Report

Interagency Collaboration Policing Pretrial and Bail August 13, 2019

Gatekeepers: The Role of Police in Ending Mass Incarceration

Vera Institute of Justice

Police in America arrest millions of people each year, and the likelihood that arrest will lead to jail incarceration has increased steadily: for every 100 arrests police officers made in 2016, there were 99 jail admissions, up from 70 jail admissions for every 100 arrests in 1994. Ending mass incarceration and repairing its extensive collateral consequences thus must begin by focusing on the front end of the system: police work. Recognizing the roughly 18,000 police agencies around the country as gatekeepers of the system, this report explores the factors driving mass enforcement, particularly of low-level offenses; what police agencies could do instead with the right community investment, national and local leadership, and officer training, incentives, and support; and policies that could shift the policing paradigm away from the reflexive use of enforcement, which unnecessarily criminalizes people and leads directly to the jailhouse door.

Policing During the Coronavirus Pandemic – and Beyond

By: Betsy Pearl

Community Engagement COVID Policing January 31, 2019

In the past month, the COVID-19 crisis has collided with another American epidemic: mass incarceration. The results have been nothing short of disastrous. Eight of the top ten largest outbreaks in America are in correctional facilities, according to data on COVID-19 hotspots compiled by the New York Times. Over 14,000 incarcerated people have tested positive in state and federal prisons, and countless more infections have likely gone undetected due to lack of testing. Tragically, COVID-19 continues to spread behind bars, since inadequate healthcare and overcrowded, unsanitary conditions have turned correctional facilities into a “petri dish” for the virus.

To protect incarcerated individuals and corrections officers alike, some jurisdictions are taking promising steps to reduce correctional populations, including granting early release to some incarcerated individuals. Jurisdictions must pair these crucial early release efforts with reforms aimed at keeping people from entering jails and prisons in the first place – starting with modifications to policing practices.

Police are the gatekeepers to the criminal justice system, and as first responders, they are vulnerable to the spread of COVID-19. As of late April, nearly 4,900 New York Police Department officers had tested positive for the coronavirus, and 37 officers had tragically lost their lives. And in Detroit, over 1,000 officers – roughly 35 percent of the Detroit Police Department – have spent time in quarantine since the outbreak began. To protect officers and residents alike, jurisdictions must ensure that policing practices are in line with the latest public health guidelines for physical distancing and other health precautions.

Policing for the 21st Century

By rethinking policing practices, city officials can curtail jail admissions – and critically, can help safeguard law enforcement officers and the communities they serve. Police departments are making critical changes, like minimizing police stops and custodial arrests, in response to the spread of the pandemic. These urgent reforms are also aligned with 21st century policing principles, according to Ron Davis, the former head of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services at the U.S. Department of Justice.

“Police must now apply the public health model of “do no harm first” in making decisions, from arrests to uses of force,” said Mr. Davis in an interview with the Center for American Progress.  “Making arrests must transition from being a common tool used by law enforcement to becoming literally a tool of last resort.”

It’s also not true that incorporating physical distancing or making other changes to policing practices will jeopardize public safety, Mr. Davis said.

“The police alone cannot make a community safe. And we have learned over the years that simply adding more police does not equate to more public safety. It takes an entire community working with the police to sustain long-term public safety,” he said. “So, as we decrease the physical footprint of law enforcement in the community, it doesn’t automatically mean that public safety is compromised or that crime is going to go up.”

Instead, cities must also invest in holistic strategies for preventing and reducing crime, from youth engagement to mental health services to diversion programming. “In short,” Mr. Davis explains, “we must reimagine policing so that it relies less on physical interventions and more on community partnerships.”

Recommendations for policing during the COVID-19 pandemic

With these goals in mind, the Center for American Progress released the following recommended policy changes that police departments are adopting to protect officers and prevent the further spread of COVID-19 behind bars and within the community:

