Topic: Community Engagement

The mass uprisings spurred by the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black Americans, have led many people to ask what role police should play in keeping communities safe. Despite this focus on policing, an observer of the criminal legal system might tell you that how police enforce laws is often influenced by how prosecutors handle criminal cases. We, as former prosecutors working to assist jurisdictions across the country with justice reform, believe the strategies outlined below are starting points for prosecutors to help promote a new vision of justice.

As cities explore ways to safely reduce the footprint of law enforcement, is there a reckoning that needs to happen for prosecutors? How might prosecutors better reflect communities’ values for public safety and provide community-driven solutions to crime? Given that prosecutors wield substantial influence over how laws may be enforced, we will benefit from prosecutorial approaches that improve people’s ability to sustain their own safety and the wellness of their communities.

As our colleagues at the Center for Court Innovation have set forth in Shrinking the Footprint of Police: Six Ideas for Enhancing Safety, there are proven ways for localities to invest in solutions that increase safety, limit the use of police, and remain rooted in anti-racist, community centered practices.

Prosecutors, too, have the ability—and indeed, an opportunity—to take these efforts even further.

This moment can inspire prosecutors, who see their role as representing the interests of the “the People” (their constituents), to forge new practices, partnerships, and programs that complement community-led safety efforts.

New Practices

First, prosecutors can develop practices that prioritize the well-being of survivors and accused people. Enter, again, the outside observer of the criminal legal system. This person sees prosecutors mostly urging swift legal action against people arrested for crimes. And the consequences are primarily retributive in nature: file charges, seek a conviction, and pursue an accompanying sentence. Prosecutors are trained to review an accused person’s criminal history and the alleged offense to recommend how the justice system should respond to the accused. These factors are indeed relevant to how cases might best be resolved, but how might early decision-making improve with more information? Perhaps the accused has a long trauma history, has unmet mental health needs, or is battling a substance use disorder without resources to address it. What if one or many of these factors contributed to the alleged offense? Prosecutors would do well to embrace a more holistic view of who accused people are early and often.

Prosecutors, who often advocate for sentencing outcomes, can also push for options other than jail to promote a person’s healing and community restoration. This concept is not new to prosecutors. They often obtain similar information, about how harm has affected someone, to better understand survivors and witnesses on their cases. Given that accused people are also part of communities that we want to keep safe, it is important to extend this practice to them.

New Partnerships

Along with developing the internal practices needed to ensure consistency between the office’s mission and its culture, prosecutor’s offices must embrace existing community solutions early and often. Community-based organizations (CBOs) provide tailored and targeted services that are needed in community as supplements to the social services provided by city and state government. Prosecutors can use these services as early on in cases as possible. In certain instances, they can also hold off on prosecuting people while they participate in these programs, to reduce further exposure to the court system. As an office beholden to its constituents and charged with protecting community safety, prosecutors must be familiar with and use community-based organizations and the services they provide as a bridge between the criminal justice system and communities affected by crime. Research supports this approach.

New & Expanded Programs

Once formal pathways to community-based services are in place, prosecutors may begin to identify gaps in the landscape to safely meet people’s needs outside of the court system. Maybe there’s a need for more programs that can reflect the cultural and ethnic needs of constituents. Perhaps services need to be available beyond business hours to serve people at the most critical times. There may also be a demand for more holistic programming that can offer housing and employment support—for accused people and their families—to help address the root causes of contact with the court system.

Whatever the needs may be, localities must be in a position to meet them if they intend to provide the supports that can preemptively address community needs. This kind of response takes investment, and prosecutors are in a unique position to offer a much-needed assist. Prosecutor’s offices often have access to civil asset forfeiture funds, which allow police and prosecutors to seize property with a suspected connection to criminal activity. These resources are often funneled back into the budgets of these same entities to spend in ways that promote public safety. To this end, prosecutors could invest asset forfeiture funds in local organizations that provide services to court-involved people.

Safe communities require investment—in networks and resources that can respond more nimbly, and often more affordably, than government might sometimes be able to do. At this moment of reckoning, prosecutors, too, can examine ways to heed communities’ renewed concerns about the criminal legal system.

Prosecutors can harness their power as representing “the People” to heed their call to broaden our view of how to keep them safe. This cannot happen unless we promote a culture that prioritizes healing and well-being over convictions. Indeed, prosecutors, who see their role as seeking justice can lead the charge to promote more human-centered approaches, for people accused of crime and survivors.

The criminal justice reform movement has often overlooked the inclusion of victims in their efforts. It has also misunderstood and frequently miscommunicated who victims are. In fact, when the National Center for Victims of Crime entered into the conversation about reform, people asked, “why are victims interested in reform, and why should they be included in the process?”

