As we consider the role of law enforcement in our communities, we must acknowledge that the police are not a one-size-fits-all solution to the myriad problems they have been empowered to solve.

Police officers should not be first responders when our loved one’s mental health is compromised, when our child has a bad day at school, when our teenager rebels, when a member of our community is unhoused, or when our neighbor is battling the sickness of substance abuse. Organizations rooted in the community already know that person by name, and we have a responsibility to invest in those organizations’ ability to respond.

In New York City, where I lead the Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety, (also known as MAP) we’ve had demonstrable success doing just that. I work with residents in the city’s most disenfranchised neighborhoods to develop solutions that will make them safe.

True safety lies in networks of strong community leaders, well-resourced local organizations, complete access to opportunity, a responsive government, and the realization of justice. That’s why in New York City, we’ve spent the past four years developing NeighborhoodStat, or NStat.

NStat is a process that brings together neighbors, community organizations, and agencies to support safer, more vibrant communities. The approach is grounded in the belief that public safety cannot exist without the trust and participation of the public. NStat involves these parties meeting regularly and rebuilding trust.

I have sat in on dozens and dozens of NStat conversations with Black and Brown communities, and while there are those for whom safety is very much about law and order, what is more commonly affirmed in those conversations is that safety isn’t about the absence of crime — it’s about the presence of opportunity. This video demonstrates how the process has worked in New York, and gives direct voice to those people’s concerns:

An example of the NStat process at work is in Brownsville Brooklyn, home to the most densely concentrated area of public housing in the United States. It is a vibrant, tight-knit community with a strong sense of pride, and it produces powerful and profoundly committed organizers. Conversely, residents have had to fight against deeply entrenched inequity and disinvestment, and the violence that is a by-product of that condition.

The 73^rd Precinct area that includes Brownsville consistently ranks among the top precincts for crime, yet despite what’s happening around it, the Brownsville Houses, arguably through the leadership of its residents and community partners, have continued to buck the trend.

In 2019, as part of NStat, residents of Brownsville Houses noted concern with critical hotspots in their community that they deemed underutilized, poorly taken care of, and vulnerable to negative activity. They also dug into high poverty and high unemployment at Brownsville Houses that make young people vulnerable to crime. In response, residents created B-Lit, an innovative lighting series that included activating public spaces at night-time.

Here’s a picture of the B-Lit project:

The series also offered programming that included a community poetry night titled Poetic Justice; a roller-skating event called Swervin; an employment expo for residents; and a performance of “King Lear” followed by an interactive, guided conversation on about caregiving and death. In each case, the community activated the shared space for a neighborhood event.

Overall, Brownsville Houses have experienced notable declines in major and violent crime and exhibited an almost 87% decline in shootings — the most significant decrease of all developments that are part of the Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety since its launch in 2014.

The NStat process is not a perfect solution to every public safety challenge, but it does strive to serve as a mechanism for residents to achieve their vision of safety for their own communities.

Behind the strategy is the belief that if we really want to understand how to undo the structural damage that has destabilized communities of color, then the government must come down from its ivory tower and take a seat at the people’s table.

A 2019 report from the Center for American Progress noted about NStat that “while this approach may seem like a radical departure from traditional policing-focused methods of crime reduction, the model is firmly grounded in evidence on the factors that influence neighborhood safety.” It also found that because NStat focuses on “micro-level communities,” jurisdictions of all sizes seeking to address public safety through community investment can learn from it.

Crime is an outcome. It’s the product of centuries-long, government-backed structural inequity, disinvestment, and dehumanization. It should not be a surprise that neighborhoods with the least amount of government dollars flowing into the community, the lowest rates of educational attainment, minimal access to fresh food, and the highest rates of incarceration and chronic disease also have the highest crime rates. This is what systemic inequity looks like.

The days of using conditions that the government helped create as an excuse to over police neighborhoods are over. We can no longer strip entire neighborhoods of resources and tell residents to build a future with broken tools. It’s past time to divest from punitive enforcement and invest in well-being and opportunity. The time for communities to self-determine their own safety is now.

