighborhood residents.



Around the country, there are thousands of

creative, courageous, local communities working to

make neighborhoods safer. What CANS has added is an

informed, organized, and independent community

voice, its citywide coalition of community-based

organizations--the Community Policing Task Force.



The task force is now working to make CAPS a

success. Task force meetings serve as a forum for

communities to talk to each other; to find out, for

instance, how the regular beat meetings that the

department has established are faring. Task force

members ask such questions as: Are the meetings

well run? Do police and community participate? Who

sets the agenda--the community, the police, or

both? These exchanges are a critical force for

spreading best practices across the city. 



The task force not only tracks the progress of CAPS

citywide but also provides a mechanism for

expressing the community's views on what is

happening and how things can be improved. It is an

arena for developing informed, committed,

grassroots citizen leaders--residents whose

opinions are respected in the community, who can

get work done and bring people to meetings and

other events. The commitment of these block club

and community organization members is crucial to

creating a critical mass in the community

sufficient to sustain long-term change and safer

neighborhoods. No community can play its part

without neighbors who understand what it takes to

close down a drug house, how the police department

works, and where community policing should be

going. (See "Creating Community Leadership.")



------------------------------



Creating Community Leadership



Twice a year, as part of the development of

grassroots leadership, CANS conducts the Leadership

Institute for Community Policing. The purpose of

the Institute and leadership development in general

is to develop informed, skilled community leaders

who can work with the Community Policing Task Force

and their communities, educate residents, and give

informed expression to their concerns.



The Institute brings 30 to 40 community policing

activists to a series of six Saturday sessions

conducted by CANS staff and guests from academic

and other research organizations.



Topics range from the history and theory of

community policing to an examination of the

community's role in it. Following the sessions,

participants take a field trip to examine another

city's version of community policing. They have

visited Seattle; New York; Joliet, Illinois; and

Milwaukee, Wisconsin.



------------------------------



Backing neighborhood efforts



CANS devotes considerable energy to practical

research. In response to questions raised by

community organizations about neighborhood crime,

CANS pioneered computerized crime mapping with area

universities and the police department. CANS is

regularly called on to explain the workings of the

department and to help groups strategize about drug

markets or other crime problems.



From time to time, CANS also conducts indepth

studies of issues on which it intends to take

action. An example is a recent study of relations

between young people and the police. Stories

circulating in the neighborhoods of police

mistreatment of young people were the impetus for

the study; CANS wanted to raise the question as a

policy issue and change the nature of those

relations.



Nearly 1,000 public high school students were asked

about their experience with the police. Young

people participated in designing the questionnaire.

They discussed the findings, critiqued drafts of

the report, and helped to formulate the

recommendations. Making the findings and the

problems public became the first step in an effort,

still under way, to improve relations between

Chicago youths and police.[4]



Promoting the "community" in community policing



Not even a perfect partnership between the

community and the police can take the place of

strong incentives to lawful behavior jobs,

fairness, healthy families and communities, and

hope for the future. Community policing is,

however, the most promising neighborhood-level

program on the horizon, and it is an essential

component of any serious, comprehensive strategy to

make America safer.



In 1980 Chicago was one of nine Urban Crime

Prevention Programs funded by the Federal

Government. It is probably the only survivor of

that important but short-lived venture. Fifteen

years of hard work and organizing were required to

set the stage in Chicago for the public-private

partnership envisioned then. It will probably take

10 years to establish collaboration as the norm in

community-police relations. And it will not happen

at all unless the active, informed, and organized

community continues to grow and its understanding

deepen.



The promise of 100,000 more police is not enough to

make neighborhoods safer. Independent, community-

based organizations and coalitions must be

supported so that the struggle in neighborhoods can

be sustained. Residents must be trained, educated,

and organized so they can come up with their own

answers and do their part. The people in America's

troubled and at-risk neighborhoods need more than

more police. They need a national commitment and

investment in the community side of community

policing.



Notes



[1] In addition to funding from the city of Chicago,

the State of Illinois, and AmeriCorps, CANS

receives funding from a variety of Chicago

foundations, including the John D. and Catherine T.

MacArthur Foundation, the Chicago Community Trust,

the Wieboldt Foundation, the Woods Fund of Chicago,

the Polk Brothers Foundation, the Lloyd A. Fry

Foundation, and the Beldler Charitable Trust.



[2] The report, Police Service in Chicago: 911,

Dispatch Policy and Neighborhood-Oriented

Alternatives, was based on information from the

Chicago Police Department, studies funded by the

National Institute of Justice, and many

conversations with criminal justice professionals

around the country.



[3] See Community Policing in Chicago: Year Two,

Research Preview, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department

of Justice, National Institute of Justice, October

1995. The evaluation was supported by the Illinois

Criminal Justice Information Authority, the

National Institute of Justice, and the John D. and

Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. A copy of a

Research in Progress presentation given by Dr.

Skogan, "Community Policing in Chicago: Fact or

Fiction?," is available on videotape for $19 from

the National Criminal Justice Reference Service

(800-851-3420); ask for NCJ 153273.



[4] Friedman, Warren, and Marsha Hott, Young People

and the Police: Respect, Fear and the Future of

Community Policing in Chicago, Chicago: Chicago

Alliance for Neighborhood Safety, 1995.

----------------------

Warren Friedman is executive director of the

Chicago Alliance for Neighborhood Safety (CANS).



------------------------------ 



## Neighborhood Revitalization: Lessons from

Savannah and Baltimore ##



by David M. Kennedy



Among the neighborhood focused, comprehensive crime

control and revitalization strategies emerging

nationwide are those now under way in Savannah and

Baltimore. Both cities have developed programs that

combine law enforcement, economic development,

human services, and community organizing in

attempts to effect major improvements in public

safety and the quality of community life. The

Showcase Savannah program, begun in 1987, and

Baltimore's Sandtown program, begun in 1990, have

not been formally evaluated; thus, whether their

approach works remains an open question. (See

"Results.") 



------------------------------



Results



Neither project is complete nor has been evaluated.

In Savannah, statistics and local accounts reveal

mixed crime control results. By the end of 1990,

for instance, the 14 identified drug hot spots in

one Showcase neighborhood had been cut to 3. In the

mostly owner-occupied neighborhood of one activist,

things are, he says, "75 percent better." Residents

no longer worry much about robbery and burglary, he

says, and the drug problem is still an issue but

has vastly improved.



In some of the more transient areas of the first

two Showcase neighborhoods, things are not as good.

"They sell drugs on the corner and out of two

houses on my block," said one active resident.

Another, the head of his block organization,

suffers from nighttime dealing a few streets over

and a brothel across the street. He and his

neighbors watch, jot down license numbers, and call

the police, but matters are not improving. It is

clear, however, that project participants value the

connection it gives them with police and other city

officials.



Sandtown, for its part, no longer displays the

signs of a deeply troubled area. Many buildings are

empty, but most are secured; most streets are

trash-free; street corners are largely free of

threatening groups. In many places there are

visible sparks of new spirit: There are stretches

of new and newly rehabilitated homes as well as

flower gardens and window boxes.



It is still a tough neighborhood, though, with

certain streets known for late-night street drug

problems. At one community meeting, a woman brought

bullets that had ricocheted into her yard after a

shootout next door. Overall, however, both

residents and police agree that things are better.

For what it's worth, a simple before-and-after look

at statistics bears them out: Violent victimization

fell 15.6 percent between 1992 and 1993. Residents

also cite key victories like the reclamation of the

neighborhood's only large open recreation space

from drug dealers.



------------------------------



It is still possible, though, to address issues of

major interest in considering the prospects for

comprehensive community strategies. Do these

programs, on their face, make sense? Can they in

fact be designed and implemented? How does the

oft-endorsed concept of "empowerment" of

communities play out in practice? Do the two

programs converge in any operational or

administrative innovations?



The logic of the approach



The crisis that sparked the Showcase Savannah

program was the same one that struck many other

eastern seaboard cities about the same time: crack

cocaine. Fear and disorder spread rapidly in

Savannah's poor black neighborhoods. The city's

long-time manager was convinced that an effective

response would need not only to hone the city's

police strategy but also to take on the whole range

of economic and social issues that likely lay

behind the neighborhoods' vulnerability to crack

use and other crimes--poor school performance,

high unemployment, low levels of job skills, a high

percentage of single-parent families, environmental

issues such as trash and abandoned buildings, and

substandard housing. The Showcase program, kicked

off by city-led community organizing, commenced in

2 of the hardest-hit neighborhoods and expanded to

20 by 1994.



The idea for the Sandtown project came from

Baltimore's mayor, Kurt Schmoke, and The Enterprise

Foundation, a nonprofit housing organization

founded by the late developer James Rouse. They

sought an approach that faced squarely all the

disparate and depressing pieces of conventional

wisdom about troubled minority neighborhoods like

Sandtown. If businesses would not locate there

because crime was high, there should be plans to

deal with crime. If people could not get jobs

because they were poorly educated, there should be

plans to improve the schools. If kids refused to go

to school, and parents did not make them go, there

should be plans to prevent truancy and train

parents. If parents could not cope because they

were drug addicted and ill, then there should be

plans to provide treatment and improve health care.

If the neighborhood was unattractive, there should

be plans to beautify it. And the city, Enterprise,

and Sandtown residents should do all this together.

In mid-May 1990 the mayor launched Community

Building in Partnership (as the project was

formally known) with a large community meeting.



The logic of this approach is, at least on the

surface, quite compelling. Showcase and Sandtown

are based on the simple but profound premise that,

in at least some troubled neighborhoods, crime both

fosters and is fostered by a variety of adverse

conditions and systems. This frame shifts the focus

of revitalization from arguments about what caused

the problem-"root causes" factors vs. crime--to

the potential of interventions to correct the

problem. It gives what is probably justified weight

to police and criminal justice strategies as

important tools to be deployed in revitalization.



The need for direction



Both cities designed and implemented formal,

comprehensive, strategic plans. The initial

Showcase plans were more limited than the city

manager had hoped: In the "visioning" meetings with

residents that he used to launch the planning

process, residents focused on immediate issues of

drug activity and other crime and on infrastructure

issues like adequate streetlights and abandoned

buildings. He could think of no way to mobilize

them around what he saw as more deeply rooted

issues like education and employment.



Thus, through the late 1980s and into the 1990s,

Showcase Savannah emphasized capital improvements,

better sanitation and code enforcement, and public

safety. The city set formal standards for

streetlighting and garbage pickup, mobilized

residents to audit properties for code compliance,

and identified and disrupted crack-dealing

locations. Then, in the early 1990s, the manager

and assistant city manager began trying, on a

parallel track, to integrate health, substance

abuse, job training, and other services through

Family Services Centers located in the neediest

Showcase neighborhoods.



In Sandtown the situation was similar, with

residents most concerned about immediate crime and

infrastructure issues. The mayor and Enterprise

officials insisted on a broader vision, but the

problem was how to create a strategy that reflected

broader concerns and that also came out of, and

would win the support of, the community. The city's

answer was to hire nine "community advocates" --

local residents who were assigned issues like

public safety and education--to go door-to-door,

talk to people, and help craft a plan that

satisfied everyone.



"People thought that the crime and safety problem

could be resolved merely by calling the police,"

said the project's public safety advocate. In fact,

the planning process alone took more than a year,

but the result laid out a web of mutually

reinforcing steps in physical development, public

safety, community and human services, education,

and community economic development.



The experiences of both cities are instructive with

regard to the broad current consensus that

revitalization must proceed through community

empowerment. If social, education, and economic

matters with less immediate salience to residents

are central to the long-term success of

revitalization, then empowerment cannot be simply a

transfer of power or instruction in how to attain

felt community ends. It must also involve teaching

communities to understand and act on all their

interests. Baltimore's experience also suggests it

is possible--in part by using issues like crime,

housing, and sanitation as springboards--to

interest people in less immediate issues.



Mobilizing communities



Both cities have demonstrated a capacity to

organize their communities and work with them to

achieve common ends. It appears, however, that

those most actively involved, and those who

contribute the most as partners in revitalization,

are primarily older and more established residents.

In both cities it has been quite difficult to reach

renters, young people, and the socially and legally

marginal. How much of an impediment to success this

is remains an unanswered question.



"Municipal beat officers." Both Showcase Savannah

and Sandtown invented, independently of one

another, a new role that might be called the

"municipal beat officer." The role combines in one

person the functions of community organizer,

problem solver, and street-level government

liaison. During a recent day, a city-employed

Savannah "neighborhood service coordinator" (as

they are called) worked in one neighborhood to make

sure a row of vacant houses just rid of drug

dealers was still secure, then she talked with a

resident about a problem with a neighbor. In a

second neighborhood she explored using drainage

cuts to slow down speeding traffic. In the evening,

she took notes at a community meeting in a third

neighborhood. Sandtown's community advocates do

similar work.



These "municipal beat officers" may substantially

change the character of community-municipal

partnerships and the process by which they are

formed. The traditional view is that community

organizations are an important end in themselves

and an essential tool for addressing problems. Much

energy is expended in creating and sustaining them.

By contrast, in the Showcase Savannah and Sandtown

neighborhoods, while a great deal is still done

through neighborhood organizations, the outreach

workers create a capacity for customizing responses

to neighborhood needs, deployments of municipal

services, and partnerships with residents to

address particular problems. The result is an

immediate, fluid, and readily deployed community

problem-solving capability.



Repairing "broken windows." The attention of the

Showcase and Sandtown strategies to such issues as

housing, sanitation, and physical disorder

represents a sophisticated approach to addressing

such "broken windows" concerns as poor lighting,

abandoned buildings, and trash. The results are

immediately visible in both cities.



Moreover, the strategic framework of both projects

has led to municipal action that is more carefully

crafted and more consciously tied to crime

prevention. In Savannah, for instance, after a

recent auction of abandoned houses to low-income

homeowners, the city manager's office prepared what

might be considered a "broken windows plan" for

each house: an audit of work that should be done by

the city near each house to complement the

restoration undertaken by the new owners.



Community policing a critical element. The

experience of both cities underscores the

importance of addressing crime, fear, drugs, and

public safety. Revitalization models that simply

concentrate on housing and physical infrastructure

resources can only go so far. Even with all both

cities have done in those respects and even given

the strategic "broken windows" application of much

of the investment, the two communities are still

struggling to attain a level of security acceptable

to their residents.



Both projects are incorporating community policing.

It is primarily the operational demands of the

revitalization strategy that have drawn the police

into community policing. As a result, in both

cities the police play more of an "equal among

equals" role than the "first among equals" position

more typically seen.



Progress on long-term social and economic issues



Work on public safety, infrastructure, and

sanitation is further along in both cities than is

strategic attention to social, health, education,

and economic issues. Neither city is entirely clear

on how to advance on these fronts. In this they are

not alone. They reflect the apparent lack of a

strong sense of how to improve the social and

economic face of troubled communities or how to tie

strategies on these fronts to public safety

strategies. In these areas the comprehensive

community approach least resembles a well-defined,

generalizable "technology."



