Thomas P. Zugibe, District Attorney, Rockland County, N.Y.

Since taking office in January 2008, Thomas P. Zugibe has made community prosecution a guiding principle of the Rockland County (N.Y.) District Attorney’s Office. Prior to his election, Zugibe worked for two decades in private practice with an emphasis on personal injury and commercial litigation. Between 1981 and 1987, he served as a prosecutor in the Rockland County District Attorney’s Office, where he directed the Narcotics Division and Major Offenses Division and was eventually promoted to executive assistant district attorney. Zugibe began his legal career as a special assistant attorney general in the Office of the New York State Deputy Attorney General for Medicaid Fraud Control. In December 2009, he spoke with Robert V. Wolf of the Center for Court Innovation about his approach to community prosecution.

How do you describe your approach to community prosecution?
We’re taking an intelligence-led approach to public safety through community policing, community prosecution, and community partnerships. We’ve divided the county into four areas and have partnerships with all 10 of the various local police departments. Every month we have a Compstat meeting in one of the four areas and invite people from any agency that’s relevant to the problems we’re addressing. The meetings have been attended by representatives of Housing and Urban Development and the New York State Labor Department. But our version of Compstat is a little different than what’s being done in New York City in that our meetings are being driven by the District Attorney’s Office rather than the police.

How did you build these relationships among your office, the 10 police departments, and other agencies?
The first step was to open up a direct line of communication with the agencies we wanted to partner with. I have redirected my assistant district attorneys (ADAs) to relocate for the most part out of the office and into the police stations. They have been given offices there, and they’re interfacing with the police on a regular basis so that now they know each other better and have a better working relationship than ever before. The ADAs are a resource for the police, answering their questions, supporting their work. The police feel more comfortable calling their assigned community prosecutor—whom they know on a first-name basis—at any hour of the day or night. In the past, if the police had a question, they had to use a call list to contact the ADA on duty, whom they likely never met.

This office has also formed relationships with every local agency including Social Services and the local building departments. We reached out to state agencies, including Taxation and Labor, and agencies on the federal level. We now have a great relationship with Housing and Urban Development, which can help us solve problems in buildings we might otherwise have trouble accessing. For instance, HUD has assisted in obtaining  search warrants when it was determined that someone was violating the lease in a Section 8 apartment. Gaining access through traditional law enforcement means was not an option

Do your community prosecutors visit all 10 police stations on a regular basis?
They do, although understandably they spend more time in the larger stations. For instance, in the southern end of the county, the community prosecution region includes the Orangetown Police Department as well as the police departments in the Village of Piermont and the Village of South Nyack, both of which are within incorporated Orangetown. My community prosecutors will work in all those police stations in satellite offices that the police have provided, but they spend more time in Orangetown because it is larger and has more activity. All three departments attend the Compstat meetings.

Have the partnerships with police generated new programs or initiatives?
Sure. For instance, we’ve developed “hot sheets.” Every police department has provided a list of the top 20 offenders in their areas—both those who are affecting quality of life as well as committing serious crimes. Our own intelligence center in the D.A.’s office has taken the lists and researched the background of each offender, and then supplied all the police departments in the county with an aggregate list of all the hot-sheeted defendants. That means, if a police department in the southern end of the county picks up a guy who’s been a persistent problem in the northern part of the county, they can respond appropriately.

We’ve also been selected to receive federal funding through the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services to launch the drug market initiative in one of our neighborhoods.

From the get-go of your administration, you’ve sought to have community prosecution permeate your entire office.
I think what distinguishes Rockland from most other offices that have adopted community prosecution is that we’ve take the approach office-wide. I attended  the National District Attorneys Association conference on community prosecution last year and heard certain larger offices lament that they were compelled to cut back on their community prosecution program because of fiscal concerns. Our answer is: This is not a program. This is a philosophical change in the way we do business. We’re not spending any money that we wouldn’t be spending anyway. We have numerous crime prevention and diversion programs that have been thrown into the mix to enhance our work, but in terms of actual costs to my department, I’m not adding manpower. I’m just asking everyone in my office to work differently.

That’s very ambitious. How did you implement such a dramatic, office-wide transformation?
Community prosecution started out with baby steps. We initiated this approach as a pilot program in the northern area of the county and basically learned by trial and error as we went. It took about six months to work out the bugs and expand countywide.

What were the biggest challenges?
The biggest challenge was trying to change the traditional approach and thinking of the people—both those who work here in my office and those we partner with. When people first hear about community prosecution, it sounds great, but when you try to effect change you invariably encounter resistance. I told my ADA’s.: “If you have a problem with this philosophy, you can find another job. I can find people who are interested in working this way.” There were a few rough spots along the way, but we worked it out.