The answer for those of us in the field is clear – victims are at the moral center of the criminal justice system. Soliciting victims’ opinions on issues that will affect their lives is the right, smart, and just thing to do. However, reformers may be surprised that crime survivors are often their strongest allies and supporters. That’s because in the majority of cases, those who have committed a crime have also survived trauma and identify as victims themselves.

Ninety percent of individuals who have been, or are, incarcerated, are also crime victims. Labeling someone an “ex-con”, “felon”, or “prisoner”, however, clouds our perception of them and their perception of themselves.  Attaching these labels to individuals attaches the corresponding stigma of being “bad” and “not deserving” of assistance and crucial services to address their trauma. While in fact, this assistance is what may help them to heal and live productive lives. “The worst part of repeatedly hearing your negative definition of me, is that I begin to believe it myself,” wrote Eddie Ellis, the late justice reform leader.

The taint of these labels extends to the places where people who have been incarcerated, and are crime survivors, live.  We call them “bad neighborhoods” making it easier to leave them unprotected and under-resourced rather than providing these places with treatment, assistance, security and compassion.

In 2016 the Department of Justice Office of Justice announced that it would no longer use the words “felon” or “convict”, and in 2018 Washington state’s reentry council urged people to “use accurate and non-stigmatizing language” to describe individuals who have been formerly incarcerated. Such people are “often characterized as being part of a criminal underclass”, the council said. While the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution to adopt the practice of using “human-first language”, recently.

As we continue to reform the criminal justice system, let’s ensure that the voices of victims are heard and considered.  Let’s also stop defining others by the worst thing that they have done in their lives and create additional barriers to their success and healing. As Eddie Ellis said, “no single moment or experience should define any of our lives forever. Least of all in words.”

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

You can watch a Facebook Live video on this subject featuring Ronald Simpson-Bey of JustLeadershipUSA and Erik Henderson of San Francisco County, and Mai Fernandez of the National Center for Victims of Crime on the MacArthur Foundation’s Facebook page.  

Depending on one’s perspective, the role of law enforcement is often summarized into catchy but vague terms; peacekeeper, guardian, warrior, gatekeeper, savior, and enforcer are some of the most common. But none completely captures the multifaceted role we often play in communities around the world.

To a survivor of domestic violence or a parent with a choking infant, a police officer, sheriff’s deputy, or trooper might be a welcome source of support. To someone who was swept up as part of a “tough on crime” initiative, law enforcement officers are often viewed as warriors or enforcers.

The history of law enforcement shows that these roles are dynamic and change over time. In many communities, law enforcement agencies are at a critical nexus of redefining their role as gatekeepers to the criminal justice system.

With this in mind, the Vera Institute of Justice recently released a report entitled “Gatekeepers: The Role of Police in Ending Mass Incarceration,” outlining a roadmap to change which includes a series of recommendations that go beyond encouraging the establishment of alternatives to arrest programs.

The report delves into the need to address structural factors to alleviate the pressure on law enforcement agencies to arrest, and outlines how to do this through partnerships with other stakeholders such as community-based service providers and elected officials.

It’s important that we reinforce this point— that while the title of the report focuses on police and other law enforcement officials as “gatekeepers,” the report’s substance goes much deeper, highlighting the need for community-wide collaboration, and making it very clear that responsibility for the shift away from mass incarceration goes far beyond law enforcement, alone.

In truth, most individuals enter the field of law enforcement to help people and would rather have other options beyond arrest to respond to public safety challenges. In simplest terms, law enforcement officers do not want to bring people to jail at all hours of the day and night any more than people want to be brought to jail – particularly when alternatives to arrest, if available, would be a far better tool.

In areas where alternatives to arrest and/or booking exist, law enforcement takes full advantage of these non-punitive options, which is better for the citizen with whom they’re dealing, and gets officers back on the street and able to respond to calls for service faster and interdict violent crime. However, when options and discretion are limited, jail becomes the default. Law enforcement cannot reduce custodial arrests alone; government at all levels must work to provide alternatives.

Alternatives to arrest practices, like pre-arrest diversion and the use of crisis response or triage centers, show great promise to reduce both the collateral consequences of contact with the justice system and recidivism. This paradigm shift to increase law enforcement discretion to use non-punitive options is growing in the work of both local police agencies and national entities.