Showcase Savannah and Sandtown do suggest some

promising prospects. Each has a long-term and a

short-term strategy, with clusters of investments

in each. First, with an eye to fundamental change,

both are investing in long-term child development,

family support, educational improvement, and

economic development. Many of these measures appear

to be grounded in "root causes" thinking; Sandtown,

for instance, is investing heavily in Healthy

Start. The steps being taken, however, are more

focused, integrated, and problem oriented than

usual. Sandtown links a variety of measures to make

its young people "school ready," to improve the

schools, to address issues like street safety that

may keep young people from attending school, to

deal with truancy and poor school performance, and

to use local action on all these fronts to build

capacity and organization in the community.



This approach is significantly different from the

more usual citywide and agency-specific plans to

address structural problems. It has the advantage

of being comprehensive, inclusive, and of

addressing chronic problems (like youth violence)

by handling acute ones (like gang conflicts near

schools). Its probable disadvantage is not showing

significant results for some time, requiring heavy

institutional lifting, and using a neighborhood

focus that is perhaps not appropriate to a mobile

population. And, as always, economic development is

especially difficult.



Second, with an eye to immediate improvements, both

projects incorporate social services and economic

development in a focused, "problem-solving"

approach based on the needs of individuals,

families, blocks, and neighborhoods. Sandtown uses

regular meetings of community outreach workers to

identify and address problems as they arise. A

parent's addiction, for example, may have

repercussions in child welfare, employment, public

safety, and housing; the project's structure allows

those issues to be recognized rapidly and addressed

in a coordinated fashion. In one example that a

Showcase Savannah official is particularly fond of,

one neighborhood has launched a program using local

kids to cut grass and collect trash in the area's

numerous vacant lots: It saves the city money,

provides work, and offers the struggling community

a much needed win.



Sandtown and Showcase: laboratories



These projects are early steps toward linking

public safety and "root causes" ideas and practices

in attempts to improve the quality of life in

deeply troubled neighborhoods. They have made

important progress in crime control, fear

reduction, physical improvement, social service

delivery, municipal/public partnerships, and the

creation of a municipal problem-solving structure.

They appear to confirm common intuitions about the

significance of both public safety and social and

economic welfare in revitalizing neighborhoods.

They have clearly done some good. It remains to be

seen whether the strategies will be sustainable and

how successful they will be. But as laboratories

for testing many of the most ambitious ideas for

addressing crime, fear, and decline, they will

continue to warrant close examination.

------------------

David M. Kennedy, Ph.D., is a professor in the

Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management

at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of

Government.



--------------------------------------------------



## Crime Prevention Through Neighborhood

Revitalization: Does Practice Reflect Theory? ##



by Deborah Lamm Weisel and Adele Harrell



The neighborhood of Merrill in Beloit, Wisconsin,

could be called a typical American community. An

urban area bounded by major thoroughfares, it is

characterized by single family homes some rental

properties, others owner occupied. It is racially

mixed: About 55 percent of its 3,500 residents are

white and 45 percent are African American. The

average household income in Merrill is about

$15,000. The population is young--more than one-

third (36 percent) of all residents are under age

18.



A familiar pattern of urban decay



Merrill is also typical in having experienced the

physical decay and deteriorating social conditions

that afflict so many urban areas in this country.

Once a solid working-class community, by the late

1970s Merrill became plagued by problems related to

drugs and gang activity, a high out-of-wedlock

pregnancy rate, and high unemployment. Young people

had few activities to occupy their leisure time,

and residents' fear of being victimized by crime

was increasing.



In this all-too-common story, areas once home to

stable families, manifesting the vibrant spirit of

community associated with the traditional American

neighborhood, enter a downward spiral of decay

typified by declining housing stock, the frequent

abandonment of dwellings, or a proliferation of

properties allowed by absentee landlords to

deteriorate and become overgrown with weeds. These

neighborhoods gradually begin to show other signs

of neglect, such as trash and litter, abandoned

cars, and gang graffiti defacing walls.



Most conspicuous in such communities is the absence

of normal neighborhood activity: There are no

children on the playgrounds and no older people

sitting on their porches. Instead, seemingly

ubiquitous groups of young men congregate idly on

street corners. Taken together, these components

too often constitute the visible indicators of

rising crime and fear.



Arresting decay



Although decline began to become entrenched in

Merrill, the citizens of Beloit did not sit idly

by. They organized to reverse the situation,

creating Neighborhood Housing Services (NHS), an

organization funded by a community development

block grant. Founded in 1979, NHS has two primary

missions: to reduce and prevent crime, and to

increase homeownership and improve the exteriors of

dwellings. Improved appearances hopefully would

motivate more people to buy homes in the area.



As its name suggests, housing is a major focus of

NHS, but the organizers also built into the program

a collaborative component consisting of several

community partners. Among them are correctional

programs, a youth organization (Beloit Positive

Youth Development), the Merrill community center,

the local health clinic, the area mental health

agency, various city agencies (such as the

community development office and the office

responsible for municipal codes and compliance),

and the area council on substance abuse.



Beloit's approach--mobilizing a broad community

coalition to reduce crime through neighborhood

revitalization--is not uncommon. Across the

country, attention is increasingly being paid to

reversing the now familiar pattern of urban decay

and the crime that often accompanies it by

enlisting the resources of practitioner

organizations such as nonprofits, municipal

agencies, and community- and church-based groups.[1]



Linking theory and practice



Concurrently, academic and other research

institutions have invested considerable efforts to

document the nature and causes of urban decline,

the patterns in which it is manifested, its human

consequences, and the factors related to success.

When communities like Beloit organize to reduce

crime and revitalize neighborhoods, they are

guided, explicitly or implicitly, by the theories

advanced in these research studies. Finding out

which theories underlie and explain successful

practice was the goal of a study conducted by the

Police Executive Research Forum and The Urban

Institute.



Using the findings of these studies and examining

hundreds of programs aimed at crime reduction and

revitalization, the researchers developed a

typology or set of characteristics that define

effective strategies. (See "Components of

Successful Strategies: The Typology.") The typology

can be used to guide development of subsequent

neighborhood-based crime prevention programs.

Merrill typifies the conjuncture of theory and

practice; it demonstrates how activities at the

community level reflect concepts based on research

and the practices of other communities that have

been effective in reducing crime.



------------------------------



Components of Successful Strategies: The Typology



The researchers examined hundreds of programs in

specific neighborhoods that focused on preventing

crime and reversing deterioration. The programs

were nominated by experts as models of successful

neighborhood revitalization. The communities

selected had to be able to document the primary

strategies they used and to explain the rationale

for selecting them.



The researchers reviewed relevant studies to define

attributes and made refinements on the basis of

information from the programs. They used both

sources to develop a typology or set of attributes

characteristic of successful community strategies.



The typology[2] consists of two major categories: (1)

strategies based on crime prevention through

environmental design ("CPTED") and active defense

of neighborhood spaces, and (2) those approaches

involving development of the commitment and

capacity of neighborhood residents to act

collectively to prevent crime. Within each category

are a number of more specific strategies:



CPTED/Neighborhood       Collective Action

Defense



Physical improvement     Community investment and  

                                         economic development Situation management     Investment in human

capital 



Increased active         Community organization

               surveillance       



------------------------------



The elements of this typology, which groups

strategies into two basic categories, are

elaborated in the following sections. Strategies

used in Beloit are highlighted.



CPTED/neighborhood defense strategies



Physical improvements. Generally, two reasons are

advanced for physical improvements, which are basic

to most revitalization programs. First, they are a

way to reduce or remove visual cues that indicate

crime is tolerated and that contribute to fear.

Second, they can reduce the availability of spaces

perceived by offenders as conducive to criminal

activity or as poorly defended by legitimate users.

Efforts to improve the physical environment

include:



o Removing litter and trash from streets, parks,

and other public places as well as around

residences removing graffiti and abandoned

automobiles.



o Painting murals, trimming shrubberies and trees,

and adding plants to increase green space.



o Condemning residences and other buildings, when

rehabilitation is not practical, by enforcing

building or health codes and nuisance abatement

ordinances or by taking title through asset

forfeiture laws.



o Decreasing density by limiting occupancy, capping

construction of multifamily units, restricting

conversion of single-family homes to multifamily

units, or demolishing buildings to create open

spaces.



o Obtaining historical designation to preserve

dwellings or increase resources for the often

costly maintenance of older houses that contribute

to a sense of place.



Situation management. Often used in conjunction

with physical improvements, situation management is

conceptually related to "routine activities

theory," which holds that crime can be prevented by

modifying or manipulating the social or physical

environment to increase the odds that an offender

will be observed or apprehended. Often, potential

crime targets are identified and changes are made

to reduce their vulnerability through target

hardening.



Variations include activities that regulate

behavior and may involve changing pedestrian or

vehicular traffic patterns, placing desirable

shoplifting targets near checkout counters, or

having windows face back alleys or other sites of

potential illegal activities. Examples of situation

management, all of which were adopted in Beloit,

include the following:



o Regulating parking and traffic flow with signs or

barriers placed in specific sites to subject

prospective offenders to greater risk of being

observed and apprehended.



o Controlling access to schools and other

buildings, parks, public housing, or other

potential "trouble spots" through use of regulated

entry.



o Monitoring the ways people gather, especially in

public places, by enforcing loitering, trespassing,

and public drinking laws.



o Limiting the hours or modifying the operations of

convenience stores, liquor stores, or other

businesses, as well as schools.



o Securing buildings, homes, and public spaces by

installing or repairing windows and doors;

installing bars, locks, or better hardware;

replacing wooden doors with metal doors; and

increasing and improving lighting.



o Increasing informal police monitoring of specific

activities, adding more police personnel, and

stepping up enforcement of municipal codes (such as

those for traffic or parking).



Increased active surveillance. This tactic has the

same rationale as situation management, but it is

more proactive. In situation management,

surveillance is often informal or passive, based on

manipulating the routine use of space and time;

increased active surveillance involves cultivating

neighborhood defenders who serve as crime

detectors. Typical examples are as follows:



o Creating citizens' activities, such as

establishing Neighborhood Watch or similar groups,

training residents for citizen patrols, and setting

up tiplines and hotlines to report suspicious or

criminal activity.



o Training private and public landlords to use

leases to control tenants' behavior. Leases can be

a civil law tool for eviction based on failure to

comply with regulations against making noise,

disturbing other tenants, and conducting criminal

activity.



o Monitoring the activities of security guards and

local law enforcement personnel.



o Placing security cameras in elevators, parking

lots, and other sites.



Developing citizen commitment and capacity



Community organization. This strategy involves

building community capacity by expanding social

networks and institutions that enable residents to

act collectively to protect the well-being of their

neighborhood. Community organizing increases

cohesion by creating a sense of shared goals and

norms, overcoming the social disorganization that

may contribute to neighborhood decline, and

developing resources for the neighborhood.

Strategies include:



o Planning--to identify problems to address and

solutions to adopt--through the establishment of

residents' organizations and councils, parent

groups, and crime prevention councils.



o Organizing such events as marches, fundraisers,

rallies, and other special activities that bring

residents together, rebuild community spirit, and

promote friendships that bond neighbors as they

work toward specific goals.



Community investment and economic development.

These activities are designed to expand economic

and social opportunities for residents and local

businessowners. They enable residents to improve

their standard of living by increasing access to

legitimate jobs as well as facilitating property

ownership. These activities include:



o Attracting business and economic development

through tax credits, concessions on water and sewer

costs, and other government-provided incentives.



o Providing homeownership opportunities to

low-income residents to increase their investment

in and commitment to the community.



o Establishing jobs programs and educational

improvement policies in the schools.



Investments in human capital. These investments are

designed to provide residents with skills and

resources to increase their economic and social

well-being. In doing so, they reduce the economic

motivation to commit crime and increase people's

expectations of labor market access. Typical

approaches include:



o Recreational opportunities to deter young people

from crime.



o Mentoring and similar programs to enhance at-risk

youths' self-esteem.



o Job training to improve work skills.



o Child care services and parenting education,

particularly for young parents.



o Counseling and resources for pregnancy prevention

(especially for teenagers) and counseling for at-

risk youths and their families.



o Health care services, including treatment for

alcohol, drug, and mental health problems.



Program development: selecting and combining

strategies



Program planners do not arbitrarily adopt an

aggregate of unrelated activities. Instead, they

construct programs on the basis of their

perceptions, stated or unstated, of the links among

elements contributing to neighborhood decline. In

Beloit's NHS in the Merrill community, the two

primary missions--homeownership and crime

prevention--are viewed as related. Homeowners are

considered the "eyes and ears" of the neighborhood

because they have an investment, which they are

willing to protect through crime prevention. This

is the reason why the program contains several

components that encourage homeownership (an example

of "community investment and economic

development"). (See "Beloit's Neighborhood Housing

Services Promotes Homeownership.")



------------------------------



Beloit's Neighborhood Housing Services Promotes

Homeownership



Among the several components of Beloit's

revitalization program that encourage

homeownership, the most important is the NHS

Homebuyers Club. It focuses on the following:



o Reducing barriers that may restrict access to

ownership (such as lack of resources for a

downpayment).



o Providing guidance about selecting a home,

helping prospective buyers decide where to live,

and identifying the characteristics of desirable

and less desirable neighborhoods (such as age of

dwellings and amount of living space).



o Teaching homebuying skills.



o Holding workshops on lending, budgeting, and

financial goal setting.



o Conducting real estate field trips to prepare for

homebuying.



NHS also provides resources for rehabilitating both

houses and rental properties through a loan program

and offers rehabilitation counseling.



------------------------------



Organizations rarely use a single approach. In

addition to focusing on housing, NHS functions as a

social services referral center and engages in such

activities as publishing a neighborhood newsletter

and sponsoring workshops on home landscaping and

energy conservation. As previously noted, it serves

as a catalyst for collaborative efforts with other

organizations. The citizens of Merrill also adopted

a number of situation management strategies:

lobbying their city council and police department

to institute a foot patrol, and again lobbying the

council to close a neighborhood tavern where

shootings had occurred.



Research confirms that a single approach may not be

as effective in achieving or sustaining the level

of success as one that incorporates multiple,

comprehensive strategies.[3] In Beloit, NHS developed

a comprehensive approach by responding to problems

and building on resources unique to Merrill. Since

the organization is committed to building on

"community capital," the Merrill approach was to

adopt programs on the basis of community interests

and concerns and on citizens' willingness to act.

Other communities, with different needs and

resources, will tailor their own solutions.



Practice reflects theory



The strategies used by organizations ranging from

churches and community groups to municipal agencies

and nonprofits to fight neighborhood crime and

deterioration reflect the theoretical categories

used in research on crime prevention. In

implementing these strategies, program

administrators rarely refer to the concepts of

social disorganization, economic deprivation,

subcultural norms, weaknesses in the defensibility

to place, and the social ecology of urban areas

that have been identified by researchers.[4]



Nevertheless, program administrators integrate

these core concepts into their programs, tailoring

them to fit specific community conditions. This is

a considerable accomplishment, especially since

they do so while facing the challenges of seeking

funding and other assistance and conforming to the

constraints often imposed on their programs by

sponsoring organizations.



Theory and practice can inform each other.

Researchers and program planners can both benefit

from closer links between theory and practice.