  1. Drastically reduce the number of police stops and custodial arrests. Law enforcement agencies must decrease enforcement actions for lower-level offenses, focusing instead on the most serious cases. Custodial arrests should be reserved only for the small subset of individuals who pose a clear risk to public safety. Several jurisdictions have taken already steps to limit custodial arrests, including Washington, D.C., where Metropolitan Police Department Chief Peter Newsham has expanded the types of offenses that are eligible for citation and release. Likewise, the Philadelphia Police Department postponed arrests for many categories of non-violent crimes, including all narcotics offenses, burglary, prostitution, vandalism, and others.
  2. Limit the amount of calls for service that officers respond to in person. Police departments must limit officers’ exposure to the virus by reducing in-person responses for nonemergency issues. Officers should respond in-person only when there is an imminent threat to public safety or in instances where investigation or evidence collection cannot be delayed. In cities like Syracuse, NY, for example, law enforcement has temporarily shifted protocols for responding to calls for service to emphasize online and over-the-phone incident reporting.
  3. Prioritize responding to and preventing domestic violence. Even during the pandemic, not everyone is safer at home – including survivors and those at risk of domestic violence. Law enforcement agencies need to train officers to recognize the warning signs and understand the increased risk of intimate partner violence in the context of the current crisis. Agencies should prominently feature hotline numbers and other resources from local service providers alongside all public guidance related to COVID-19. In Minnesota, the state Department of Public Safety instructed local law enforcement agencies that residents who are not safe in their homes must be allowed to relocate, without risking a violation of the governor’s executive order. Likewise, the city of Chicago has partnered with ride-sharing services provide free rides for those who contact the Illinois Domestic Violence Hotline, helping to ensure that those who need to relocate are able to do so.
  4. Obtain and distribute personal protective equipment (PPE) to every officer to use while on duty. Law enforcement agencies must provide officers with personal protective equipment to protect their health and prevent additional spread of the virus. In cities such as Austin, Texas, and Philadelphia, for example, police officers are required to wear face masks while on duty. Agencies must also provide access to COVID-19 testing and trainings on personal safety precautions, such as physical distancing, sanitizing procedures, and recognizing the symptoms of COVID-19. In addition to providing PPE kits to patrol officers, the Los Angeles Police Department provided guidance for officers on using this equipment and maintaining safe interactions with the public.
  5. Consider contracting with local hotels to allow officers to isolate. Jurisdictions may need to provide safe lodging for first responders, who are at heightened risk of exposure to COVID-19 and may be required to distance themselves from their household and colleagues. The city of Seattle, for example, contracted an entire hotel to provide accommodations for first responders and other essential city employees, including police, firefighters, emergency medical services (EMS), and transportation workers.

Why More Cities Are Establishing Offices of Neighborhood Safety

By: Betsy Pearl

Community Engagement Featured Jurisdictions Policing October 13, 2018

In 2020, Americans across the country joined in protest to demand an end to racial injustice and police violence. As more and more Americans begin to reconsider the role of law enforcement in our society, city leaders have a unique opportunity to re-envision their approach to strengthening community safety and wellbeing.

Sparked by a series of high-profile incidences of police violence against the Black community, the protests drew national attention to the outsize role of policing in many American cities. The number of police officers nationwide has ballooned over the past several decades, yielding only modest impacts on crime rates, at best. From resolving noise complaints to reversing overdoses, our society has come to rely on police officers to respond to a broad swath of issues beyond simply responding to crime. The expansion of policing has created disproportionate harm for Black Americans, who are unjustly subjected to higher rates of arrest, incarceration, and aggressive enforcement tactics. All too often, contact with the police can turn fatal. Police violence is now among the leading cause of death for Black men, one in 100 of whom will be killed by law enforcement in their lifetimes.

Now, building on years of work from grassroots campaigns and local advocates, the movement to shrink the footprint of the police is gaining momentum in communities nationwide. As the calls for change grow louder, local governments are increasingly looking to rethink their approach to public safety to better meet the needs of residents. A new Center for American Progress report—“Beyond Policing: Investing in Offices of Neighborhood Safety”—offers a roadmap for cities to sustainably shift toward a community-driven approach to public safety, starting by establishing a civilian Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS).

An ONS serves as a hub for nonpunitive public safety solutions, which might include violence interruption, job readiness programs, civilian first responders, transformative mentoring, and others. Crucially, such offices are situated outside the justice system and staffed entirely by civilians, setting them apart from traditional public safety agencies. By establishing an ONS, local governments officials have a unique opportunity to ensure that data-driven community safety strategies receive the sustained financial and political support necessary to create meaningful impact. And by embedding nonpunitive approaches into the fabric of government, city leaders send a powerful message about the importance of these strategies – an important step towards changing the narrative around public safety.

The ONS model was pioneered in Richmond, California, where community-driven strategies like the Peacemaker Fellowship have contributed to significant reductions in citywide homicide rates. When Richmond established its ONS in 2007, the city had the highest homicide rate in the state of California. That year, the city recorded 45.9 homicides per 100,000 people—eight times the national average. Ten years later, in 2017, the city’s homicide rate had fallen by 80 percent, to nine per 100,000.

