Topic: Community Engagement

Amidst the ongoing national conversation about public safety and policy priorities, the voices of those most impacted must be centered in order to see real change.

To that end, the New Orleans Safety and Justice Challenge Community Advisory Group (CAG) devised a creative way to shift that conversation from City Hall and budget-planning board rooms into the streets where our neighbors live, work, and play.

The mission of the CAG is to support and participate in the successful implementation of the Safety and Justice Challenge strategies and hold public agencies and officials accountable to reducing the jail population and increase equity within the criminal system. We have always recognized that a plan or strategy without the community’s voice will not be sustainable nor successful. In our three years of existence alongside the city’s Safety and Justice Challenge commitments, we have sought numerous opportunities to bridge the gap that often exists between policy makers and their constituents, those most impacted and those making decisions at a distance.

As the pandemic has ravaged New Orleans physically, economically, and culturally, and the centuries-long movement for racial justice gained fresh steam this summer, we wanted to put our Safety and Justice Challenge Community Engagement funds to use in a way that would open the door for the essential conversations that would create a healthy, safe, and equitable city for current and future generations. We wanted to channel the energy of both the national protests for justice and the continuous efforts to safely reduce the jail population in the context of a global health crisis in an accessible and engaging way. We knew that debates over criminal system reform can easily break down without really uncovering what real people need to feel safe. Who is the system really serving if we do not have the chance to share our experiences with those in power?

In 2020, the city of New Orleans spent $313 million on “public safety,” but those dollars do not always align with the things that make people who live here feel safe. And the field of public safety is so professionalized that it often excludes many of the people whose very safety it is tasked with upholding. We wanted to close some of that disconnect by broadening the tent of voices that are involved in the discussion of what public safety means in New Orleans. Inspired by The Black Thought Project in Oakland, California, we envisioned inviting the community into the process of reimagining safety through an interactive public art installation.

We hired local barber and artist Ronnie Dents to oversee the design and installation of community chalkboards in seven locations around the city. We used grant money to pay Black-owned local businesses suffering from pandemic losses to host the boards and grassroots community groups to monitor the boards for hate speech, as well as chalk and supplies. All came together to amplify the diversity of our voices in response to the question of “what makes me feel safe?”

Local businesses hosting the chalkboards include barbershops (HeadQuarters and Juju Bag), restaurants (Neyow’s Creole Cafe, Treme Hideaway, Two Sistas ‘N Da East), a bakery (Mr. B’s) and a neighborhood market (Burnell’s Lower 9th Ward Market).  We have also partnered with community organizations to monitor the boards: Community Book Center, Lower 9th Ward Homeownership Association, Guardians Institute, Southern Solidarity, VAYLA and Roots of Music.

The answers shared on the boards have been as diverse as “being anywhere the police aren’t” to “the color purple” and even reflections on religion and spirituality. “The most fulfilling part of the project has been the conversations that have been had as a result of the prompt,” says Dents. “I look forward to what thoughts and attitudes and actions come as a result of answering this very important question.”

The timing of the project to coincide with local elections in November and December was intentional. We wanted to create an opportunity for conversation, even in a socially-distanced way, for neighbors, business owners, and community members that could frame criminal system reform in a community-rooted way. Ultimately our hope is that campaigning and elected officials would listen to the citizens of New Orleans and be spurred on by what residents actually value around safety and justice.

Our Community Advisory Group is a diverse and representative group of New Orleans residents who volunteer our time and energy to hold the city’s stakeholders accountable to the Challenge strategies. We are looking forward to seeing more answers from the community about what makes them feel safe, as this project plays out over the coming months.

The people of New Orleans are speaking up about how we can keep each other safe. Will our public officials listen?

—Emily Rhodes is a member of the Community Advisory Group, New Orleans Safety and Justice Challenge and works for the Center for Employment Opportunities in New Orleans.

—Natalie Sharp is the Community Advisory Group Coordinator and works at Travis Hill School, which has a school located inside of New Orleans’ juvenile detention center and adult jail.

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

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  

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.

At the National Center for Victims of Crime, we have come to realize that the majority of the people in our jails and prison are victims of crime themselves.

We hope to shed light on the link between experiencing trauma or victimization and incarceration in our new video series.

We hope this series will encourage cities and counties across the country to develop and provide programs for crime victims who are behind bars  to overcome their traumatic pasts, and live happier, more fulfilling lives.

The series focuses on the experiences of three people: Lisa James, David Garlock, and Richard Smith, all alumni of Just Leadership USA—a national nonprofit dedicated to decarcerating the United States by educating, elevating and empowering the people and communities most impacted by systemic racism. Each of them has a lived history of victimization, trauma, and incarceration. These videos focus on them as survivors, examining their pasts through their own words. We are extremely thankful that Lisa, David, and Richard were willing to share their stories in such an honest, open, and vulnerable way.

The interviewer and narrator, Dr. Justin Ramsdell, Assistant Professor of Psychology at George Mason University, provides us with an introductory video providing background on the series and  guides us through four additional videos on: what makes victimization traumatic; developmental effects of victimization and trauma; connecting victimization and incarceration; and treatment within the criminal justice system

The videos are an effort to break down the false dichotomy between victims and offenders. The videos do not suggest that being a victim necessarily leads a person to involvement with the criminal legal system, later on. But they provide insight as to how these experiences are sometimes connected, and why the trauma experiences of incarcerated individuals need to be addressed. Just as we provide someone who is diabetic in jail with proper treatment, we should provide help to someone with a history of abuse.

One way that cities and counties can begin to address this issue is by reaching out to victim organizations in their communities who may be able to provide assistance to individuals inside the jail and those who are re-entering their communities.

—Renee Williams is the Executive Director of the National Center for Victims of Crime