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Community Prosecution
Inspired by the popularity and success of community policing strategies, prosecutors in the early 1990s began experimenting with an approach to addressing crime that came to be known as community prosecution. Because community prosecution was inspired by and built upon community policing, the approaches share characteristics—most significantly, perhaps, an emphasis on making centralized, anonymous agencies more neighborhood specific and personal. This entry describes community prosecution’s components, history, and impact on community policing as well as presenting Denver’s (Colorado) community prosecution initiative as an example.
Components
The definition of community prosecution continues to evolve. In some respects its definition changes with every office that practices it. Still, researchers and practitioners have identified components that distinguish it from traditional prosecution: community engagement, partnership, and problem solving.
Community Engagement
Community prosecution seeks to engage communities in various ways. The purpose of community engagement is to build bridges between prosecutors’ offices and their constituents in pursuit of safer communities and improved public confidence in justice. Through community engagement, prosecutors tap public knowledge and resources, try to identify the most pressing crime and safety problems, and enlist local resources in fashioning effective responses. Tools of community engagement include conducting surveys, hosting and attending public meetings, creating community advisory boards, and establishing storefront offices that encourage community members to walk in off the streets with complaints, concerns, and questions.
Partnership
Community prosecution emphasizes going beyond the prosecutor’s office in search of information, know-how, and resources to address office priorities. Through partnerships with other government agencies, community-based organizations and individuals, community prosecutors seek to build better cases and solve community problems. A number of community prosecution programs are characterized by closer working relationships with police departments. In Indianapolis, Indiana, for example, community prosecutors were assigned offices in stationhouses to answer officers’ questions, help officers build better cases, and develop collaborative crime-control and prevention strategies.
Problem Solving
Community prosecution uses varied and innovative approaches to address crime and public safety issues. The idea is not just to prosecute cases but to use data and local knowledge to craft new crime prevention strategies and to address problems that are not overtly crime related—for example, a community’s lack of constructive after-school activities.
History
Two of the earliest advocates of community prosecution were Multnomah County (Oregon) District Attorney Michael Schrunk and Kings County (New York) District Attorney Charles J. Hynes. They were inspired, in part, by frustration with rising caseloads. Despite putting more and more people behind bars, especially at the peak of the crack epidemic during the mid-1980s, many prosecutors felt they were having little impact on crime. The overwhelming amount of work, and the fact that many offenders were returning to criminal activity as soon as they were released, fostered a desire for new responses, and many, like Schrunk and Hynes, turned to community policing as a model.
Schrunk launched his Neighborhood D.A. Program in 1990 by assigning a single prosecutor to a commercial district in Portland, Oregon, where low-level offending was felt to be harming economic revitalization efforts. The prosecutor’s first focus was illegal camping, which local businesses considered a public nuisance, an impediment to neighborhood development, and a source of petty criminal activity. Since arresting transients hadn’t solved the problem, the community prosecutor addressed the issue by engaging multiple city agencies in cleanup efforts, forming a volunteer citizen patrol to alert authorities to the presence of illegal campers, and supporting initiatives to link transients to housing and other services.
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- Changing Agency Culture
- Agency Mission and Values, Changes in
- Community Policing, Discretionary Authority Under
- Community Policing: Resources, Time, and Finances in Support of
- Customer-Based Policing
- Decentralizing the Organization/Organizational Change
- Implementation of Community Policing
- Involving Local Businesses
- Learning Organization
- Measuring Officer Performance
- Officers’ Job Satisfaction
- Publicity Campaigns
- Recruiting for Quality and Diversity
- Roles, Chief Executives’
- Roles, First-Line Supervisors’
- Roles, Middle Managers’
- Roles, Officers’
- Strategic Planning
- Crime Analysis: Technologies and Techniques
- Evaluation and Assessment
- Foundations: Evolution of Community Policing and Problem Solving
- Broken Windows Theory
- Building Partnerships and Stakeholders
- Citizen Patrols
- Collaboration With Outside Agencies
- Community Cohesion and Empowerment
- Community Justice
- Community Policing and Problem Solving, Definition of
- Community Policing, Evolution of
- Community Policing: What It Is Not
- Community Prosecution
- Community, Definition of
- Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design
- Directed Patrol, Studies of
- Evidence-Based Policing
- Fear of Crime
- Flint, Michigan, Experiment
- Foot Patrols
- Generations (Three) of Community Policing
- Intelligence-Led Policing
- International Community Policing
- Investigations, Community Policing Strategies for
- Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment
- Metropolitan Police Act of 1829
- Place-Based Policing
- Police Mission
- Police-Community Relations
- Policing, Three Eras of
- Predictive Policing
- Problem-Oriented Policing, Goldstein’s Development of
- Problem-Oriented Policing: Elements, Processes, Implications
- Problem-Solving Courts
- Problem-Solving Process (SARA)
- Problem, Definition of
- Restorative Justice
- Situational Crime Prevention
- Social Capital
- Team Policing
- Volunteers, Police Use of
- Wickersham Commission
- Future Considerations
- Public Safety Issues
- Supporting Legislation and National Organizations
- Center for Problem-Oriented Policing
- Community Oriented Policing Services, Office of
- Community Policing Consortium
- Executive Sessions on Policing
- Homeland Security
- National Center for Community Policing
- National Crime Prevention Council
- Neighborhood Associations
- Operation Weed and Seed
- Police Foundation
- Regional Community Policing Institutes
- Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994
- Training and Curriculum
- “What Works”—Selected Strategies and Initiatives
- Colleges and Universities, Community Policing Strategies for
- Domestic Violence, Community Policing Strategies for
- Drug Crimes, Community Policing Strategies for
- Elderly Victimization, Community Policing Strategies for
- Gang Crimes, Community Policing Strategies for
- Immigrant Populations, Community Policing Strategies for
- Immigration: Issues, Law, and Police Training
- Public Housing, Community Policing Strategies for
- Repeat Victimization, Community Policing Strategies for
- Rural Areas, Community Policing in
- School Violence and Safety, Community Policing Strategies for
- State Police/Patrol, Community Policing Strategies for
- Traffic Problems, Community Policing Strategies for
- Youthful Offenders, Community Policing Strategies for
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