Planners may be more effective if they are

conscious of the relationship of their strategies

to theories of crime prevention and if they are

familiar with research documenting successful

interventions. At the same time, researchers need

to test more explicitly the theories of crime

control implicitly reflected in programs aimed at

crime prevention and neighborhood revitalization.

They then need to examine whether the theories

reflect successful practice and to modify them.

Moreover, these links and explanations should be

framed in an understanding of the specific contexts

of the neighborhoods where the programs are

implemented and of the participating organizations

that shape the choice of strategies.



Notes



[1] The situation in Merrill described here, and the

community response, reflects conditions that

existed when this study was conducted and that may

have changed since then.



[2] Other crime prevention classification schemes

have been suggested by, for example, Aaron

Podolefsky and Fredric Dubow in Strategies for

Community Crime Prevention: Collective Responses to

Crime in Urban America, Springfield, IL: Charles C.

Thomas, 1981; and in Situation Crime Prevention:

Successful Case Studies, ed. Ronald V. Clarke, New

York: Harrow and Heston, 1992.



[3] Podolefsky and Dubow, Strategies for Community

Crime Prevention; and Cook, Royer F., and Janice A.

Roehl, Preventing Crime and Arson: A Review of

Community-Based Strategies, Reston, VA: Institute

for Social Analysis, 1983.



[4] The categorization of theories related to crime

and neighborhood decay is presented in detail in

Harrell, Adele, and Caterina Gouvis, Predicting

Neighborhood Risk of Crime, Report to the National

Institute of Justice, Washington, D.C.: The Urban

Institute, 1994.

------------------------

Deborah Lamm Weisel is senior research associate

with the Police Executive Research Forum; Adele

Harrell, Ph.D., is director of the Program on Law

and Behavior at The Urban Institute. The research

for their study was supported by NIJ grant 91-IJ-

CX-K016.



------------------------------ 



## The Federal Role in Revitalizing Communities

and Preventing and Controlling Crime and

Violence ##



by Catherine Conly and Daniel McGillis



After years of being on the defensive against 

escalating crime and violence, communities across

the country have begun to take the offensive,

developing ambitious, multifaceted strategies to

reclaim and revitalize their neighborhoods. The

Federal Government has been encouraging and

supporting such cooperation through considerable

financial and technical assistance, with the hope

that communities will eventually be able to sustain

their progress through local public and private

resources.



Federal initiatives to stimulate community-based

planning and action



In recent years the U.S. Department of Justice has

made a significant investment in community-based 

efforts to prevent and control crime. In addition,

the U.S. Departments of Education, Health and Human

Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Labor,

as well as the Corporation for National Service,

have made substantial contributions to community

planning and program development. (See "Selected

Federally Sponsored Community-Based Initiatives.")

Although not necessarily focused on crime

prevention and control, programs funded by these

other agencies often aim to ameliorate conditions

that place community residents at risk for crime

and violence.



------------------------------



Selected Federally Sponsored Community-Based

Initiatives[1]



U.S. Department of Justice



- Community Policing Programs

- Project PACT (Pulling America's Communities

Together)

- Operation Weed and Seed

- Comprehensive Communities Program

- SafeFutures: Partnerships to Reduce Youth Violence

and Delinquency



U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development



- Empowerment Zone/Enterprise Community Program

- Family Investment Centers

- Public Housing Drug Elimination Program



U.S. Department of Health and Human Services



- Community Partnership Demonstration Program

- Community Demonstration Grants

- Family Preservation and Support Program

- Youth Gang Drug Prevention Program

- Community-Based Family Resource Program



U.S. Department of Education



- Safe and Drug-Free Schools Program

- Community Schools Youth Services and Supervision

Grant Program



U.S. Department of Labor



- Youth Fair Chance Program

- Job Corps Program



Corporation for National Service



- AmeriCorps

- National Civilian Community Corps

- AmeriCorps VISTA Program



------------------------------



Efforts in specific neighborhoods



A number of federally sponsored programs, such as

those described below, seek to provide intensive 

assistance to relatively small geographic areas,

such as neighborhoods or housing developments.



Cleveland's RAPP House. The Justice Department's

Office of Community Oriented Policing Services is

sponsoring the Residential Area Policing Program

(RAPP) in Cleveland to provide targeted

neighborhoods with intensive community policing and

related services. In early 1995 the Cleveland

Police Department converted a dwelling into a RAPP

House in a neighborhood consisting of approximately

180 mostly multifamily homes. Nine police officers

staffed the RAPP House around the clock (three

officers per shift) for a 3-month period, after

which the local community association planned to

maintain many RAPP House activities in conjunction

with the local police district. Two additional RAPP

Houses were to be put in operation for 3 months

each in other troubled neighborhoods in Cleveland

later in the year.



After conducting a survey among neighborhood

residents to find out their views of local problems

and potential remedies, the police worked with

other city agencies and the community to crack down

on crime in the neighborhood and to clean up and

revitalize the area. For example, the police

conducted a sweep of the area's many drug dealers

and had more than 40 junked cars on the streets

towed away. The city's housing department

demolished the abandoned house next door to the

RAPP House. The resulting vacant lot was used as a

play area by youths visiting the RAPP House, which

has served as a safe haven for local youths--for

afterschool activities or just socializing with

each other and the RAPP House officers. The RAPP

House also is used for community meetings,

parenting classes, and police auxiliary members'

gatherings.



Weed and Seed program. The Weed and Seed program,

sponsored by the Department of Justice in 36 cities

across the country, involves a concerted effort

both to arrest and prosecute offenders (weeding)

and to develop services--such as safe havens for

youths and job training programs--to reduce risk

factors associated with crime (seeding).



The Seattle Weed and Seed program, for example,

targets the city's Central District, a community

with approximately 14,000 residents which, in turn,

comprises 8 neighborhoods, each roughly the size of

the Cleveland RAPP House target area. Weeding by

the Seattle Police Department has included

intensive sweeps of drug dealers, enhanced

community policing, and measures to target police

resources on housing projects and other troubled

portions of the community. Grants for seeding,

awarded by a community advisory council, have

supported 14 activities, including afterschool

programs sponsored by the Urban League, the YMCA,

and Girls, Inc.; job training by local

organizations; and community revitalization and

business development programs operated by local

community development corporations.



Initial results on the impact of the Seattle Weed

and Seed program are promising. An extensive survey

found dramatic improvements perceived by residents

in the Weed and Seed target area in police

responsiveness to community concerns, police

effectiveness in keeping order, satisfaction with

city services, willingness to get involved in the

community, and perceived safety on the streets.

Residents of a comparison area did not identify

these changes.[2]



Empowerment Zone/Enterprise Community program. The

Empowerment Zone/Enterprise Community (EZ/EC)

program, sponsored by the Department of Housing and

Urban Development (HUD), required that grant

applicants prepare comprehensive strategic plans.

These plans emphasized economic development in

targeted distressed areas (including tax incentives

for businesses that located in them) and delivery

of social services. In December 1994 HUD awarded 

Empowerment Zone grants to six urban areas ($100

million each) and three rural areas ($40 million

each). In addition, HUD designated 95 localities as

Enterprise Communities; they pursued community

development goals similar to those of the

Empowerment Zone grantees but received only $3

million each. Another four communities received 

$25 million each, and two others--Los Angeles and

Cleveland--were designated as supplemental

Empowerment Zones and received $125 and $90

million, respectively.



Initiatives focused on entire cities and

metropolitan areas



In contrast to these programs, some Federal

initiatives have focused on larger jurisdictions. A

prominent example is Project PACT (Pulling

America's Communities Together), funded in two

metropolitan areas (Atlanta and Denver), one city

(Washington, D.C.), and an entire State (Nebraska).

These demonstration jurisdictions may, in turn,

develop highly targeted antiviolence efforts in

specific neighborhoods. Project PACT organizing

committees in each demonstration site have brought

together a cross section of community members and

leaders from government and the private sector,

encouraging much needed coordination across local,

State, and Federal governmental initiatives,

nonprofit group and community organization

activities, and other programs operating in these

jurisdictions.



The PACT programs may over time develop the

capacity to serve as a valuable broker for

resources and cooperation in their jurisdictions.

The PACT initiative also seeks to coordinate

Federal resources in Washington, D.C., across the

many participating agencies (the Departments of

Education, Health and Human Services, Housing and

Urban Development, Justice, and Labor, and the

Office of National Drug Control Policy) to assist

in local planning and implementation.



Other Federal support roles



In addition to providing funding, Federal agencies

have played a number of other supportive roles.

(See "Joining Forces with the Private Sector: The

National Funding Collaborative on Violence

Prevention" for an example of public and private

cooperation.)



------------------------------



Joining Forces with the Private Sector: The

National Funding Collaborative on Violence

Prevention



Pooling and leveraging resources is the mission of

the National Funding Collaborative on Violence

Prevention--an unprecedented partnership of

communities, private foundations, corporate

grantmakers, Federal agencies, and other experts in

violence prevention. Established in 1994, the

Collaborative grew out of the philanthropic

sector's search for a way to work collectively on

the issue of violence. As its name suggests, the

Collaborative advocates a coordinated approach that

includes the widest possible participation,

engagement of diverse disciplines, and integration

of multiple perspectives.



Local and national orientation. The Collaborative

subscribes to the belief that the most powerful

force for countering violence is the power of the

community. For this reason, the need for local

communities to define their issues and devise

targeted solutions is paramount. But as the name

also suggests, the Collaborative's vision is also

national. It will serve as a national forum for

advocating violence prevention, raise and leverage

funds from national and local sources, provide

technical and evaluation assistance, and promote

information sharing among local initiatives.



The emphasis is on low-income communities, rural

and urban, with populations of at least 100,000. In

addition to the Department of Justice and the

Department of Housing and Urban Development, 15

foundations and corporations have joined the

Collaborative to date. Among others, they include

the American Express Company, the California

Wellness Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the

William C. Graustein Memorial Fund, and the Charles

Stewart Mott Foundation. In the 3-year period

ending in mid-1998, the Collaborative anticipates

that up to $15 million may be leveraged for

violence prevention.



Work under way. Community foundations in 12 sites

nationwide received support in April 1995 for a 15-

month period of planning, during which local

collaboratives were established to assess community

needs and resources and to develop comprehensive

goals. The sites are:



Flint, Michigan 

Knoxville, Tennessee

Minneapolis, Minnesota

New Haven, Connecticut

New Orleans, Louisiana

New York, New York

Oakland, California

Rockford, Illinois

San Antonio, Texas

Santa Barbara, California

Spartanburg, South Carolina 

Washington, D.C.



Local violence prevention strategies will be put

into operation on the basis of these goals during

the next 2-year implementation phase when national

support will be matched on a 2-to-1 basis by the

communities themselves. Depending on the site,

strategies will include cultivating youth

leadership, integrating government services,

effecting change in housing and law enforcement

policies, and preventing domestic violence.



The collaboratives directing the local initiatives

are interdisciplinary and multisectoral; in most

sites they encompass stakeholders in the faith,

business, public health, mental health, and law

enforcement communities. In several the local media

also are involved.



Next steps. A cross-site evaluation of the planning

and implementation phases will be conducted by the

COSMOS Corporation. In an ongoing process of

discovery, the Collaborative will disseminate

information about effective strategies. An

education campaign aimed at private funders will be

launched to increase their interest in supporting

violence prevention and to introduce them to

prevention strategies.



Knoxville--an example. The East Tennessee

Foundation's project, situated in and around

Knoxville, serves two primary sites: rural Cocke

County and one of Knoxville's inner-city

neighborhoods. The broader region served by the

foundation is marked by problems of poverty; the

city neighborhood site has high unemployment and

relatively low educational levels. As in many other

parts of the Nation, fear of crime heads the list

of problems cited by opinion surveys, and this

perception is backed by data on increases in crime,

particularly youth crime.



The initial focus of the project will be

development of strategies to prevent interpersonal

violence, with prototypes created for rural and

inner-city communities. The first step will be to

fund "listening projects" modeled after a process

in which someone from the community interviews and

gathers information from residents. All

stakeholders will be involved in the project, among

them families, youth groups, churches, social

service agencies, and law enforcement officials.

The strategy will emphasize development of social

competence, problem-solving skills, and a sense of

self and purpose among young people.



Further information may be obtained from the

National Funding Collaborative at 815 15th Street,

N.W., Suite 801, Washington, DC 20002 (phone 202-

393-7731; fax 202-393-4148).



------------------------------



Encouraging full-scale community involvement. As a

condition of funding, many Federal programs require

that communities assemble multidisciplinary

planning teams that combine various professional

disciplines (e.g., law enforcement, public health,

and housing) and include a mix of government and

private-sector representatives, community leaders,

and residents.



These teams assess community needs and resources,

develop program strategies, monitor implementation,

offer regular opportunities for communication with

residents, and seek additional sources of funding.

For example, the Project PACT planning team in

Denver designed and now oversees the area's

Comprehensive Communities program, an approach

funded by the Justice Department to provide

multifaceted responses to combat crime in 16

cities. PACT planners also have been instrumental

in recruiting local foundations to support other

community-based violence prevention and control

programs.



Providing incentives for colocation. To better

coordinate Federal initiatives, some Federal

funding opportunities assign priority to projects

that locate services in communities where Federal

programs already exist. For instance, the Office of

Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention has

specified that four of the six sites receiving

funding under its SafeFutures program (a

comprehensive effort to address risk and protective

factors affecting young people) must be Empowerment

Zones or Enterprise Communities. Moreover, through

funding mechanisms such as the Ounce of Prevention

program, the Department of Housing and Urban

Development has promised to give special

consideration to grant applications that propose

projects in EZ/EC sites.



Providing technical assistance. Federal sponsors

are providing community-based planners with 

information on planning and implementation

processes, program models, evaluation methodology,

and related topics. Ideally, Federal technical

assistance will help to create and bolster local

capacity. After participating in several federally

sponsored training workshops on community policing,

participants in Denver's Comprehensive Communities

program created a consortium of local experts to

provide training and technical assistance on that

topic to law enforcement agencies throughout the

metropolitan area.



Communicating information. The Partnerships Against

Violence Network (PAVNET) is a key example of

information exchange and communication. Developed

with funding from the Department of Justice's

Office of Justice Programs, under the leadership of

the National Institute of Justice and the

Department of Agriculture and with information

provided by more than 30 Federal clearinghouses,

PAVNET presents information on promising

anti-violence programs as well as on funding and

technical assistance resources. One of its

distinctive features is its availability through

the Internet.



In addition, several recent publications inform

communities about the array of Federal funding

opportunities related to the prevention and control

of crime and violence. In May 1995 the Office of

Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention

produced a Matrix of Community-Based Initiatives,

which summarizes major public and private

community-based crime prevention and economic

development initiatives nationwide. In September

1995 the President's Crime Prevention Council

released Promoting Responsibility: 50 Programs that

Help Communities Help Their Youth. It lists

important questions for community planners engaged

in designing crime prevention strategies and

describes 50 Federal crime prevention initiatives.



Conducting research and evaluation. In addition to

sponsoring evaluations of major federally sponsored

programs, Federal funding agencies are helping to

ensure that community-based planning and

implementation can access the most current research

information on community crime prevention and

control. For instance, Federal agencies have

supported materials development and technical

assistance for risk-focused prevention models, the

core components of Project PACT, the Comprehensive

Communities program, and the SafeFutures program.