There are plenty of good local examples, but here are two:

• Tallahassee/Leon County, Florida Pre-Arrest Diversion, Adult Civil Citation (ACC) program: A four-year evaluation of this program, which started in 2013, showed that law enforcement, working directly in partnership with community-based behavioral health professionals, reduced the recidivism rate by approximately 80% for program participants. In addition, the 84% of participants who successfully completed the program avoided arrest records and any accompanying collateral consequences. Legislation passed in Florida in 2018 mandates Adult Civil Citation programs in every Florida county, leading to improved public safety, reduced impact on human dignity, and future opportunities by avoiding the life-long consequences of an arrest record.
• Milwaukee, Wisconsin, The Sisters Program: From 2013 to 2015, 704 women were arrested in Milwaukee 1,292 times, and 83% of those arrests occurred in just two police districts. The Sisters Program is a community-police partnership that offers diversion from the justice system, giving women the opportunity to change their lives and avoid future incarceration, fines, or other judgements. The Sisters Program is designed to create a citywide policy that uses a public health-based approach to street prostitution and sex trafficking, rather than a criminal justice approach that criminalizes women. Women diverted by the Milwaukee Police Department to the Program are connected to a variety of resources, including crisis management, counseling, advocacy, assistance with obtaining housing, and other critical resources.

On the national level, beyond participating in the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge, the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) has worked on several projects to promote justice system change and support law enforcement efforts to build stronger community-police relationships. Through these projects, IACP has created resources to support law enforcement in pretrial justice reform, conducted a study of citation-in-lieu of arrest programs that demonstrates widespread support for this practice, and created the One Mind Campaign to ensure successful interactions between police officers and people affected by mental illness.

So, how does this shift in culture and practices occur?

The reality in many communities is that few services are available all day, all night, and all year round, as law enforcement are, so they become the default resource for immediate help. Incidentally, that’s why people tend to call upon the police for so many different things.

Growing the capacity and availability of community-based treatment and services in order to create options for police—like diversion programs and community drop-off centers—takes collaboration among several local systems, including justice, behavioral and public health, medical, and local government. To be clear, having these resources available will reduce the reliance on a criminal justice response.

Additionally, creating 24/7/365 non-emergency help hotlines in communities can also reduce the reliance on law enforcement so that their calls for service are for instances in which there are public safety concerns.

These recommendations may seem simple and straightforward, but the process of implementing them can be complex. By working collaboratively with community-based partners, stakeholders can begin to identify gaps in treatment service capacity and combine expertise to work on system-wide solutions to fill those gaps, including identifying sources of state and federal funding and combining or co-locating local resources.

For many justice system agencies, the need for alternatives is evident, but the path to establishing them is uncertain. The wide variety of alternatives to arrest that communities and law enforcement are using can be overwhelming; it raises questions of what is the “best” or “most effective” approach.

There are also competing interests between addressing the real need for restructuring how communities seek and provide help versus gaining traction and showing progress by tackling the low-hanging fruit. New approaches might be difficult to introduce to the rank and file, such as the concept of harm reduction, which is a set of practical strategies and ideas aimed at reducing negative consequences associated with drug use. Alternatives to arrest that incorporate harm reduction may be foreign to law enforcement who were trained to act on a binary choice – whether or not the person they are dealing with has “done wrong”.

This uncertainty should not be a barrier to exploring alternatives to arrest, however. It should be an incentive. When there is uncertainty, innovation can thrive. The climate is ripe for new ideas that go beyond low-hanging fruit and create deeper structural changes.

In the end, criminal justice reform is not simply police reform. We welcome and encourage all efforts to provide law enforcement officers meaningful alternatives to arrest to better serve our communities.

—Dr. Ronal Serpas retired in 2014 as Chief of Police in New Orleans, Louisiana. Previously he was Chief of Police in Nashville, Tennessee, between 2004 and 2010, and Chief of the Washington State Patrol between 2001 and 2004. He is now a Professor of Practice in the Criminology Department at Loyola University, New Orleans, and is the Executive Director of Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration. He is a past Vice President and member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP).

Police and prosecutors are leaders in public safety and the criminal justice system. The challenges they face are complicated, ranging from responding to violent crime to addressing the unmet need for treatment and services related to mental illness and/or substance use disorder in the communities they serve. This gap in community-based treatment and services, coupled with complex societal changes and challenges—including income inequality and the resulting wealth gap—contributes to the justice system being the de facto response. As such, the responsibilities of traditional public safety stakeholders have broadened to include innovative approaches, including working with community-based public health partners.

The key to navigating these evolving and innovative strategies is through partnerships. Collaboration among justice system stakeholders is a common theme woven into the recommendations of scores of reports, toolkits, and other resources. However, budget and resource limitations, varying community and stakeholder perspectives and priorities, and balancing short-term needs with planning for long-term sustainability can create strains on individual agencies that have committed to these partnerships. These factors, while challenging, are not insurmountable.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys recently published a report on recommendations made during a roundtable on police-prosecutor collaboration held in August 2018 in Pennington County, South Dakota, with law enforcement and prosecutorial leaders from Harris County, Texas; Pennington County, South Dakota; Orleans Parrish, Louisiana; and Milwaukee County, Wisconsin.