Renita Francois is the Executive Director, Mayor’s Action Plan for Neighborhood Safety in New York City

The results are in: Three years of data from Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) sites across America show it’s possible to successfully reduce jail populations by a significant percentage.

The numbers show significant declines in overall and pretrial jail populations, and improved outcomes for people of color across the sites. Jail bookings are down, particularly for people charged with misdemeanors. But there is still work to do to build on the progress we have made. Racial and ethnic disparities persist in jail populations, and we have made limited progress on reducing length of stay and felony bookings.

Jails are intended to hold people who are awaiting court proceedings and are considered a flight risk or public safety threat. Today, 75% of people across our nation’s 3,100 local jails are being held for nonviolent offenses, and three out of five are legally presumed innocent. While many people admitted to jail are released within hours or days of their booking, many cannot afford to post bail and may remain behind bars for weeks or even months.

These and other burdens of jail fall disproportionately on communities of color: Black Americans are jailed at five times the rate of white Americans.

In 2015, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation launched the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC), a multi-year initiative to reduce populations and racial disparities in American jails. To date, the SJC has provided $217 million to help 51 jurisdictions in 32 states use innovative, collaborative, and evidence-based strategies to create fairer, more effective justice systems. To track the progress of reforms in the SJC jurisdictions, the Foundation engaged the Institute for State and Local Governance (ISLG) at the City University of New York (CUNY). Our latest report focuses on performance three years into the Challenge (through April 2019). Additionally, we have released a brief examining monthly jail population trends since the pandemic struck in 2020.

Digging into the Data

Our report tracked progress in 14 jurisdictions that have submitted case-level data for analysis from May 2016 to April 2019.

From 2016 to 2019, the Average Daily Population (ADP) declined significantly across the SJC sites, especially for the pretrial population. The decrease was 18% across all sites, combined. And for those who were being held pretrial, or were waiting action on their case, the decrease was 19% across all sites, combined.

While many outcomes for people of color improved, disparities persisted. Booking rates for people of color were down 5% or more in 10 of the 14 sites.
There was also an 11% overall decline in the over-representation of People of
Color in jail for misdemeanors. Despite that progress, the booking rate for people of color relative to that of White People was down 5% or more in only three sites.

Sites have made progress reducing the representation of misdemeanors in their jails. This trend was most apparent among bookings, where nine of the 12 sites providing data reduced misdemeanor bookings by 5% or more. However, there is room for improvement on felonies: only four of the 12 saw such reductions for felony bookings.

Length of stay is mostly increasing, but the interpretation is complicated. When looking at the average length of stay at time of release, six sites saw an increase of 5% or more while four saw a decrease of 5% or more. When measuring average length of stay among everyone in jail on a given day (also referred to as the “in-custody population”), nine of the 14 sites experienced an increase in average length of stay (ALOS), with six of them experiencing an increase of 20% or more. The increase in ALOS may mean longer case processing times, but may also reflect a reduction in bookings among people who are in jail for short stays. More in-depth analysis of these trends is needed to better understand what they mean.

Recent Jail Population Trends in light of COVID-19

Throughout 2020, as the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic set in nationwide, many municipalities—including SJC sites — implemented emergency measures to reduce their jail populations. Since COVID-19, Average Daily Population (ADP) and bookings were still below pre-COVID levels in most SJC sites.

There Is Still More Work To Do

After three years of implementing strategies to reduce jail populations, our findings suggest that jail populations can, in fact, be substantially reduced; and over the last year the COVID-19 pandemic has led to even further reductions in jail populations across sites and racial and ethnic groups. With all of that said, there is room to go further, especially in reducing racial and ethnic disparities which persist and in some cases are exacerbated as jail populations decline. There will be a deepening focus on addressing these challenges as the initiative moves forward. There also needs to be more focus on length of stay, which is a huge driver of the jail population in many of the challenge sites.

The early progress represents significant cause for optimism for reducing the over-reliance on jail across America. With further progress, we expect to see a further reduction of negative impacts on communities and families.

You can download a summary of the analysis here (link). Or you can download a link to the full analysis here (link.)

—Reagan Daly is the Research Director at CUNY’s Institute for State and Local Governance.