Continuing challenges for Federal involvement



Since many of the programs presented here are being

carried out simultaneously in the same site, there

is a continuing need for: (1) coordination among

Federal agencies to avoid duplication and to ensure

that gaps in services are filled cost-effectively,

(2) evaluation to sharpen understanding of specific

program contributions, and (3) flexibility in the

Federal response to local concerns.



Coordinating across Federal agencies. Communication

among Federal agencies currently engaged in

community development and crime prevention and

control is being addressed in a number of different

forums, although much remains to be accomplished.

The President's Crime Prevention Council, for

example, was created by Congress in 1994 to

coordinate Federal crime prevention programs and to

encourage community-based crime prevention. It is

chaired by Vice President Gore and includes

high-ranking officials from a number of Federal

agencies.



Coordination also is occurring at the agency level.

For instance, the Department of Justice formed a

Community-Based Initiatives Working Group to

integrate information on departmental programs.

Similarly, individual Federal programs are being

coordinated on a multiagency basis. For example,

Project PACT has been supported by an

Interdepartmental Working Group consisting of

representatives from the Departments of Justice,

Housing and Urban Development, Labor, Health and

Human Services, and Education, and the Office of

National Drug Control Policy. Finally, multilayered

coordination is also a key feature at the site

level. Regional boards help coordinate the

activities of several EZ/EC sites, while local

EZ/EC boards develop and manage community-level 

activities.



Developing benchmarks for evaluating the Federal

role. It is important to study these

community-based strategies so they can be refined

over time. The development of measurable benchmarks

could be helpful for assessing progress in such

areas as: (1) Federal interagency coordination, (2)

coordination between Federal agencies and local

agencies and organizations, (3) the establishment of

practical, multifaceted plans for combating crime,

(4) the implementation of such plans, and (5) the

extent to which the processes and effects of

implementation are objectively evaluated.



Responding flexibly to community needs.

Community-based organizations often express concern

that the Federal Government's categorical funding

streams and complex regulations impede the

development of many important community 

ventures. Efforts are under way to make Federal

approaches less directive and more flexible. EZ/EC

approaches, for example, include tax incentives,

flexible block grants, waivers and flexibility with

existing Federal resources, and priority

consideration for discretionary funding.



Conclusion



The Federal initiatives discussed here have

considerable potential to help American communities

combat crime and violence. As might be expected,

programs centered on relatively small areas can

provide intensive law enforcement and related

services for the areas, but it may be difficult for

them to affect the overall array of referral

services available to needy individuals. At the

other extreme, city or metro-wide programs can

bring together agency leaders and funding sources

to ensure that a range of services geared to

reducing crime and risk factors is available across

the jurisdiction, but they usually cannot also

provide intensive attention to any one specific

neighborhood.



Ultimately, policy planners will need to work at

the various jurisdictional levels--ranging from

small neighborhoods to cities and States --

simultaneously and in a coordinated fashion to

maximize the particular benefits of each level.

Such multiple approaches have begun in some

jurisdictions. Together, if managed effectively,

the programs could constitute a "full-court press"

against crime and community decay in a single city.

The Federal Government can give this strategy its

fullest force by continuing to facilitate the

development of comprehensive, community-based

programs and by encouraging teamwork among all

players.

-----------------------

Notes



[1] For further information on these programs and

related ones, see Office of Juvenile Justice and

Delinquency Prevention, Matrix of Community-Based

Initiatives, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of

Justice, OJJDP, May 1995.



[2] Institute for Social Analysis, Baseline Data

Collection Effort for the National Evaluation of

the Weed and Seed Initiative: Final Report,

Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice,

National Institute of Justice, August 1995.



-------------------

Catherine Conly and Daniel McGillis are both

researchers at Abt Associates Inc. in Cambridge,

Massachusetts.



------------------------------------------



## The Community's Role in Community

Policing ##



by Wesley G. Skogan



Discussions about community policing often involve

a number of assumptions about the role that the

community will play. These assumptions often appear

on reflection to have been arrived at too casually.

It is usually anticipated that citizens will be

eager to step forward to work with police.

Discussions of problem solving frequently assume

that police and residents will engage in joint as

well as coordinated efforts to tackle neighborhood

problems. There even is talk about the role that

police can play in fostering the development of

community organizations and mobilizing the

organizations in problem solving and

community-building activities.



It is also widely assumed that crime prevention is

probably more dependent on the community than on

the police side of the community policing equation

and that in the final analysis, the police play an

ancillary role in maintaining social control. In

this view, the police can keep their part of the

bargain by being more "customer oriented." They

will be more effective when citizens' priorities

help shape their agenda, and the subsequent buildup

of trust will rebound in the form of greater

police-citizen cooperation and mutual support.



Challenges in sustaining community involvement



Although the community side of community policing

is as critical as any, many cities have experienced

difficulty getting neighborhood residents involved.

The Vera Institute of Justice found in its

NIJ-sponsored study of community policing in eight

cities that "all eight...sites experienced extreme

difficulty in establishing a solid community

infrastructure on which to build their community

policing programs."[1] The researchers concluded

that, of all the implementation problems these

programs faced, "the most perplexing...was the

inability of the police departments to organize and

maintain active community involvement in their

projects."[2] They found that the list of problems in

sustaining community involvement in policing was

long.



Police-citizen cooperation. Above all, police and

citizens may have a history of not getting along

with each other. Especially in disadvantaged

neighborhoods, there too often is a record of

antagonistic relationships between residents and

the police, who may be perceived as arrogant,

brutal, and uncaring--not as potential partners.

Residents may fear that more intensive policing

could generate new conflicts between them,

including harassment and indiscriminate searches.



This concern about police behavior was documented

in a recent study of community policing in Chicago.

It revealed that Hispanics and African Americans

were almost three times as likely as whites to

think that police serving their neighborhoods were

impolite and more than twice as likely to think

they treated people unfairly. Among Hispanics,

about 35 percent felt police were not concerned

about the problems facing people in their

neighborhoods; 25 percent of African Americans but

only 15 percent of whites also felt this way.



Organizational involvement. Organizations

representing the interests of community members

also may not have a track record of cooperating

with police. Low-income and high-crime areas often

lack the organizational infrastructure needed to

get people involved. Since their constituents often

fear the police, groups representing low-income and

minority areas may be more interested in monitoring

police misconduct and pressing for greater police

accountability to civilians, not in getting

involved with them.



Research that has examined participation in crime

prevention programs has revealed that in

disadvantaged neighborhoods it is not easily

initiated or sustained. Crime and fear stimulate

withdrawal from, not involvement in, community

life. In crime-ridden neighborhoods, mutual

distrust and hostility often are rampant; residents

may view each other with suspicion rather than

neighborliness, and this undermines their 

capacity to forge collective responses to local

problems. Because they fear retaliation by drug

dealers and neighborhood toughs, programs requiring

public meetings or organized cooperation may be

less successful in areas with high levels of fear.



Understanding community policing. It is also

difficult to get out the community policing

message. Nothing in the past has really prepared

many Americans for this new police mission.

Residents are unlikely to understand community

policing's goals and tactics. Vera Institute

researchers found in their eight-city study that

none of the cities had recognized the need to train

residents in their appropriate roles. They

concluded, "[A]ny potential for the success of

community policing will be limited if major

commitments to community education and training are

not forthcoming."[3]



There also may be no reason for residents of

crime-ridden neighborhoods to think anything about

community policing except, "here today, gone

tomorrow." Too often their past is strewn with

broken promises and programs that flowered but then

wilted when funding dried up or newspapers looked

the other way. They are rightly skeptical that it

will be any different this time, especially when

they discern that the police officers they deal

with are not fully committed to the program.



Victims' experiences. Research indicates that

people with direct, personal experience with crime

are much more dissatisfied with police service

(when other factors are held equal). The experience

that crime victims often have with the criminal

justice system has been referred to as "the second

wound." During the 1970s there was a great deal of

interest in providing better police service to

victims, and in many places victims of domestic

violence and sexual assault continue to receive

specialized treatment. Few community policing

programs, however, seem to feature services for

victims.



Community diversity. Some of these problems

multiply when program boundaries imposed by police

departments bundle together diverse communities.

Suspicion and fear may divide the area along race,

class, and lifestyle lines, leaving residents and

the organizations that represent them at odds with

one another. They will probably point fingers at

each other over who causes what problems, and the

police are likely to be pressured to choose sides.

Groups contending over access to housing, municipal

services, infrastructure maintenance, and 

public-sector jobs and contracts also may find

themselves battling one another over policing

priorities and for the ear of the district

commander.



Community policing then threatens to become

politicized. In an evaluation of community policing

in Houston, researchers found that the program

favored the interests of racially dominant groups

and the established interests in the community.

This was reflected in turn in the impact of the

program, whose positive effects were confined to

whites and homeowners.[4]



The Houston experience illustrates that policing by

consent is difficult in places where the community 

is fragmented by race, class, and lifestyle. If,

instead of trying to find common interests in

diverse areas, the police deal mainly with elements

of their own choosing, they will appear to be

taking sides. It is easy for them to focus

community policing on supporting those with whom

they get along best and share a similar outlook. As

a result, the "local priorities" they represent

will be those of some in the community but not all.

Critics of community policing are concerned that it

can extend the familiarity of police with citizens

past the point where police professionalism and

commitment to the rule of law control their

behavior. To act fairly and constitutionally and to

protect minority rights, the police must sometimes

act contrary to majority opinion. As one

criminologist notes, community policing must

develop a process by which officers can be given

sufficient autonomy to do good without increasing

the likelihood of their doing evil.[5]



Can it work?



Can community policing live up to the expectations

of its supporters? Can the public get involved and

see clear benefits from the program? The answers to

these questions are not clear, for few systematic

evaluations of community policing have examined the

role of citizen participation in any detail. Most

of my observations are drawn from an ongoing

evaluation of a community policing program

in Chicago.



The support of the public must be won, not assumed.

Police need to be responsive to citizens' concerns,

and they have to be able to deliver on community

policing's commitment to neighborhood problem 

solving. Responsiveness requires organizational

design: There have to be regular and widely

recognized channels by which the public can

articulate its concerns and priorities, and there

has to be assurance that someone who is responsible

for responding at the police end is listening

carefully. In Chicago the mechanism is beat

meetings. These small gatherings are held all over

the city on a regular schedule; they bring together

residents and the officers who work in their area

to discuss community problems.



The capacity of the police to deliver on

commitments they make to deal with those problems

has been greatly enhanced by the city's effective

integration of community policing with the efforts

of other city service agencies. Beat teams are able

to command quick attention to problems they

identify as priorities. People will come back to

meet with police again if they see that concrete

things happen as a result of their attendance.



Train citizens, not just police. The public needs

to know what they can expect from the police and

what they themselves can contribute to coordinated

neighborhood problem-solving efforts. They have

been trained in the past to call 911 quickly when a

crime occurs, but now the range of issues the

police may get involved in and the repertoire of

responses they can bring to bear has greatly

increased. These are sophisticated concepts, and

community policing may require some aggressive

marketing so that citizens will understand their

new powers as consumers of the wide range of

products now being offered by customer-oriented

agencies. The public also has to understand that

theirs is not just a passive role and that

"police-community partnerships" are a two-way

street. When they discuss possible solutions to

neighborhood problems, police are going to ask what

resources and personal commitments residents can

bring to the table.



Once they are trained, residents are in a much

better position to make informed judgments about

their priorities, be they programs for victims or

more aggressive action against abandoned cars.

Untrained citizens are likely to define their

expectations of police in traditional terms and

expect more patrols and arrests to solve their

problems for them. Trained residents are more

likely to understand how they can confront the

parents of troublemaking youths, picket

irresponsible landlords, boycott merchants who

refuse to clean up their alleys, and use their

clout to extract resources from the city for

neighborhood problem-solving efforts--all

things that the police cannot do.



Get organizations involved. One of the conclusions

of the Chicago evaluation is that it is difficult

to sustain autonomous citizen action, even with the

support of the police. Community policing needs

community organizations. Organizations develop

agendas that keep their energies focused even when

key leaders tire or turn to other affairs. They

provide a locus for identification and commitment,

and they provide important social benefits for

participants. This commitment and solidarity can in

turn sustain the membership during tough moments or

in the face of extraordinary demands on their time.

Organizations are needed to turn people out for

meetings even when the weather is bad. They also

lend supporters of community policing the political

capacity they may need if the program flounders,

threatens to get off track, or needs protection

from its opponents.



Public forums and organizations are also good

places to confront diversity issues. We have

observed organizations working in support of

community policing struggle to build their

political base in parts of their district that they

previously had ignored. We have seen citizens rise

in beat meetings to ask where minority residents of

their beat were and how more could be encouraged to

attend the gatherings. District-level advisory

committees that represent all major factions 

have brought together leaders of warring groups in

a forum that encouraged them to identify concrete

problems and solutions acceptable to all. Sometimes

this took a year because the political interests

they represented were real and truly conflicting

ones. Community policing programs, however, are not

immune from the forces that often impede the

development of effective collective responses to

community problems.

--------------------

Notes



[1] Grinc, Randolph M., "`Angels in Marble':

Problems in Stimulating Community Involvement in

Community Policing," Crime and Delinquency, 40, 3

(July 1994):442. See also Sadd, Susan, and Randolph

Grinc, Implementation Challenges in Community

Policing: Innovative Neighborhood-Oriented Policing

in Eight Cities, Research in Brief, Washington,

D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, National

Institute of Justice, December 1995.



[2] Grinc, "`Angels in Marble'": 437.



[3] Ibid.:455.



[4] Skogan, Wesley G., Disorder and Decline: Crime

and the Spiral of Decay in American Cities, New

York: The Free Press, 1990.



[5] Mastrofski, Steven, "Community Policing as

Reform: a Cautionary Tale," in Community Policing:

Rhetoric or Reality?, eds. Jack Greene and Steven

Mastrofski, New York: Praeger, 1988:47-67.

-----------

Wesley G. Skogan, Ph.D., is a professor of

political science and urban affairs at Northwestern

University. He currently is conducting an

evaluation of Chicago's community policing program,

with support from NIJ grant 94-IJ-CX-0046.



------------------------------



## What Is Community Prosecution? ##



by Barbara Boland



More than anything else, community prosecution is

an organizational response to the grassroots public

safety demands of neighborhoods, as expressed in

highly concrete terms by the people who live in

them. They identify immediate, specific crime

problems they want addressed and that the

incident-based 911 system is ill suited to handle.

The typical problems involve quality-of-life and

disorder offenses, although in high-crime areas

these issues are overtaken by more serious crime.



The new prosecutorial response, which for the most

part is arising outside existing organizational

structures, is exemplified in an experiment in the

district attorney's office of Multnomah County

(Portland), Oregon. The Portland experience

illustrates the extent to which community

prosecution is a radical departure from

conventional notions of dealing with crime. Similar

experiments are being conducted in other

jurisdictions.[1]



Impetus and beginnings



Late in 1990 the district attorney for Multnomah

County assigned one of his most experienced senior

deputies to work for 1 year on a neighborhood-based

prosecution project in Portland's inner-city Lloyd

District. Just across the Willamette River from the

city's vibrant new downtown, the district in the

past decade had undergone sweeping change that

transformed the previously declining

industrial/residential area into a major commercial

district.