These leaders identified practices that enable their agencies to address violent crime, create diversion programs, and pilot emerging tools, such as risk assessments, with careful consideration. The practices include devoting attention to roles and responsibilities at each justice system decision point, reviewing logistical and administrative processes so they best facilitate information and data sharing, and creating opportunities for feedback between their agencies and the community, as well as between all levels of staff from leadership to front-line officers and deputies.

The details and processes of how jurisdictions implement their programs and partnerships often vary. There is no one-size-fits all approach, so this report instead focuses on high-level values and processes that promote productive relationship building to facilitate collaboration. For all jurisdictions seeking to build new relationships within their justice systems, the report encourages police and prosecutors to engage their communities and other stakeholders, promote shared messaging and accountability between police and prosecutors, and make an effort to use and reinvest agency resources as efficiently as possible. The challenges police and prosecutors face can be daunting, but through partnerships, jurisdictions can create effective solutions that will benefit both their agencies and the communities they serve.

Local organizers have galvanized an entire region in favor of shutting down the Workhouse, a place they see as emblematic of official indifference towards the plight of needy residents. 

The first time Inez Bordeaux told her story in front of a crowd, she was nervous.

It was April 2018 and dozens of people were packed into a small music venue in St. Louis to raise money for a campaign called Close the Workhouse. The fundraiser doubled as a launch party for the campaign, which is focused on building political pressure to shut down the city’s medium-security jail, known as the Workhouse.

“The very existence of the Workhouse shows me that this city is willing to throw people away,” said Bordeaux, a nurse and mother of four who spent 30 days in the Workhouse in 2016.

She took a deep breath as she described the roaches and rats in the group cell she shared with other women. Water leaked from the ceilings, she said, and black mold grew across the walls. City officials have maintained that the facility is clean and well-functioning.

“Being in a place that’s not fit for animals—let alone humans—and being treated like you’re less than nothing changes you in a way that leaves a stain on you,” she told the crowd. “It’s irreversible.”

Months earlier, nonprofit law firm ArchCity Defenders had filed a lawsuit against the city over conditions at the Workhouse, calling them “unspeakably hellish” and “inhumane”—allegations the city disputes.

The lawsuit came after a July 2017 heatwave, during which people locked inside the 53-year-old brick building screamed for help. As temperatures soared, organizers raised money to bail people out of the Workhouse. Then, they started planning a campaign to shut it down.

But the organizing that led to Close the Workhouse actually started years earlier, in 2014, after Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson killed 18-year-old Michael Brown.

Many people around the country know that Brown’s death led to an uprising in the Ferguson suburb of St. Louis in 2014. But the activists who started out protesting in the streets back then have not stopped working. Five years later, they continue to demand accountability as they build political power.

“We started with policing and we went straight to politics,” said Michelle Higgins, the lead organizer for Close the Workhouse. “We decided that people who have power need to be held accountable by the people who put them in power.”

I spoke with Higgins about her work while reporting on Close the Workhouse for 70 Million, an open-source podcast about justice reform efforts across the country, which receives funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge.

Along with prominent St. Louis organizer Kayla Reed, Higgins co-directs Action St. Louis—a black-led millennial activist collective. Last year, the group helped unseat Bob McCulloch, the St. Louis county prosecutor who declined to bring charges against Officer Wilson. McCulloch held the prosecutor seat for 28 years before his loss to former Ferguson councilman Wesley Bell. Bell campaigned on a criminal justice reform platform—much like St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, who took office in 2017 and has been working with the Vera Institute of Justice to implement data-driven reforms to reduce incarceration and racial disparities.

As policymakers started moving toward reform, Action St. Louis teamed up with other grassroots groups and nonprofits to host community discussions on ways to reimagine public safety. And they made it a priority to center the ideas of people directly affected by the system, Higgins said.

“And that’s where we got Close the Workhouse,” she said. “It’s something we’ve all wanted to see. But it’s not something that we came up with because it’s trendy, it looks good and it rolls well off the tongue—impacted people were at the center of launching this campaign because they are the ones who brought this demand.”

What’s more, they want the city to take the jail’s annual $16 million budget and reinvest it in community programs and social services.

Inez Bordeaux has grown into one of the campaign’s main organizers since speaking at the fundraiser last year. She has shared her story countless times—both on the streets and in the halls of power.

Twice a week, she coordinates volunteers and heads out to busy St. Louis intersections to hand out fliers and tell people why she wants to shut down the jail. And last November, she stood in front of a group of aldermen, which are the equivalent of city council members, and told them all about her time inside the Workhouse.

“That 30 days has radicalized me, it has changed me,” she said emphatically, standing behind a podium inside St. Louis City Hall. “And so when I say that I want the Workhouse to be closed—don’t misunderstand me. I’m not asking. It is not a request. I am demanding it.”