We launched the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) to stimulate a broad transformation of local criminal justice systems across America. Our goal is to change justice policies and practices in a tangible and measurable way to reduce the routine, reflexive, and almost mechanical overuse of jails contributing to mass incarceration. But we also aim to change criminal justice attitudes and mindsets. We want to change not just the decisions being made, but the way decisions are approached: the values driving them, the interests consulted, the voices heard. Success, as we see it, would mean not just fewer people in local jails. Success would mean local justice systems that have been opened up and truly treat people fairly.

We have had mixed success in making progress towards these goals. Jail population numbers have fallen in the communities we support, and we have good reason to hope that, over time, the practical demonstration that jail usage can be safely reduced will prompt change nationally. But the “opening up” of local justice systems has proved harder.

Most Safety and Justice Challenge communities, even those that now use their jails less, continue to use them disproportionately for people of color, particularly individuals who are Black, Indigenous, and Latinx. Data collected by cities and counties participating in the Safety and Justice Challenge has made this problem more transparent and has helped identify where in the system disparities occur most.

If we believe the system is racist why are we relying on system actors to determine who participates in system reform?

We have found that most judges, prosecutors, defenders, sheriffs, and other justice system partners do not know how to effectively engage community members as equals, be accountable, or share power. We have taken steps to support learning and experimentation in this area, making grants for community engagement activities, and bringing on new technical assistance providers. Still, few of our system partners have found ways to work consistently with community members on an open and equal basis.

In December, we convened two virtual meetings with a broad array of community advocates and representatives, the majority of whom had direct experience with the criminal justice system, as victims, as formerly incarcerated individuals, or both. The sessions surfaced a wealth of wisdom and experience, and four lessons emerged.

Remember the Importance of Language

“A good first step is language—language is incredibly important,” one of the participants pointed out. “The SJC should start articulating a commitment to ‘eliminate’ disparities instead of ‘reducing’ them.” The other participants agreed.

Our caution and modesty in stating a measurable, accomplishable goal (“reducing”) had landed completely wrong and was perceived as toleration for a certain amount of discrimination and injustice. The meetings reminded us that reform is not enough for many people closest to these issues. “We need to abolish this system, not reform it,” as one of our advisors put it, “and we should say as much.”

Examine How We Make Grants

We were urged to use our grantmaking to rectify power imbalances and exclusion in local criminal justice systems. The Safety and Justice Challenge mainly funds system actors—with non-system community stakeholders receiving support indirectly, if at all. “[But] if we believe the system is racist,” one advisor asked pointedly, “why are we relying on system actors to determine who participates in system reform?”

Another suggested that we “focus on expanding allies to include more grassroots advocates, empower local leadership of grassroots organizations, and form intersectional coalitions of allies with varying specializations to attack the issues from all angles.”

And, we were told, we should be explicit about what we are doing: “Grantees should be required to list key stakeholders on the grant who are Black, formerly incarcerated, or have a proven track record demonstrating their ability to work with the community.”

Equip and Empower Community Leaders

Many of the people attending had direct and painful experiences with the justice system, and all agreed that people who know the most about the problem should lead the search for solutions. “It’s imperative we engage directly impacted communities,” a participant said. But, he added, “A false sense of power is not power; you can put people on committees and invite them to panels, but if you’re not resourcing these efforts, these token efforts are insignificant.”

Think Beyond Criminal Justice

Many of our advisors argued that we should take a much broader view of what constitutes criminal justice reform and how we define safe communities. If we want safe communities, they suggested funding workforce development, partnering with public school systems, or supporting re-entry.

They also urged us to expand our sense of what is possible. “We are trying to get people to radically reimagine,” one advisor said of her work. “My organization has engaged thousands of people in creative practices, and every time we find that when we move into the creative mind space, it breaks us free of this narrow view of what’s possible.”

Next Steps

From these lessons, we plan to rethink the role of community engagement in the Safety and Justice Challenge. To support this goal, we will expand and diversify our formal advisory structure to include people with lived experience, find ways to partner with and invest in community-based organizations and leaders, use our funding to take bolder actions, and be more explicit in our language and goals.