During the transformation period, government and

civic leaders became concerned that criminal

activity in the district could seriously reduce the

economic benefits promised by investment. Citizens'

perceptions that the district was not as safe as

other areas were confirmed by crime data and

compounded by gang and drug problems in adjacent

neighborhoods.



Call for a neighborhood prosecutor. In keeping with

the city's strong civic traditions, Lloyd District

business leaders mobilized a response by forming a

business association and creating a public safety

committee. The committee's broad base of support

included the district attorney and representatives

from the Portland Police Bureau. After studying the

safety issue, the committee drafted an action plan

that listed specific strategies and tactics, such

as better lighting and coordination of private

security. A message that clearly emerged was the

need for intensified public law enforcement, with a

call for more officers and a more visible police

presence. The committee, however, made an unusual

request--for assignment of a special prosecutor

to the district.



The committee wanted this prosecutor to address its

concern about the lack of consequences in the

downtown courts for criminal activity that

adversely affected district business. So resolved

was the committee that it came up with private

money to pay for the prosecutor. This proposal

raised the issue of service inequity, but because

safety in the Lloyd District was determined to be

important to the city's economy, the district

attorney approved a 1-year pilot project on

condition that public funds would be forthcoming if

it succeeded.



The movement spreads. Simultaneous with these

developments was a similar movement in the adjacent

North and Northeast (North/NE) neighborhoods, which

were among the city's most crime plagued and drug

infested. Here, the business community was joined

by community activists and rank-and-file citizens.

The coalition's "rescue plan" called for a vigorous

law enforcement response. Although the plan did not

include a request for a special prosecutor, a year

after the Lloyd District project began, the

district attorney dispatched a county-financed

neighborhood prosecutor to work with citizens 

in North/NE.



The idea caught on. The business association

serving downtown Portland launched a similar

project, funding a pilot Neighborhood District

Attorney (NDA). Two more NDAs were sent to other

parts of the city and county, and a sixth went to

work for the regional transit authority. This

brought the district attorney very close to his

goal of complete county coverage with public

funding.



What citizens really want



When citizens who are concerned about crime state

their demand that something be done, they

invariably express this demand in traditional law

enforcement terms. This was so in Portland, where

drafters of the North/NE rescue plan unequivocally

stated their wish for more police, even specifying

exactly how they wanted the additional resources

used. The same was true of the Lloyd District

committee, which asked for a more visible police 

presence. The special prosecutor was to focus on

repeat offenders, an approach well within the

traditional scope of the prosecutor's role.

Initially, the attorney to be assigned envisioned

the job in conventional case processing--arrest

and conviction--terms.



Grassroots concerns. Conventional notions about

crime and prosecution were countered by what was

learned from experience. The Lloyd District special

prosecutor quickly saw that people's concerns were

more immediate than he had imagined. They wanted

something done about prostitution, public drinking,

drug use, vandalism, assaults, littering, garbage,

and "car prowls" (thefts from cars). None of these

problems fits traditional notions of serious crime,

and (with the exception of car prowls) none is even

included in official police counts of crime.



The situation at Sullivan's Gulch in the Lloyd

District illustrates this type of concern. In this

natural depression where two railroad lines

intersect, transients hop off trains and camp

illegally. The number of illegal campers had

exploded by the late 1980s, and they regularly

ventured into nearby commercial/residential areas

to buy liquor, drink, urinate publicly, and fight.

The problem was particularly troublesome to the

business community because it coincided with the

efforts to revitalize the Lloyd District. None of

these problems is a serious crime, yet they raised

serious concern among citizens.



Disorder, fear, and crime



The concerns about Sullivan's Gulch are a classic

example of the association of disorder with crime

and fear of crime that was first brought to light

more than two decades ago in research on foot

patrols. Reintroduction of this tactic in a 1970s

policing experiment was found to have no measurable

impact on crime, yet citizens reported feeling

safer. They felt safer because public order

increased as the foot patrol officers, along with

citizens, established implicit rules of acceptable

and unacceptable behavior.[2]



Shortly after the experiment, the now widely

referenced "broken windows" thesis was published.

Stated in brief, it holds that "serious crime

flourishes in areas where disorderly behavior goes

unchecked."[3] That disorder escalates into serious

crime was confirmed in subsequent studies.[4This

research validates the concerns of Lloyd District

citizens about seemingly minor offenses like the

ones in Sullivan's Gulch.



What NDAs do



The approach initially envisioned--a courtroom

focus on specific cases and categories of crime --

quickly gave way as attorneys assigned to specific

neighborhoods saw their jobs would extend beyond

prosecution. In fact, the project name was changed

from Neighborhood Prosecutor to Neighborhood

District Attorney to reflect this realization.



In general, NDAs work with citizens and police to

help come up with ways to control the types of

street behavior and low-level disorder that

threaten neighborhood safety. An important part of

the NDAs' role is to provide answers, feedback, and

explanations--especially explanations of legal

constraints that prohibit the police from doing

what citizens think they ought to do to deal with

certain conditions. The NDAs' core activity,

however, is devising alternative responses.



Using the law in new ways. The alternatives include

using the law in innovative ways (e.g., resorting

to civil remedies), reconfiguring resources (e.g.,

getting people to work together in new ways), and

conducting behind-the-scenes negotiations to bring

diverse parties to the table. To do all this, NDAs

must wear many hats: facilitator, legal counselor,

negotiator, problem solver, and community advocate.

What NDAs do not do is litigate. The way the

problem at Sullivan's Gulch was resolved typifies

the approach. (See "Cleanup at Sullivan's Gulch.")



------------------------------



Cleanup at Sullivan's Gulch



Grass now grows on the former site of "cardboard

condominiums," the name given to the illegal

campsites that once made Sullivan's Gulch in

Portland a disorderly and unsightly place. Not only

has the problem been solved, but camps as large as

the ones here have not reappeared in other areas.

Sullivan's Gulch was once a place where unruly

behavior threatened to escalate into crime and

spill over into commercial and residential areas

from this gully where railroad lines meet.



Community prosecution provided the solution. On the

basis of citizens' views of the underlying problem

of transients' illegal camping, the NDA reasoned

that increased police visibility and arrests were

not likely to work in the long run. Stepped-up,

targeted patrol and crackdowns might work for a

time, although most likely the problem would

reappear when police moved on to other areas. Nor

was permanent commitment of new resources an

option, given the competing demands on the police.



The goal became one of clearing up the illegal

camping problem. A long-term plan involving an

initial police sweep and a city cleanup was

adopted. The NDA negotiated a team effort of

citizens and police to post signs which read "No

Camping" on one side and listed addresses of

shelters for the homeless on the reverse. He also

enlisted citizens to patrol the gulch at regular

intervals and to notify police of the reappearance

of any camp sites. Essentially the solution was to

persuade campers to disperse. The police began to

use this tactic, rather than arrest, and citizens

themselves followed suit.



------------------------------



Problem-oriented prosecution. The NDAs' work is

like community policing in being problem, rather

than incident, oriented. It departs from community

policing in addressing problems that tend to be

longer term and larger in scope. In a sense, the

case file never closes. Once a problem is brought

under control, NDAs continue to monitor the

situation themselves or through a network of

citizens and police officers. Part of the job, in

other words, is to "stay on it."



An approach, not a "program"



The work of the NDA unit is not guided by clear-cut

procedures that apply uniformly to all situations.

In other words, it is not a program. To be

effective, the new approach requires a highly

flexible organization that allows NDAs to shape

responses and strategies to meet the different

needs of different neighborhoods. What concerns

residents of one neighborhood may be irrelevant to

another. Moreover, neighborhood conditions change

over time, and street behaviors are dynamic and

constantly changing, making prescribed operations

of no value. Organizational capacity to adapt is

essential.



The work of the NDA in North/NE is illustrative. He

has devised innovative uses of the law to deal with

"problem properties" in which gang and drug

activity are involved. These include enabling

property owners to make it easier for police to

arrest trespassers, using civil eviction, and

drafting city ordinances to close down nuisance

properties. (See "Portland's North/NE Neighborhood

DA.")



------------------------------



Portland's North/NE Neighborhood DA



Covering roughly one-fourth to one-third of

Portland's land area, and including about one-third

of the city's half-million residents, the North/NE

area fell prey to gang and drug problems following

the introduction of crack.



The NDA, equipped with a cellular phone and a truck

that served as his office, was assigned to North/NE

in 1992. By the time he arrived, citizen groups and

community police officers were hard at work

combating drugs and gangs and dealing with

"liveability" issues. His first task was to provide

citizens and police with easy access to the

district attorney's office.



In North/NE neighborhoods less seriously affected,

problems centered on classic disorders, such as

public drunkenness, drug use, prostitution, visible

trash, abandoned automobiles, and illegal dumping.

One of the first successes, in the Kenton

neighborhood, came when the NDA helped curb chronic

public drunkenness in the business district. Using

police-generated data that identified a handful of

alcoholics as the source of several hundred calls

for service, he simply persuaded local liquor

stores not to sell to them.



In higher crime neighborhoods, disorderly behavior

became intermixed with drug and gang activity.

"Problem properties"--drug and gang houses

associated with crack dealing--were the major

problem.



Civic activists and police agreed that what the NDA

had that they most needed was legal expertise, and

he quickly established himself as a resource.

Sometimes this meant providing legal advice on

proposed strategies before they were launched.

Sometimes it meant having a representative of the

district attorney's office accompany the police to

"knock and talk" sessions. (This tactic involved

visiting problem properties to advise drug dealers

living there that complaints were being

investigated.) Sometimes it meant developing new

legal tools, such as the citizen-driven search

warrant.



------------------------------



New tools



Neighborhood DAs could easily occupy themselves

full time with ad hoc requests for legal advice,

but their most valuable contribution is coming up

with new options--new legal tools citizens and

police can use when conventional ones fail. This

approach typically requires facilitating

coordinated action by various agents and drawing on

input from citizens and police. Even solutions

arrived at by informal negotiations, however, need

to be solidly grounded in the law.



The "citizen-driven search warrant" devised by two

NDAs to deal with low-level drug dealing in

owner-occupied houses in North/NE is one example.

Owner occupancy meant that eviction through

enforcement of landlord-tenant laws was not

possible. In the targeted property, there were no

code violations, and all taxes had been paid,

eliminating these avenues of redress. Moreover, the

police had not been able to make an undercover buy.



The solution took the form of a citizen-neighbor

informant recruited by a police officer. Using a

drug observation log sheet developed by the NDA,

the informant observed the house for several weeks

and recorded suspicious activity. At the same time

the officer conducted random surveillance to verify

the accuracy of the observations and obtained

corroborative data from police reports.



The information was used to obtain a "telephonic

search warrant." When the informant telephoned the

police officer to report a probable purchase, the

officer in turn phoned a judge, who immediately

authorized a search of the house. After the search

produced 100 retail-size packages of marijuana, the

residents were indicted and the case was assigned

for prosecution.



Standard operating procedures were developed for

citizen-driven search warrants, and the new tool

now is used on a regular basis in North/NE and

other parts of the city and county.



The emerging organizational response



What the Neighborhood District Attorneys in

Portland are doing is first and foremost citizen

driven, in both initiation and response. The

critical element in providing what citizens need is

connecting the legal expertise of the district

attorney's office with what goes on in the street.

The attorneys who work in the field repeatedly

note, "You don't see this downtown." It is when

they come to see what the police see and to know

what citizens know that their focus broadens from

the narrowly defined task of assessing legal

culpability in a particular case to the broader

question of how to take all the circumstances of a

neighborhood problem into account.



NDAs have learned that a singular focus on

case-by-case adjudication of guilt is not always

sufficient because even if the culprit is removed,

the problem persists. In such situations the NDA

will capitalize on community initiative,

facilitating development of public safety

strategies by the police and citizens. And because

street behavior is dynamic and difficult to

predict, the most successful of these strategies

will be multifaceted. They require trying

everything within reason, monitoring what happens,

dropping what does not work, and adjusting tactics

as the situation unfolds. Only a network--of

police, citizens, the local government, and

"downtown justice"--can get this job done.



In this new approach to reducing crime, the

flexibility needed to get the job done requires a

new organizational arrangement. More than anything

else, this consists of the direct, two-way

communication NDAs have created to link themselves

to citizens and police--the people who understand

better than anyone the problems they face.

--------------------

Notes



[1] In Portland, community prosecution deals largely

with quality-of-life issues and low-level

"disorder" crimes, but elsewhere there are similar

organizational responses to serious, violent crime.

In New York County (Manhattan), the district

attorney's office has established community

prosecution units for violent crime as well as

quality-of-life crime. In Washington, D.C., the

U.S. attorney's office first introduced community

prosecution to deal with homicide and now is

extending its reach to all types of crime. Suffolk

County (Boston) and Marion County (Indianapolis)

have adopted neighborhood-centered initiatives to

respond to serious crime as well as disorder.



[2] Kelling, George, et al., The Newark Foot Patrol

Experiment, Washington, D.C.: Police Foundation,

1981.



[3] Wilson, James Q., and George Kelling, "Broken

Windows," Atlantic Monthly (March 1982):34.



[4] Skogan, Wesley G., Disorder and Decline: Crime

and the Spiral of Decay in American Cities, New

York: The Free Press, 1990.

-------------------

Barbara Boland, a Visiting Fellow at NIJ, is a

consultant in prosecution issues.



-------------------------------------------------



## Community Defense and the Challenge of

Community Justice ##



by Christopher Stone



For public defenders, the transformation of the

other parts of the criminal justice system from a

series of offender-processing machines to a set of

community justice services presents both a welcome

opportunity and a challenge. The machines were

designed to respond to 911 calls, make arrests,

produce convictions, and punish offenders.

Ironically, their efficiency can improve even while

crime soars. Public defenders working in such a

system sometimes conceive of their mission as

gumming up the works, although a more objective

assessment would recognize them as primarily

another link in the offender-processing chain.



Community justice services, by contrast, aim to

identify and solve the problems that foster crime

and injustice. The transformation from machine to

service is most advanced in police departments,

although it also is under way in prosecution, court

management, and corrections. For defendants, if the

change means new opportunities to solve structural

problems that have compromised public defense for

the past 30 years, the community justice movement

may be the best thing to come along since the

Supreme Court in Gideon v. Wainwright recognized

indigent defendants' right to counsel.



The Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem



The Neighborhood Defender Service (NDS) of Harlem

was an experiment aimed at developing and testing

new ways of organizing and deploying public

defenders that can solve problems of justice in the

community while providing high-quality

representation at a cost government can afford.

Begun in 1990 by the Vera Institute of Justice in

partnership with the city and State of New York,

the 5-year project operated alongside the far

larger Legal Aid Society, New York City's

institutional defender.



NDS has differed from traditional public defenders

in its relationship to its client base, staff

structure, and priorities. The 5-year demonstration

period has ended and the future of NDS is

uncertain, dependent on its obtaining alternative

funding.