As cities consider launching such offices, local leaders should think about the following:

  • Creating a community-driven agenda: Cities should consider creating a permanent pathway for residents to engage with the ONS and shape the development and implementation of public safety policies. The city of New York, for example, is institutionalizing the community’s role in policymaking through NeighborhoodStat, an initiative operated by the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety. NeighborhoodStat is a joint problem-solving process that empowers residents of high-crime public housing developments to work directly with city agencies to craft a public safety agenda that is grounded in the community’s needs.
  • Budgeting: Cities should make a sustained investment in their ONS, ideally through the municipal budgeting process. Some jurisdictions have established new taxes to create dedicated revenues streams for community-based interventions. Jurisdictions in which marijuana sales are legal may also consider earmarking a portion of tax revenue to support community safety initiatives. Other options for funding community-based safety interventions include limiting the growth of the police department’s budget, or shrinking it, and redirecting funds toward community safety priorities.
  • Promoting accountability: ONSs should be held accountable for achieving meaningful improvements in public safety. City leadership must set clear and realistic outcomes and goals and then hold ONS leadership accountable for meeting these milestones over the specified period of time. City leaders should work with ONSs to set realistic public safety goals, using the evidence base from other jurisdictions as a guide.
  • Creating flexibility: City officials should recognize that community-based interventions differ from traditional government programming, and the structure and function of the ONS should reflect this. Cities must consider creating flexibility for ONSs to operate outside the regulations that were developed to fit traditional government agencies. For example, an ONS must be permitted to recruit job candidates from outside the civil service sector, and to hire employees with justice system involvement.
  • Engaging credible messengers: When preparing to launch an ONS, local leaders should consider how they want to engage credible messengers—community members who are able to connect with high-risk individuals based on their shared backgrounds and life experiences. Some cities have hired credible messengers directly into full-time employment with the municipal government, whereas others contract with nonprofit organizations to provide services in neighborhoods across the city. Regardless of model, cities should support the professionalization of credible messengers. Their work is difficult and potentially dangerous, and cities should invest in the professional development and support they need to succeed.

The ONS model represents a powerful tool for institutionalizing community-based interventions. By establishing an ONS, local leaders can take the first step toward shrinking the footprint of policing and making a meaningful investment in public safety beyond policing.

How We’re Engaging the Community in Improving the Criminal Justice System in Charleston County, SC

By: Kristy Danford

Community Engagement Featured Jurisdictions Policing October 12, 2018

Charleston County sustainably reduced our jail population by 20 percent between 2014 and 2019, as part of our work on the Safety & Justice Challenge.  The efforts over the last several years underscore the importance of intentional, data-guided policies and practices that engage the community in improving the local criminal justice system. Our work has been done under the auspices of the Charleston County Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, where I serve as project director. It’s a collaborative council of elected and senior officials and community representatives that formed in 2015.

In 2019 we launched an initiative to better inform and involve the community. Currently, we have four collaborative working groups, including community representatives and system leaders, working on our next strategic plan.

The workgroups are focusing on: community engagement and disparity; diversion and deflection from the criminal justice system; bond and reentry; and the processing of cases in our court system. Each group is using identified community priorities, system trends and more recent lessons learned—from the pandemic and the growing movement for racial justice—to set goals that will guide reforms to better serve the community in the years to come.

To get here, we’ve traveled a journey. In 2018 we published a report that explored a variety of racial and ethnic inequities locally and nationally, dissected system decision points, and reviewed national examples of reform. We learned by 2017, Black individuals were brought to jail on five single, low-level charges 2.61 times as often as white individuals, a rate that was almost 30 percent lower than it was in 2014 before we started reducing bookings. Still, in 2017 we incarcerated Black individuals more than seven times the rate of white individuals.

In 2019, the council launched our Dialogue to Change project to expand community engagement while better informing and involving the community in creating our next strategic plan.

We worked closely with community representatives and Everyday Democracy, technical assistance providers to the Safety and Justice Challenge, to form a community coalition that helped to: Build an infrastructure for outreach and meaningful engagement; hold dialogues in constructive spaces to share perspectives on key criminal justice system challenges, foster relationships, and explore ideas for moving forward; and conclude with an Action Forum to determine community priorities for the next strategic plan.

The group identified parts of the community not yet engaged in the discussion, figured out how to include them, and made it happen. We engaged more than 1,000 people in the Dialogue To Change process: more than 450 people came to large community discussions; 101 people came to 11 recurring small group roundtable dialogs; and more than 650 people took part in a community survey.

Here’s a video that gives an overview of the process.

Participants reacted positively throughout, and in the end five broad themes emerged:

  • Racial bias and socioeconomic factors, such as poverty and low educational attainment, exacerbate disparity in the justice system.
  • The everyday conduct and behaviors of system agents, such as police officers, defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges, impacts perceptions of trustworthiness, accountability, and transparency of the criminal justice system.
  • There are major challenges for individuals returning to the community from incarceration, such as system-related financial obligations, housing, different kinds of treatment, transportation, employment, and regaining community trust.
  • Outcomes produced by the local criminal justice system need to be improved.
  • Engagement strategies such as transparent reporting, public forums, and community conversations are helpful in improving the local justice system.

The community survey also showed common perceptions of the local criminal justice system: People agree that improvements are needed, have concerns over safety, and want to know more. People want more to be done to improve fairness and address disparities, bonding practices, the time it takes to bring cases to justice, and recidivism.