Laurie Garduque is Director, Criminal Justice, at the MacArthur Foundation  

People of color and other diverse groups should not be denied fair access to drug court and the support needed to successfully complete it. A new tool has the potential to reduce racial and other inequities that currently exist in such courts across the country.

Drug court is often the last chance for many people to stay connected to their community rather than spend time in jail or prison. That means it’s particularly important that we don’t deny that opportunity to anyone because of biased decision-making.

Drug courts want to be fair but disparities exist. For example, many drug courts’ retention rates are lower for Black people than white people, which means more Black people end up going to prison or jail. The data also shows that there are racial disparities with being admitted to drug court in the first place – in other words, whether people even offered the opportunity.

The National Association of Drug Court Professionals (NADCP) says it is up to drug courts to find inequities and address them. But courts need some help. That’s why the National Center for State courts partnered with NADCP to develop a new equity tool, the Equity and Inclusion Assessment Tool that gives drug courts the means to assess where they stand on inclusion and equity. It helps courts analyze referrals by race, ethnicity, gender identity, age, and sexual orientation.

It is an easy-to-use spreadsheet-based tool designed to be accessible to almost any court, providing useful summary statistics and graphics to assist with data interpretation. It is the diagnostic component of a suite of tools and responsive actions developed by NADCP to promote inclusion and equity in drug courts. Such steps include rewriting curricula to be more inclusive and hiring more Black case workers. These tools are consistent with best practice for fostering racial equity in the criminal justice system more broadly.

There is broad interest in the tool, with almost 400 people attending a webinar to introduce it. Since its launching in August 2020, the tool has been implemented by numerous jurisdictions. For example, Minnesota is pilot-testing the EIAT in 13 drug courts to determine its suitability for use in that state as a prelude to possible statewide implementation. Researchers from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington are using the Equity and Inclusion Assessment Tool to assess equity and inclusion in the drug courts with which they work. We have also been approached by software firms that develop databases for drug courts that seek to incorporate the logic embedded in the assessment tool into their databases. This is a very promising development that will certainly promote the use of the tool and the logic underlying it. Further, some of the sites that participated in our pilot study before the release of the tool to the field more generally have used the information generated by it to take affirmative steps to address problems.

It’s good that we aren’t sweeping disparities under the rug. I have been working on drug courts for years. Defense attorneys could make the argument that these courts aren’t doing all they can to be fair, and they cite statistics showing that Black clients have less chance of succeeding in drug court than white clients do. Against this backdrop, it is important these courts come into compliance.

The Equity and Inclusion Assessment Tool is also designed to examine inclusion and equity in drug courts with respect to several other demographic characteristics, including age, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. Further, since the tool provides users with pull-down menus to identify reasons for failure to admit candidates for drug court as well as similar menus to identify reasons for failure to successfully complete drug court, it will be possible to better understand the decision points that result in differential inclusion and equity by race other characteristics.

To maximize the utility of the Equity and Inclusion Assessment Tool, drug courts will be required to track data that many have not tracked in the past. Importantly, drug courts must record data on the characteristics of referrals and must track referrals to the point of admission and beyond to the point of drug court completion. Most drug courts also do not currently record data on sexual orientation or data required to identify gender identity.

There is potential for huge change with this tool beyond drug courts. We’re also getting enquiries from other types of problem-solving courts. Mental health courts as well as juvenile drug courts are asking if this can help them address equity. And the answer is “yes.” This method could work in any number of different types of problem-solving courts, as well as more mainstream courts interested in investigating the fairness of their processes.

Folks interested in the tool may also wish to check out the article published earlier this year in the Justice System Journal that describes the evolution of the Equity and Inclusion Assessment Tool from a performance measure to a tool. Results from the pilot-testing are also expected to be published in a peer-reviewed journal later this year year. I’m eager to engage with cities and countries as part of our work with the Safety and Justice Challenge.

The Equity and Inclusion Assessment Tool and NADCP’s Adult Drug Court Best Practice Standards on Equity and Inclusion, which the assessment tool supports, are consistent with the Safety and Justice Challenge’s goal to address racial disparities in incarceration.

—Fred Cheesman is a Principal Court Research Consultant at the National Center for State Courts.