Client base. Like any public defender, NDS has

represented individuals accused of crimes who could

not afford private lawyers. But while traditional

public defenders are based at courthouses to handle

court business, NDS has been based in the

community. Instead of waiting for the court to

assign NDS to represent clients, NDS has encouraged

Harlem residents to call the office any time, the

way more affluent people would call their

attorneys. This relatively minor change in intake

procedure has given NDS a few more hours before a

client is in court to gather information and, more

significantly, has created a wholly different

attorney-client relationship that continued to pay

dividends long after the case was over. It is the

public defender's equivalent of a community police

officer exchanging the 911 queue for a neighborhood

beat.



A team approach to staff structure. In contrast to

the usual practice of assigning each client a

single attorney, each NDS client has been

represented by a team. Each team has consisted of

attorneys, community workers, an administrative

assistant, an intern, and a senior attorney who

served as team leader. One attorney has had

principal responsibility for each case, but

everyone on the team was aware of the activity in

each of the team's cases. If a client ever had

another case, it was handled by the same team.



NDS adopted this structure to increase efficiency

by making extensive use of nonlawyers and to ensure

continuity of representation over time. In addition

to producing these benefits, the structure also

unexpectedly heightened accountability. In

traditionally structured offices only the attorneys

know what they are or are not doing on a case, and

they answer principally to themselves. At NDS, team

members, whether lawyers or not, challenged each

other in a common effort to represent each client

as well as possible.



Shifted priorities. In a traditional defender

office, the highest priority is given to cases

about to go to trial, with little priority given to

cases just begun, and none given to former clients

or anyone who does not have an active criminal case

in court.



NDS turned this priority system on its head,

assigning the highest priority to investigating and

advocating for clients at the start of their cases,

sometimes even before arrest. Teams were held

accountable for the amount of work accomplished

early in the case--in the first 4 weeks.

Community workers gave priority to helping former

clients avoid problems on probation and parole that

might otherwise produce new cases.



Changing priorities in professional organizations

is difficult and is one source of resistance to

community justice. For public defenders, assigning

priority to trials reflects their pride in this

work more than their judgment about what benefits

the most clients. NDS also took pride in winning

trial cases, and trial work still received a higher

priority than many other stages of representation;

but however, trial work was removed from the

pinnacle of NDS office culture, just as arrests and

convictions have been demoted as part of community

policing and prosecution reforms.



Serving families and communities



At the start of the project, no issue produced more

disagreement among staff than the ability to serve

clients' families. Some of the notions held by

well-intentioned, committed defenders illustrated

how little even some good defenders in traditional

offices know about their clients and the

communities from which they come. Within a few

months, however, the whole staff came to know

Harlem as a series of interconnected family

networks, and NDS became essentially a family

service. (See "Community Education.")



------------------------------



Community Education



Many traditional defense firms encourage their

lawyers to become involved in community education

or mentoring, but very few organize community

education programs for prospective clients. Having

based itself in Harlem, the NDS staff felt

compelled to help the children of Harlem avoid the

problems its clients were confronting.



The result was a formal program for high school

students to train them in keeping conflict with

police officers from escalating into arrests or

violent confrontations. By drawing from cases

involving students whom NDS had defended, the

discussions and role-playing of the 10-session

curriculum were anchored in reality. More important

than content was the commitment of the office to

use its daily case work as the raw material for a

course of positive instruction in the community.



------------------------------



Help for a relative in trouble. Those who planned

NDS expected that people arrested in Harlem would

call NDS from precinct houses or would ask a friend

or relative to call. But the great majority of

calls came from parents, grandparents, spouses, and

children who were trying on their own to get a

lawyer for a relative who had been arrested. NDS

also regularly received calls from relatives asking

for help in arranging voluntary surrenders to the

police. From the start of a case, this meant there

was often an insider who could help obtain

information, assist in locating witnesses, and

ensure the client appeared in court.



Relatives usually called out of concern for the

person's safety as he or she entered the criminal

justice system. Some callers understood the value

of a lawyer in protecting a defendant's legal

rights at this early stage, and some hoped that a

lawyer could get a defendant out quickly. But most

hoped that NDS could insulate their relative from

unspecified harm during initial processing. Just by

being there, NDS was providing a service for

families.



Mediation between neighbors. NDS was able to deal

with the social realities of neighborhood disputes

that court-based prosecutors are rarely familiar

with. These relatively minor disputes can often be

mediated outside criminal courts, but they are

taken to court because the parties know of no other

way to resolve them. There is the shop owner who

just wants a teenager from up the street to

apologize, the woman who is angry at her boyfriend,

the desperate young man who wants the boys down the

block to stop picking on him. The wrongs these

people suffer are real, but in order to get help

from the criminal justice system, they may

exaggerate the crimes. Then the system takes over

and the complainants lose control.



Traditional criminal justice processing ignores

these problems. It moves the cases along, crafting

plea bargains to crimes that neither the victim nor

the defendant believes occurred but that neither

the defense nor the prosecution has time to

investigate. NDS could not ignore this social

reality, and as a result, much of its practice grew

into helping the traditional system dispose of the

fictitious cases with its eyes closed so that

others could mediate the real disputes.



Noncriminal matters. The legal problems that result

from an arrest are not exclusively matters for the

criminal courts. A parent arrested may lose custody

of children, a family whose son is arrested for

selling drugs may be evicted, or a person may be

injured as a result of police misconduct during an

arrest.



Traditional defenders confine themselves to

defending their clients, and they generally assume

that clients face the most serious consequences in

the criminal courts. By contrast, NDS represented

its clients in any matter arising out of a criminal

accusation.



Early on, NDS represented a woman accused of

abusing an infant foster child. Although medical

evidence eventually proved her innocent, 

for more than a year she faced attempted murder

charges and termination of parental rights over her

two children in family court. Her NDS team

represented her in both courts--itself a novel

practice. But the real novelty was her lawyers'

acceptance of her view that the family court case

was more important than the criminal case.



The decision to sacrifice strategic advantage in

the criminal case for the sake of the family case

was a turning point in the practice of law

throughout NDS. The teams became more flexible and

responsive to the wishes of clients and their

families. Thus, a young client might choose to

plead guilty and do time on a drug charge to give

his mother, also a client, a better chance of

winning her eviction case. NDS teams acquired

expertise in counseling clients about such choices

because NDS first learned how to litigate the

noncriminal cases and then to listen to client and

family concerns.



Cost-effectiveness



The creators of NDS believed the project would

produce faster case disposition, less pretrial

detention, and less jail and prison time. This

would happen because by working on the case earlier

and knowing the client and community better, the

community defender would bring more information

into the process at an earlier stage in ways that

would lead judges and prosecutors to end cases more

quickly with less severe sentences.



To test that hypothesis, the outcomes of NDS cases

begun during its first 2 years of operation were

compared with cases handled by the traditional

system.[1] The findings revealed that NDS clients did

receive significantly shorter sentences, but they

were not released at their first court appearance

in significantly greater numbers than clients of

traditional defenders, nor were their cases

concluded significantly faster. When translated

into dollars, the savings from shorter sentences

were considerable: 150,000 bed-days or about $10

million--more than twice the entire budget of the

program--for the cases NDS began in its second

year.



The failure of NDS to significantly reduce

detention decisions at the initial bail hearing can

be explained by the fact that New York City

detained very few defendants before trial, so a

community defender would need to make a great

difference to have any impact. Moreover, NDS was

present at the initial hearing in only about half

the cases because the defendant engaged NDS only

after the hearing. This suggests the need for

representation from the start if there is to be a

substantial impact.



The failure to speed time to disposition suggests

that defenders have less influence on pretrial

delay than planners initially believed. Experiments

conducted in the mid-1980s had shown that early

provision of defense counsel produced some

reduction in pretrial delay and in the number of

appearances per case,[2] but "early" defense in those

experiments had been provided from the first bail

hearing. The NDS experiment suggests that community

defenders who start even earlier may not produce

any faster resolution of cases than defenders who

are present from the initial court appearance.



The real cost-effectiveness of NDS comes down to

the impact on sentencing. Whether the result came

from plea negotiations or sentencing advocacy, it

reflects the cumulative benefit of all the services

community defense provided: deeper understanding of

clients through continuity of representation and

better investigation, better presentation of

sentencing options through greater connection to

community resources, and greater ability to

represent residents' support for a less severe

sentence than a prosecutor might seek. (See "The

Tradition of Community Defense.")



------------------------------



The Tradition of Community Defense



None of the features of community defense

originated with NDS. There always have been lawyers

for the indigent providing elements of what might

be called community defense, just as for decades

individual police officers have been trying to

engage in what is now called community policing.

Shortly after the 1963 Gideon v. Wainwright

decision, lawyers for the poor began organizing

community-based legal services that provided both

civil and criminal representation.



Several lawyers tried to provide comprehensive

legal services although that proved impractical

because of differences in the kind of funding for

criminal and civil legal services. Even in the

absence of comprehensive legal services for poor

communities, neighborhood-based public defense was

still a possibility in cities with decentralized

courts, such as Chicago and Boston, where

neighborhood-based offices became laboratories for

expanding the meaning of public defense services.



The Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem was a

new stage in the development of community defense

services. Like the Chicago and Boston experiments

of the 1970s, NDS maintained aggressive outreach--

including placing posters in subway stations,

widely distributing business cards, and

participating in community social and educational

events--and put heavy emphasis on investigation and

social services. In funding, operations, and goals,

NDS was more integrated into the criminal justice

system than its Boston and Chicago predecessors.

The increased cooperation was possible because of

growing interest in community justice on the part

of the local and State governments and the promise

of savings in other parts of the criminal justice

system.



------------------------------



Safety and justice



Whatever the future of NDS, its experiences can

inform the development of public defenders and the

community justice movement in general. Community

policing focuses on the underlying problems in

communities that generate high crime. If

prosecutors, judges, and corrections officials do

the same, they will find opportunities to forge

alliances with defenders whose clients share an

interest in eliminating problems that produce

crime.



Equally important, defenders can remind their

colleagues that communities experience problems

with justice as well as with crime. The treatment

of families and individuals by the criminal justice

system in heavily policed urban communities often

is disrespectful and sometimes criminal. Community

defenders need to identify these problems and

devise strategies for solving them. NDS has refined

some familiar ideas of how to do so and contributed

a few of its own.



In the broadest terms, the lesson that emerges from

the last 5 years of work in Harlem is that people

expect both safety and justice and do not want to

sacrifice one for the other. Community justice

services of every kind represent the best hope of

delivering both.

---------------------

Notes



[1] Sadd, Susan, and Randolph Grinc, "The

Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem: Research

Results from the First Two Years," New York: Vera

Institute of Justice, 1993.



[2] Fazio, Ernest J., Sandra Wexler, Thomas Foster,

Michael J. Lowy, David Sheppard, and Juliet Musso,

Early Representation by Defense Counsel Field Test:

Final Evaluation Report, Washington, D.C.: U.S.

Department of Justice, National Institute of

Justice, 1988.

--------------

Christopher Stone is president and director of the

Vera Institute of Justice, Inc.



--------------------------------------------------



## Community Courts: Prospects and Limits ##



by David B. Rottman



This country once had what were, in effect,

community courts. The attachment between the courts

and their communities grew weak as urban areas

expanded. But the trend is growing again to build

attachments between communities and courts.

Although the history of community courts is

complex, it suggests the parameters within which

future courts will develop.



Prospects and limits for community courts are seen

in the few existing models for comprehensive court

and community collaboration. The contrasting

examples of "Peacemaking" in the Navajo Nation's

court system and the Midtown Community Court and

Red Hook Community Justice Center in New York City

are discussed here as touchstones for exploring the

possibilities of community-focused courts.



Court centralization and its legacy



From the start of this century to its middle, the

agenda for court reform was set by Roscoe Pound,

dean of the Harvard Law School. Pound was keenly

aware of the ties that once bound courts and

communities in an era when limitations on

transportation prevented litigants from traveling

without great inconvenience. Gradually, physical

distance became less of a barrier to access, but

the real change came in the shift away from the

dominance of the homogeneous, rural community.

Pound wrote that the type of community that emerged

was one in "which our legal institutions had no 

experience."[1]



Factors promoting the shift. Cities required new

types of courts, notably ones specializing in

business law, juvenile offenses, and small claims.[2]

Legal specialization and professionalization were

the twin engines of change. New types of disputes

and the increasing involvement by lawyers as judges

and as advocates led to the creation of different

types of courts.



Their number and variety proliferated accordingly;

in 1931, 556 courts were serving the citizens of

Chicago.[3] That expansion was of greater concern to

reformers than the prospect of estrangement between

courts and communities. As a result, 65 years

later, a single court with a main courthouse and 10

satellite locations serves the city of Chicago. The

pattern of consolidation of trial courts into a

single location was repeated many times. The

rationale was efficiency and coordination, but one

result was that courts became less visible to the

community.[4]



There were other, less evident motives for

consolidation. Reformers like Pound wanted to sever

the link between the courts and local politics;

they used court unification, along with

specialization and professionalization of the law,

to do this. They also wanted to eliminate

jurisdictional overlaps and thus prevent litigants

from "shopping" for a sympathetic judge and court.[5]



Steps toward a renewed community focus



During the 1960s and 1970s, the national

commissions on crime promoted a quest for the

justice system's community roots by espousing

citizen participation. Harbingers of a renewed

community focus can be found within the traditional

court structure from the 1960s onward.

Court-watching programs, judicial disciplinary

commissions, and permanent court advisory

committees flourished. The primary goal of most of

these early efforts was limited to serving as

"conduits of information" between the courts and

the community.



Court devolution. More recently, in response to

pressures to provide better service, courts are

decentralizing facilities. Some have adopted the

ATM machine as their model: A court system

permitting access at many remote locations enables

people to file forms or pay fines and fees. This

enhances convenience, but it does not constitute

collaboration with the community.[6]



Citizen participation. If by the mid-1980s

opportunities for citizen participation in the

courts were not plentiful, they were expanding.(See

"Community and Court Involvement Varies in Purpose

and Type.") During the 1990s, the widespread

adoption of community policing encouraged extension

to the courts of similar approaches. The underlying

premises for involving the community with the

courts are that urban social problems manifest

themselves as problems for the courts and that, in

turn, fair adjudication of cases requires

consideration of the con-text for understanding

these problems that only the community can provide.



------------------------------



Court and Community Involvement Varies in Purpose

and Type[7]



Program Purpose: Better court practices  



Program Types: 

- Citizens' advisory committees

- Futures commissions

- Public opinion and exit surveys

- Community volunteer panels

- Court-watching programs

- Teen courts

- Judicial evaluation programs

- Citizen sentencing panels



Program Purpose:  Better public access    



Program Types: 

- Telephone hotlines

- Divorce workshops

- Day-care facilities

- Information kiosks





Program Purpose: Increased public 

knowledge of courts



Program Types: 

- Courthouse tours

- Citizen guides

- "Meet your judge" programs

- School outreach

- Media outreach

- Public service announcements



------------------------------



Community-focused courts. A community-focused court

is a more expansive effort still, requiring ongoing

collaboration between a trial court and one or more

community groups either for a specific purpose or

in a major aspect of the court's adjudicatory

scope. This definition does not generally encompass

programs that consist primarily of court outreach,

such as public education. On the other hand, court

"inreach" (e.g., court monitoring) comes closer to

meeting the definition, particularly if its

objective is to forge a more broadly based

connection between court and community.