At the action forum, we identified these priorities:

  • Increase education, training, and awareness for justice system stakeholders
    • Special trained units for special populations (mental health)
    • Training (sensitivity), substance abuse, language/human
  • Create more opportunities for community members to become actively involved and engaged
    • Community buy-ins
    • More involvement between the council and the community
  • Build on efforts and activities that the council is doing
    • Provide adequate funding for council based on qualitative results
    • Focus on the challenges of re-entry from prison and jail
  • Establish partnerships and collaborations that will support local justice reform
    • Prevention before intervention
    • Find community leaders to be the face and voice of this advocacy

Our strategic plan will be finalized this summer and is shaping up to keep community engagement at the forefront. We anticipate it will include a combination of low or no-cost objectives that can be enacted with minimal financial or policy hurdles, as well as more ambitious goals for collaborative reform through community engagement.

—Kristy Danford is the Project Director at Charleston County Criminal Justice Coordinating Council.

The Pandemic is Changing the Criminal Justice Process

By: Lars Trautman

Courts COVID Policing May 31, 2017

If you could go to a courthouse right now, the sound you would hear is not just the same eerie silence echoing elsewhere in society, from empty stores to unused playgrounds. It is the sound of the gears of justice grinding to a halt as jurisdictions scramble to avoid the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Emergency measures that keep people out of courthouses, however, raise questions of what process is “due” in times of crisis and how the criminal justice process will be altered if and when normalcy returns.

With its people-centered practices and typically close quarters, the justice system is especially vulnerable to the coronavirus, and courts across the country have postponed proceedings and restricted public access to facilities in response. Jury trials have been deferred, initial appearances delayed and correctional facilities placed on lockdown.

Individual modifications to regular business may seem minor or innocuous, but even relatively short procedural freezes raise immediate due process concerns. Elongating the period between an arrest and a first appearance extends the time for which individuals sit in jail cells without judicial oversight or the chance to challenge either the allegations or the detention. At the other end of the process, the cancellation of jury trials may be a logical means of social distancing, but it similarly reduces a critical constitutional right into a paper tiger.

Defendants are not the only ones caught in this disturbing state of limbo. Prosecutors are also paralyzed by the inability to try defendants or otherwise pull many of the levers of justice. Likewise, victims and witnesses must wait even longer to gain closure and end their involvement with the justice system.

Since delaying normal operations creates issues this troubling, solutions must work to reduce the stressors that create delays wherever possible. In practical terms, this means using each decisional chokepoint—from arrest and charging decisions to pretrial release and sentencing—to shrink the system. This will keep many low-risk individuals out of the system entirely and free up scarce court capacity for those who are left.

Thankfully, local leaders are already taking these kinds of steps. Police departments everywhere should consider following the lead of the Portland Police Bureau, which in agreement with the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office started issuing citations for misdemeanors more frequently rather than taking people to jail. Likewise, prosecutors could take a cue from the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, which is working with the Public Defender’s Office to identify detained individuals who can be safely released.

In addition to serving as short-term Band-Aids, these strategies will ultimately help the justice system recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Few jurisdictions can afford case backlogs accruing to already packed dockets or additional detainees in crowded jails. As such, these ad hoc measures represent the best chance many jurisdictions will have to avoid the impossibly high caseloads that deferring cases for any meaningful period of time will create.

Beyond weathering the potential surge of cases once the justice system lifts its finger off the pause button, such policies will help dictate the future course of criminal justice reform as the public and policymakers judge the results in the coming months. Places that see crime rates drop or remain static will have momentum on their side should they wish to make these temporary measures permanent. On the other hand, those in which crime of any sort rises can expect tough-on-crime voices to argue for a return to the incarceration-heavy policies of yesteryear.

But the criminal justice community must force policymakers and the public to look deeper than this simple equation, in which less crime means a strategy is retained and more crime results in it being discarded. Crime rates are a particularly rough way to measure results under normal conditions. And after a global pandemic that shatters routines and shakes up society at large, results will be even more difficult to interpret.

Sifting through the data and educating stakeholders on its meaning will be an arduous task. But it’s the only way to save worthwhile programs that were unable to withstand the substantial headwinds of the pandemic. It is also the best way to transform more successful impromptu reforms into long-lasting change and ensure they reach their fullest potential.

Obviously, the immediate concern right now is saving lives and preserving public safety. But jurisdictions should not allow these imperatives to obscure other essential elements of our justice system. As local leaders have demonstrated throughout the country, justice and public safety need not be mutually exclusive. The right innovations can help mitigate the pandemic’s destruction while setting up the justice system to operate more fairly and effectively for years to come.

—Lars Trautman is a senior fellow of Criminal Justice and Civil Liberties at the R Street Institute and a former assistant district attorney