As technical assistance providers to the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge, my colleagues and I have worked with several key sites across the country to embed racial equity as an integral part of addressing America’s over-reliance on jails, often through better community engagement, particularly in Black and brown communities.

Our work over the last three years has had some success, and we’re excited to build on it. And a key lesson has been to ask often, when we’re working with decision-makers: Who isn’t here in the room? Why not? And how can we bring them in?

Very often, in our long careers, my colleagues and I have found ourselves brought into rooms of criminal justice decisionmakers who do not look a great deal like the communities in which they’re working. It’s not always constructive to ask a room full of white people in suits to look around themselves and ask “who’s missing?” But there are constructive ways to bring more diversity into the system, and to start that conversation moving.

If a person who’s waiting on their court date were to come into that room of decisionmakers, they’re going to ask themselves: “Do I see people I can trust, to whom I can tell my story without judgment? Do I see people who’ll be supportive of me and help me with my family situation?”

People are fearful, and they don’t know what’s going to happen. When we talk about building trust in communities, we need to honor that fear, and try to understand it.

I started doing this work when the Rodney King incident happened in Los Angeles. I was working with the Department of Justice on its 15 member National Church Burning Response Team when President Bill Clinton was in the White House. We traveled around the U.S. to communities where houses of worship had burned.  Being a part of that experience and my background in conflict management and resolution has afforded me a good sense of what people who are in vulnerable situations are feeling.  There is a lack of trust for systems and players who are perceived to hold power and resources. In this instance my role as a conciliation specialist was to pave the way for federal officers from agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigtion and the bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, along with local and state officers, to properly do investigations.

The unjust history and their personal stories are there when you go into communities. Understand: It’s just a lot. The stories that they hold. You need to pay attention to that, it’s not just coming in and saying “we want to work with you” and “we want to help.” When we talk about organizing, we talk about building that trust.

Using our dialogue to change approach, there are checklists we’ll work with, when we’re helping sites to build coalitions to tackle their issues: Does your coalition include people with different racial and ethnic backgrounds, different religious or philosophical views, and different political views? People with lived experience in the criminal justice system? Different ages? People with disabilities? Different professions? From different neighborhoods? People with different viewpoints on criminal justice? Different education levels? Folks with diverse gender identities and socioeconomic status?

Sometimes, it’s simply a question of prompting ourselves as decisionmakers to ask how we are showing up in our communities. What unconscious biases might be impacting our behaviors and decision-making?

As an African American – a Black woman, I have a vivid memory of being brought into a courtroom to observe as a judge was conducting pre-trial arraignment in a major city. Most of the defendants who came into the courtroom were Black or brown, and the judge referred to them by number, not by name. They were often asked if they could make bail, and many of them couldn’t. Then a young white defendant came in. She had been before the same judge, it turned out, although the judge still referred to her by her number. Still, she was sent straight to drug diversion. There was no question of her being asked about bail or staying in jail. I remember my own bias surfacing, and scoffing as I thought, “of course the young white woman is going to diversion.”

I don’t know the details of the young lady’s case. And it may well have been that the judge made the right call in sending her to diversion. The point is that for Black and brown people, our knowledge of the criminal justice system is shaped in the context of the history of our communities, and the history of the United States. When we see something like what I saw, we don’t always have time to think about the ins-and-outs. There’s a reaction to something we feel we’ve seen before.

The incident stuck with me, and I often talk about it with white criminal justice decisionmakers when we talk about how they show up in their communities, and the impact that they’re having.

There’s also a researched and proven tendency that in communities where there are more Black and brown folks, white decisionmakers can tend to micromanage, a little more, than they might do if they are working in communities where more people look like they do.

When it comes to the Safety and Justice Challenge, the sites that have been most successful in tackling racial inequity in the system have tackled it head-on, naming it as an issue and recognizing the role that power dynamics play in addressing it.

Some justice system leaders show up to our trainings curiously willing to ask the hard questions about why so many Black and brown people continue to show up in our jail system and why so many Black and brown people are being arrested.

Such sites have hired Black and brown community engagement managers who know the communities in which they work, and understand what it looks like to build trust, and what that means. These people have the voice of the communities in which they’re working. And that’s where the push for racial equity really starts to move things in the right direction.