The unique community of a court



Why has a genuine community focus been so slow to

reemerge in the Nation's trial courts? Courts lack

law enforcement's easy affinity with the community

that has allowed community policing to achieve

prominence. When people talk about their police

force, they have in mind a local entity with a

distinct image, a high-profile official in charge, 

and a set and knowable boundary. Police officers

are visible, entering every neighborhood of their

jurisdiction. Courts do not have this clear

identity.



An indistinct image. To most people, the term "the

courts" conjures up an amorphous image of 

the judicial branch in which local, State, and

Federal jurisdictions merge without distinction.

Courts are remote and mysterious, and while police

chiefs are known in their communities, the chief

judge is not. Furthermore, the organization he or

she heads consequently lacks a human face. Lack of

knowledge about what the courts do--and about

which court does what--is pervasive.



This amorphous image is supplemented by the

public's ambivalent opinion of the courts. Survey

research reveals a judiciary that has great

confidence in the courts but a public that

consistently rates them lower than other public

institutions (although not lower than the other two

branches of government).[8] All this makes

collaboration between courts and communities

difficult.



What is the community of a court? Three models



Some different models exist for a community-focused

court today.



Navajo Peacemaking. In the late 19th century,

traditional Navajo approaches to resolving 

disputes were superseded by the imposition of a

court system rooted in Anglo-American adversarial

justice. Subsequent reforms recreated a role for

Navajo traditions and principles in the judicial

process.



The infusion of Navajo values is most evident in

the Peacemaker Division of the Navajo Nation

judicial branch, which emphasizes nonadversarial

processes in dispute resolution. The formal

components are a peacemaker, who is an individual

of recognized ability and wisdom, the disputants

and their extended families, and the use of Navajo

religious ceremonies. Peacemaking, however, often

operates within the framework of such familiar

proceedings as intake interviews and subpoenas, and

the resulting agreements can be incorporated into

court orders.[9]



Peacemaker sessions follow a similar pattern:

Ground rules are established, prayers are said, all

people present are involved in investigation and

questioning, a problem-solving statement is

crafted, a summary is prepared by the peacemaker,

commitment is made and solidarity is achieved, and,

finally, prayer is said again. Sessions average 2

or 3 hours but can last for several days, and they

address problems ranging from marital discord to

land disputes. The objective is healing. There are

no winners and losers.



Peacemaking depends for its authority on the

community, as manifested by the extended families

and clan membership of disputants and peacemakers.

Peacemakers are selected by the disputants from 

the individuals so designated in their local areas.

Most importantly, however, peacemaking depends

upon, and also reinforces, the complex matrix of

ties and responsibilities woven into the larger

Navajo community by clan, kinship, and 

tradition.[10]



The Midtown Community Court. The Midtown

Community Court (MCC) in New York City

exemplifies the renewed interest in bringing high-

volume, short-duration criminal cases back to

communities through satellite and branch courts.

MCC, however, adds a significant community

component. The community is viewed as having

a major stake in how well the courts adjudicate

cases involving quality-of-life crime. In turn, the

court's ability to better adjudicate such cases is seen

as heavily dependent on the active involvement

of community groups. Consequently, community

groups provide opportunities and supervision for

sentences to community service and offer social

services within the courthouse, augmenting the

traditional--mainly governmental--providers.

The treatment, health, support, and educational

services are available to local residents as well as

offenders. In addition, a community advisory board

was formed and a mediation program was established

to address disputes within the community.



The geographic boundaries of MCC embrace 3 of

Manhattan's 21 police precincts, which together

account for 34 percent of all misdemeanor arrests

in the borough. Times Square and the Theater

District are near the court building (on 54th

Street), as are the neighborhoods of Chelsea and

Clinton. The area's population, which numbers about

120,000, ranges from immigrant working class to

professional middle class.



Research evaluating MCC is using an abstract, less

geographically based definition than is appropriate

for policing.[11] MCC's environment contains a

business community that extends from some of the

country's largest and most powerful organizations,

such as the New York Times and owners of some of

the world's most valuable real estate, to a

multitude of small retailers whose financial

situation is often precarious. The economic and

political clout of the residents is dwarfed by some

of these institutions.



The community is also distinct because it includes

sections of the city, like Times Square, that are

perceived as territory common to all New Yorkers

and to many non-New Yorkers. This communal

ownership and membership make it particularly

relevant to think about community in a way that

embraces the people who work in, shop in, or

otherwise use the area served by the court, without

disregarding the greater stake that residents have.



But only 7 percent of the criminal defendants live

in the court's community. Court proceedings are

limited to misdemeanor arraignments, which are not

spectator events because court language consists

largely of penal code numbers punctuated by

acronyms. Because no witnesses, civilian or police,

are called and no jurors sit in judgment, there is

no obvious drama.



Although MCC is not located in a major residential

area, conceptually it is, however, an integral part

of a larger community effort. Its establishment

coincided roughly with the ongoing revitalization

of the Times Square area. A comment by a

participant in a focus group session of community

leaders reflects the sense of multiple change

agents and the integration of the court into them:



Everyone acknowledges that the Times Square area is

better, but it's very hard to assess who gets the

credit. Is it because of the Times Square BID

[Business Improvement District], or is it because

of the Midtown Court? And when you go on Lower

Ninth Avenue, below 40th Street, there it's not

only the Times Square BID, but it's the Fashion

Avenue BID and it's the 34th Street Partnership

that maybe caused changes--around Penn Station,

around Macy's.



This court is a community court, most fundamentally

because of its contribution to the broader array of

partnerships and collaborations among local

organizations and residents' groups in Midtown

Manhattan that are dedicated to the general

betterment of the area.



The Red Hook Community Justice Center. The

community court concept is to be given different

expression in a criminal justice center to be located

in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, New York.

Planners responsible for the Midtown Community

Court are seeking to design a court that will respond

to social problems prevalent in Red Hook, an area

very different from Midtown Manhattan.



Surrounded by water on three sides and an elevated

highway on its fourth side, Red Hook is an isolated

community served by two police precincts. Decades

of declining population have left a marginalized

community of low-income residents, most of whom

(more than 70 percent) live in an old, massive

public housing complex.



The plan is for a justice center that "significantly

expands traditional notions about the role of courts

and tests the extent to which they are capable of

serving as catalysts for change." Features will

include the use of local agencies to supervise

community service sentences, general reliance on

residents' groups as partners with the court, and

the presence in the center of services not currently

located in Red Hook, including child care, law-

related education, drug treatment, GED classes, job

training, and job referral, as well as a variety of

programs designed to fit the needs of young residents.



The court component will be tailored to specific

kinds of disputes common in Red Hook. Traditional

barriers between the State's various lower trial

courts are being disregarded to offer a

comprehensive jurisdiction in which much of the

court business generated in Red Hook will be

resolved there. Family cases will include those

arising from domestic violence and at-risk youths.

Civil cases will cover landlord-tenant disputes and

small claims and will use mediation as well as

traditional court processes. Criminal cases will be

mainly quality-of-life misdemeanors and

violations.[12]



The future of community courts



These disparate models belie some commonalities

useful for organizing a community-focused court.

First, a community-focused court practices

restorative justice. Emphasis in these models is on

the ways in which disputes and crimes adversely

affect relationships among community residents. A

just resolution of a dispute addresses all

concerned, including the community at large.

Second, a community court treats parties to a

dispute as real individuals rather than abstract

legal entities. Third, community resources are used

in the adjudication of disputes.



Community-focused courts will assume various forms,

depending on the composition of the community and

the nature of the problems brought before the

courts. In MCC, for example, defendants are rarely

residents and the emphasis is on quality-of-life

crime. In Red Hook, it is anticipated that

defendants will be community residents, but family

and civil disputes will be addressed as well.

Navajo Peacemaking addresses a more expansive range

of disputes, and its methods are distinct from the

adversarial processes that MCC and the Red Hook

Center must use.



The potential process. The potential exists for

community-focused courts to offer a means to

improve the performance of judicial institutions,

respond to concerns about racial and ethnic bias,

and increase public trust. Courts and communities

have drifted apart largely because, with the best

of intentions, reformers sought to distance courts

from local politics. A move back inevitably

reintroduces politics, although not the classic

partisan variety. Rather, the courts will reflect

the varied interests and conflicts inherent in any

community, and for this reason the "community" of

community courts will not be simple or homogeneous.



The potential for developing community-focused

courts also depends to some extent on the legal

profession. People want the opportunity 

to represent themselves in a wide range of disputes

and to speak in lay terms. The demand is not met by

adding more legal aid centers and more pro bono

work by attorneys. What people want challenges the

professionalization of the courts and their

domination by lawyers--forces that originally

contributed to the drift from community ties. Court

and community collaboration today consequently

depends on balancing the role of lawyers and the

formalism they bring that militate against the

influence of extralegal factors on the one hand and

public expectations for user-friendly, problem-

solving courts on the other.



Ultimately, the challenge of creating community-

focused courts may lie with communities

themselves. The low level of public knowledge about

courts is a formidable obstacle to collaboration

between courts and communities. For this obstacle

to be overcome, organized community interests need

to view the courts as a resource and as a vehicle

for change. In other words, if there are to be

community-focused courts, there must be court-

focused communities.

---------------

Notes



[1] Quoted in Tannenbaum, Frank, Crime and the

Community, Boston: Ginn and Co., 1938:30.



[2] See Friedman, Lawrence, Crime and Punishment in

American History, New York: BasicBooks, 1993.



[3] Glick, Henry, and Kenneth Vines, State Court

Systems, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,

1973:25.



[4] Johnson, Earl, Courts and Communities,

Williamsburg, VA: National Center for State Courts,

1978.



[5] Colonial-era legal philosophy and the

anti-Federalists in the early 19th century stressed

the virtues of local jurors as both factfinders and

as the expression of the community's conscience.

See Abramson, Jeffrey, We, the Jury: The Jury

System and the Ideal of Democracy, New York:

BasicBooks, 1994, chapter 1.



[6] Planet, Michael, "Future Directions in the

Practice of Court Management," in Handbook of Court

Administration, eds. S. Hays and C. Graham, New

York: Marcel Dekker, 1993:503.



[7] The prevalence of various programs is assessed

in two recent surveys, "The Court-Community

Relations Survey," conducted by the National Center

for State Courts in 1993, and "The Survey of

Strategies to Improve Public Trust and Confidence,"

conducted by the American Judicature Society in

1994.



[8] Two recent examples of surveys on the courts are

the American Judicature Society's Results of a

National Survey of Strategies To Improve Public

Trust and Confidence in the Courts, Chicago, 1994,

and the State-specific Reinventing Justice 2022,

Boston: The Supreme Judicial Court of the

Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1992.



[9] Caution is needed in seeking to abstract

Peacemaking from its cultural and religious matrix.

Justice Austin of the Navajo Supreme Court notes

that studies of Navajo institutions often read

"like Tony Hillerman novels. The characters are

Navajos, but they do not think like Navajos, speak

like Navajos, or act like Navajos." Austin, R.,

"Incorporating Tribal Customs and Traditions into

Tribal Court Decisions," paper presented for the

Federal Bar Association 1992 Indian Law Conference,

Albuquerque, New Mexico.



[10] See Bluehouse, Philmer, and Jim Zion, "Hozhooji

Naati'annii: The Navajo Justice and Harmony

Center," Mediation Quarterly (1993).



[11] The evaluation is being conducted under NIJ

sponsorship.



[12] Information on the Red Hook Community Justice

Center is taken from a concept paper submitted in

March 1996 by the Fund for the City of New York.

------------

David Rottman, Ph.D., is associate director of the

Research Division at the National Center for State

Courts.



------------------------------



## Toward a Corrections of "Place": The Challenge

of "Community" in Corrections ##



by Todd R. Clear



The new "place" orientation in the criminal justice

system and in criminological research already has

had major implications for crime policy and

practice. This is perhaps most evident in policing,

where the rediscovery of crime "places" has

informed a community-oriented, problem-solving

approach that has in many departments completely

altered the nature of the profession.[1]



While the place orientation has now become familiar

in law enforcement, it is less so in correctional

practice. The term "community corrections" has been

current for some time, predating by far today's

discovery of place by other disciplines within

criminal justice, but this currency is deceptive.

In corrections, the term "community" does not stand

for the problem-solving focus but instead often

merely indicates that an offender happens to be

living outside a correctional facility. This raises

the question of what community corrections might

learn from the place movement in criminology and

law enforcement.



This article reviews some of the most important

lessons of the place movement from other

disciplines and proposes implications for

correctional programming. The lessons of this

movement in criminology and law enforcement pose

five main challenges for corrections.



Five "crime and place" challenges for corrections



What may be called the place movement in fact

comprises a broad array of initiatives and ideas.

Some are theoretical, involving alteration in the

way criminal behavior is viewed to include

understanding of the context of criminal events. 

The movement would reconceptualize burglary, for 

example, to include not only the offender's motive 

but also other aspects of the crime situation, such 

as the vulnerability of the victim and the presence 

or absence of guardians. Some aspects of the movement

are very practical. For example, the police are

called on to engage in specific crime prevention

activities with groups of community members who

have defined a crime problem. Because the array of

practical and theoretical manifestations is so

broad, there are numerous implications for

corrections.



Mission. Since the devaluation of rehabilitation in

the 1970s, corrections has been befuddled about its

mission. Along with the devaluation of correctional

treatment came a growing "get-tough" movement that

has dominated correctional policy. It can be argued

that by the 1990s the correctional system has taken

a posture of unreconstructed punitiveness: Talk of

correctional innovation today includes chain gangs,

"people's prisons" with hard labor, harsh "boot

camp" regimens for youngsters, and an end to such

"amenities" as television, smoking, and weight

lifting. All these approaches focus on the offender

(or potential offender), and their goal is to

convey an anti-crime "message" so reproachful that

no law-abiding citizen would dare commit any

transgression.



A place orientation recognizes that the criminal

motivation of offenders, the focus of corrections

practice today, is only one possible crime

prevention target. "Routine activities theory"

suggests consideration of two additional components

-- the existence of suitable targets and the

absence of capable guardians.[2] Neither of these

components of a crime is dealt with through an

exclusively punitive focus, especially one that is

excessively punitive.



A place orientation would call upon corrections to

accept a subtle but crucial shift in its mission.

Incorporating a place orientation takes the

offender out of the center of the picture and

inserts instead a concern for community safety.

This opens up corrections to a larger variety of

interventions that promote safety for all citizens,

including offenders (who also live in the

community). It even requires that the success of

corrections be linked not merely to alleviating the

suffering that citizens experience as a result of

crime but to a larger (and considerably more

attractive) pursuit of quality of community life.



This mission also shifts corrections'

accountability. A punitive orientation fixated

solely on offenders addresses human suffering in a

way that distorts interaction between correctional

workers and their clients. In this perspective,

accountability is measurable primarily in terms of

the varieties and levels of misery resulting from

crime. By contrast, a community safety mission is

more concretely anchored in and oriented to

achieving favorable results. The test of

accountability becomes whether a particular action

is better at improving community safety than

alternative actions.



This mission shift also opens up a wider range of

intervention targets. The corrections system can

broaden its focus beyond the supervision of

offenders to include such actions as working with

victims, organizing community groups, and

developing crime prevention strategies for specific

crime problems. The central question becomes "What

short- and long-term approaches promote a safer

community?" Any answer has to recognize that

offenders are members of the community and

important consumers of safer streets.



Geography. Central to the idea of place is the

orientation of criminal events in time and space. A

major advance in this regard is geocoding of crime

problems--the concept of crime "hot spots" comes

directly out of the technology of geocoding.



The distribution of offenders who are released

under correctional authority in communities and the

situating of their activities in time and space can

follow the same logic that applies to hot spots:

When concentrations of offenders live in defined

areas, concentrations of correctional resources can

be provided. In the same manner, areas of 

communities where large numbers of offenders work

also can be correctional targets.



The idea of geographic alignment of resources is

consistent with today's correctional practice of

risk assessment. In this thinking, places can be

seen as posing a risk as well. In police work, for

example, 10 percent of all locations generate fully

30 percent of calls for service,[3] and in

corrections, up to 70 percent of offenders in a

State prison system come from only seven

localities.[4] Risk is thus related to place.

Moreover, the place to which a person is paroled

determines parole success independent of what the

personal characteristics of the parolee might be.[5]

In short, place-related classifications and

workload arrangements should profitably augment

offender-based classifications now widely used in

correctional practice.



By thinking in terms of geography, correctional

practitioners also may begin to consider dynamic

risk factors. It is well known that offenders who

are mobile are more likely to reoffend, but in some

cases changing addresses may actually reduce risk.

Moreover, the risk-generating potential of

locations could be lowered if changes could be made

in neighborhood characteristics (e.g., number of

abandoned dwellings) and resources (e.g., number

and type of local jobs).



Crime prevention. The place orientation that has

become central to contemporary thinking about crime

prevention also can be incorporated into

correctional practice. The example of sex offenders

illustrates how: With this type of offender, 

relapse prevention includes identifying family

members, employers, and neighbors who are asked to

be sources of information about the behavior of the

offender, especially as it relates to "signals" of

reoffending. This approach is consistent with

corrections' "routine activities" theory of the

need for capable guardians. Corrections could

expand the concept of "guardians" to other types of

serious offenders who live in the community.



In the same way, correctional researchers can pay

closer attention to situations in which reoffending

is likely to occur, and correctional officials can

place greater emphasis on altering or monitoring

the offender's entry and exit into these

situations. Crime problem solving in which the

community's expertise is incorporated into crime

prevention planning also can become a corrections

technique in localities where there are

concentrations of offenders. Similarly, design

approaches can be applied by having correctional

staff work with communities that are experiencing

high levels of crime to identify ways that physical

structures can be modified to deter criminal

activity.



The implications of these approaches are to shift

the attention of community corrections from

intervening solely in offenders' lives and toward

implementing a spectrum of strategies for local

crime prevention. But how does the community

corrections worker identify the appropriate

strategies? The answer has a great deal to do with

the final two challenges: involvement and

coordination.



Involvement. Today, correctional managers carry out

their work with precious little involvement of

anyone except perhaps energetic judges and

(occasionally) volunteers. As a result, corrections

is the object of a deep-seated community distrust,

nourished by misunderstanding built upon ignorance.

A focus on place can help change this by promoting

local correctional initiatives that are ideally

suited for involvement of victims, offenders, and

community members.



Victims are part of a place orientation for several

reasons. First, they are usually victimized near

where they live, and they continue to live there

afterward. Their understandable fear and resentment

can be a major impediment to making a community

safer and are a first priority for correctional

staff. Using such approaches as restorative

justice,[6] correctional officials can empower

victims to reestablish control over their

environment and feel safer.



Offenders are an untapped crime prevention

resource. Too often, they are seen solely as

targets of State control, but most offenders who

live in high-crime areas have a personal stake in

community safety. At the risk of oversimplifying,

it can be said that offenders are familiar with

criminal activity in the community, have links to

situations promoting criminality, and have

knowledge unavailable to the justice system about

ways to confront crime. This is why some of the

most successful crime prevention projects are run

by ex-offenders.



Community involvement has changed the face of

policing. The same could be true for corrections.

The too-frequent call to "lock 'em up" is 

partly a response to an alienated public that

discerns no accountability on the part of offenders

or corrections system officials. When community

members feel they can shape correctional policy by

direct participation, they also will feel less

estranged from the decisions made by officials, and

they will feel inclined to shape their

participation to be meaningful rather than

antagonistic.



Involvement has two benefits with regard to place.

First, it locates community corrections staff in

the world of the people affected by the corrections

process--offenders and the community. In so doing

it resets the balance of corrections to include

aspects of community safety that transcend mere

supervision of offenders. It makes the lives of the

people who live in the same location as offenders

substantively meaningful in the corrections agenda.

Second, it activates resources available in a given

place and focuses them on correctional aims.

People's time and effort become capital that 

corrections may tap.



Coordination. Social and justice system initiatives

must be coordinated with corrections' community

safety concerns. This coordination can begin by

colocating correctional services with these other

services. Demonstration projects in which probation

and parole services have colocated with community

police services, neighborhood prosecution offices,

and even public schools are now under way and show

great promise. Connecting services this way can

strengthen the impact of the correctional activity

while placing the corrections function within the

larger context of public services affecting the

lives of offenders and their families.



The image generated is of a geographically

localized, multifunctional service delivery system

in which several agencies, including those of the

justice system, are working in collaboration to

make the community safer.



Coordination within geographic locales is perhaps

the ultimate realization of a place orientation to 

justice services. The long-range intention would be

for service strategies to evolve to meet local

conditions and to emphasize approaches to community

safety that most powerfully enhance the quality of

life in the area.



Impediments to a corrections of place



This application of place to corrections has

powerful implications. It depicts local corrections

systems in which all offenders who come from one

community would be dealt with in that place. The

emphasis of all correctional work would be on

community safety, and the staff would be experts in

crime prevention, not just offender management.

Citizens, victims, and even offenders would

collaborate to determine correctional policy, and

these policies would be implemented in coordination

with other services.



What is wrong with this picture? Several problems

need to be resolved before there can be a true

"community" corrections.



Difficult offenders. There will be limits on the

types of offenders with whom communities can work.

High-risk offenders will continue to require some

form of control. Moreover, effective assessments

are needed to determine the suitability of specific

offenders for specific community-based activities.

Over and above any desire to reintegrate offenders,

there must be practical ways to assess and control

the risk of reoffending, especially serious

reoffending.



Tradition. The correctional focus on case

management of individual offenders is so deeply

ingrained in penology that a broader

conceptualization will require exceptional effort

and some time. In existing practice, there also may

be an antagonism between correctional workers and

offenders that will be difficult to overcome.



Standardized services. Much correctional innovation

in recent years has emphasized standardization of

practice in risk assessments and case management

systems. Standardization has its benefits, but it

does not readily take community variations into

account. A corrections of place requires

flexibility that runs counter to this trend.



Workload. Most correctional systems are responsible

for supervising a large number of offenders with

limited staffing. If staff are not relieved of some

direct case management responsibilities, it is hard

to imagine how they will be able to take on added

responsibilities.



Inequality. Perhaps the biggest impediment to

change is extreme inequality in crime problems and

anti-crime resources from place to place. In

general, localities hardest hit by crime are the

least capable of assembling resources to combat it.

They have the fewest organizations and the smallest

human and social capital, and their residents are

the least able to mobilize and organize. Some way

will have to be found to reorient resources toward

these localities.



For the future



A list of some of the community corrections

initiatives now under way appears to make evident

that a corrections of place will not be an exact

replica of place movements in other aspects of

criminal justice. They are, however, promising

beginnings and they exemplify the way place is

being rediscovered in corrections. (See "Promising

Starts in Community Corrections.") The

possibilities in these and other initiatives are

nearly boundless and suggest the coming of truly

"community-based" corrections.



------------------------------



Promising Starts in Community Corrections



o Vermont: Community boards assist in determining

the conditions of supervision for offenders

sentenced to probation and placed on parole.



o Madison, Wisconsin: Probation officers are

aligned with police officers in teams to provide

close monitoring of high-risk offenders.



o Spokane, Washington: Probation officers no longer

have case management contact requirements; in their

place, they are involved in a project that helps

offenders buy their own homes.



o Portland, Oregon: Probation offices are housed

with local neighborhood prosecution offices and

work in tandem with selected offenders.



o New York City: Neighborhood justice centers (such

as Manhattan's Midtown Community Court) provide an

array of services to offenders, including access to

postconviction program alternatives.



o Minneapolis-St. Paul: Probation staff operate a

program in which victims and offenders meet to

promote reconciliation and restoration of both to

the community.



-------------------------------



Notes



[1] Goldstein, Herman, Problem-Oriented Policing,

New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990.



[2] "Routine activities theory" holds that crime

occurs for three reasons: The offender has a

motive, the target is suitable, and capable

guardians are absent. See Felson, Marcus, "Routine

Activities and Crime Prevention in the Developing 

Metropolis," Criminology, 25 (1987):911-931.



[3] Spelman, William, "The Criminal Careers of

Public Places," in Crime and Place: Crime

Prevention Studies, vol. 4, eds. John E. Eck and

David Weisburd, Albany, New York: Harrow and

Heston, 1996:115-142.



[4] Clines, Francis X., "Ex-Inmates Urge Return to

Areas of Crime to Help," New York Times, December

23, 1992.



[5] Gottfredson, Stephen D., and Ralph Taylor,

"Person-Environment Interactions in the Prediction

of Recidivism," in The Social Ecology of Crime,

eds. James M. Byrne and Robert J. Sampson, New

York: Springer-Verlag, 1986.



[6] Umbreit, Mark, Victim Meets Offender: The Impact

of Restorative Justice and Mediation, Monsey, New

York: Criminal Justice Press, 1994.

--------------

Todd R. Clear, Ph.D., a Visiting Fellow at NIJ, is

a professor in the School of Criminal Justice at

Rutgers University.



------------------------------------------------



Selected OJP and ONDCP Publications About

Communities, Crime, and Justice



Listed below are some recent Office of Justice

Programs and Office of National Drug Control

Policy publications related to issues of

communities, crime, and justice. These

publications are free, except as indicated, and

can be obtained from the National Criminal Justice

Reference Service: telephone 800-851-3420, e-mail

askncjrs@ncjrs.org, or write NCJRS, Box 6000,

Rockville, MD 20849-6000. Please note that when

free publications are out of stock, they are

available as photocopies or through interlibrary

loan.



These documents also can be downloaded through the

NCJRS Bulletin Board System or at the NCJRS

Anonymous FTP site in ASCII or graphic formats.

They can be viewed online at the Justice

Information Center World Wide Web site. Call NCJRS

for more information.



Community Involvement



Evaluation of Boys and Girls Clubs in Public

Housing, NIJ Research Preview, 1995, FS 000100.



Innovative Community Partnerships: Working

Together for Change, OJJDP Program Summary, 1996,

NCJ 147483.



Matrix of Community-Based Initiatives, OJJDP

Program Summary, 1996, NCJ 154816.



McGillis, Daniel, Beacons of Hope: New York City's

School-Based Community Centers, NIJ Focus, 1996,

NCJ 157667.



Sampson, Robert, Ph.D., Communities and Crime: A

Study in Chicago, VHS videotape, 1995, NCJ 156924,

U.S. $19, Canada and other foreign countries $24.



Responses to Drug Abuse



The National Drug Control Strategy: 1996, ONDCP

Report, 1996, NCJ 160086.



Responding to Drug Use and Violence: A Directory

of Public- and Private-Sector Drug Control Grants,

ONDCP, 1995, NCJ 153429.



Rising Above Gangs and Drugs: How to Start a

Community Reclamation Project, OJJDP, 1995 (third

printing), NCJ 133522.



Responses to Youth Violence and Delinquency



Inciardi, James, Ph.D., a Corrections-Based

Continuum of Effective Drug Abuse Treatment, VHS

videotape, 1995, NCJ 152692, U.S. $19, Canada and

other foreign countries $24.



Bridging the Child Welfare and Juvenile Justice

Systems, OJJDP Bulletin, 1995, NCJ 152155.



Combating Violence and Delinquency: The National

Juvenile Justice Action Plan, OJJDP Report, 1996,

NCJ 157105; OJJDP Summary, 1996, NCJ 157105.



Curfew: An Answer to Juvenile Delinquency and

Victimization? OJJDP Bulletin, 1996, NCJ 159533.



Evaluation of Violence Prevention Programs in

Middle Schools, NIJ Update, 1995, FS 000094.



Gang Suppression and Intervention: Community

Models, OJJDP Research Summary, 1996, NCJ 148202.



Gang Suppression and Intervention: Problem and

Response, OJJDP Research Summary, 1996, NCJ

149629.



Guide for Implementing the Comprehensive Strategy

for Serious, Violent, and Chronic Juvenile

Offenders, OJJDP Update on Programs, 1995, NCJ

153571 (6 pp.); NCJ 153681 (255 pp.).



Harrell, Adele, Ph.D., Intervening with High-Risk

Youth: Preliminary Findings from the

Children-at-Risk Program, VHS videotape, 1995, NCJ

153270, U.S. $19, Canada and other foreign

countries $24.



Intensive Aftercare for High-Risk Juveniles: A

Community Care Model, OJJDP Program Summary, 1996,

NCJ 147575.



Intensive Aftercare for High-Risk Juveniles:

Policies and Procedures, OJJDP Program Summary,

1996, NCJ 147712.



Community Policing



Community Policing and D.A.R.E.: A Practitioner's

Perspective, BJA Bulletin, 1995, NCJ 154275



Community Policing Strategies, NIJ Research

Preview, 1995, FS 000126.



Sadd, Susan, and Randolph M. Grinc, Implementation

Challenges in Community Policing: Innovative

Neighborhood-Oriented Policing in Eight Cities,

NIJ Research in Brief, 1996, NCJ 157932.



Sherman, Lawrence W., Ph.D., Reducing Gun

Violence: Community Policing Against Gun Crime,

VHS videotape, 1995, NCJ 153730, U.S. $19, Canada

and other foreign countries $24.



Skogan, Wesley, Ph.D., Community Policing in

Chicago, Fact or Fiction? VHS videotape, 1995, NCJ

153273, U.S. $19, Canada and other foreign

countries $24.



Prosecution and the Courts



Anderson, David C., In New York City, a "Community

Court" and a New Legal Culture, NIJ Program Focus,

1996, NCJ 158613.



Finn, Peter, The Manhattan District Attorney's

Narcotics Eviction Program, NIJ Program Focus,

1995, NCJ 153146.



CPTED



Gordon, Corey L., and William Brill, The Expanding

Role of Crime Prevention Through Environmental

Design in Premises Liability, NIJ Research in

Brief, 1996, NCJ 157309.



Smith, Mary S., Crime Prevention Through

Environmental Design in Parking Facilities, NIJ

Research in Brief, 1996, NCJ 157310.



Taylor, Ralph B., and Adele V. Harrell, Physical

Environment and Crime, NIJ Research Report, 1996,

NCJ 157311.