We have 45 [lower-level] justice court parts in addition to three county court parts. I’ve assigned a senior prosecutor to serve as a supervisor over each of the community prosecution regions. These supervisors also attended the National District Attorney’s Association community prosecution annual conference, where they expanded their knowledge and understanding of community prosecution, walking away with myriad ideas to be more effective. Now they’re enthusiastic and have even developed an internal office competition to excel.

How do your prosecutors engage the community?
That’s our major focus now. I’ve just met with every one of my community prosecutors and said, “We now have to see some actual successes in the community.” I’ve directed them to identify a specific community in their region that they’re going to address immediately. It may be an entire village or a single street. They need to identify issues we’re going to address, hot spots where there are problems, and we’re going to prioritize them. We’re going to involve the appropriate stakeholders to help identify the problems and potential solutions. Every area needs a community project, and my ADAs are going to every possible community meeting to learn more. 

You can be in one of our villages that have many of the attributes of an inner city, including crime, yet a mile away you can be in a neighborhood of mansions and affluence. Our focus right now is obviously on the urban-like areas.

In the town of Nyack, the police and the community have come together to focus on a two-block area with drug dealing and quality-of-life offenses. Someone from the community challenged me to see for myself what life was actually like there, so I went down with my chief of detectives and drove around. It was shocking to see the individuals on the street openly dealing drugs and intimidating the residents. I saw four males, and watched as a new Cadillac pulled up. They completed a drug deal right in front of us, and then they shook their hands at us basically signaling to get lost. They clearly had no fear. The message was basically “Mind your own business.”

This experience was very revealing for me. There’s no way to get that first-hand feel for what life is like in a neighborhood when you spend all day in an office or courtroom. For a long time, the community did not believe that the police were handling the problem, and the police had specific reasons why they didn’t intervene more. Now we’re all sitting down and coming up with solutions.

You’re giving your prosecutors a whole new set of responsibilities. How do you get them to go to community meetings when most of them probably never imagined when they were in law school that that would be part of their work?
If they don’t like it, I say, “That’s your job because this is a community prosecution office and you’re not just prosecuting cases. Your job also requires you to be involved in crime prevention and diversion, and the only way to do that is to know everything you can about the community, and what issues are important and what’s not.”

Before I took office, they were paper processors. They’d look at a report, a rap sheet, and decide whether this guy should be prosecuted or not. Each case was looked at as a separate crime to be processed with no attempt to determine whether there was a relationship between them. Now we’re looking at hot spots; we’re looking for patterns. Our prosecutors are sitting with the community and saying, “Where is all this coming from? Are there connections? How can we solve this so it doesn’t happen again?”

If you don’t try to answer those questions, you’re operating in a total void. You are lacking the perspective to determine whether this person is a real problem in the community or merely made a one-time mistake. You’re treating all the offenders the same, applying a one-size-fits-all approach. Community prosecution is different. You have the benefit of far more information. That’s why it’s defined as an intelligence-led approach to public safety.

Before any determination is made on a felony arrest, the community prosecutor is required to speak with the arresting officer and obtain input that is not necessarily contained on police reports. Then the prosecutor completes a felony assessment form that contains a disposition recommendation based upon this conversation and the community prosecutor’s own assessment. In the past, the executive level prosecutors who determined whether a case should proceed as a felony or misdemeanor had a police report and a criminal complaint and that was it. Now they have the benefit of detailed felony assessments based upon feedback from our partners who may say, “This isn’t a bad kid. You should reduce this to a misdemeanor,” or “I really think you should keep this as a felony. I know it’s not a great case, but this person has caused a lot of problems in the community so we’d appreciate your pursing it as a felony.” And if we decide to go against the officer’s recommendation, we go back to the officer and give a chance to argue the case further.

How did community prosecution play out in your campaign?
When I’d bring up community prosecution at a debate, my opponent would say, “We’re doing that already” and would explain, “We busted this bar and that bar.” I responded, “You clearly have no idea what community prosecution is.”

I was a local judge for nearly 20 years in one of the more active villages and saw firsthand many of the problems that plague communities. I developed a number of programs out of my court that we’re now implementing countywide. As a judge, I tried to implement on a local level, basically acting as a community court. It took a lot of time, trying to find solutions, but I considered that part of my job. For instance, every single student at the local high school who came before me needed to make a contract with the school requiring him or her to obey all the school’s rules of conduct, discipline, and academics. The school was my partner on this because many of the same kids who appeared before me were terrorizing the school. These students didn’t necessarily have a criminal history, but they were troublemakers.

By using the influence of the court, the school was now empowered. The students knew that before every court appearance, the school would send me a status letter verifying whether the students were in compliance with the court-imposed conditions, and we made that not only part of the release conditions but part of the any final disposition. And I told the students, if they weren’t in compliance, I’d reconsider their bail. I operated that program for 10 years. The school kept good stats. Their attendance changed instantly, and, in 95 percent of cases, the students’ grades improved, discipline problems dropped and the dropout rate among these at risk students was substantially reduced. Also, for those students who complied, far better dispositions were achieved on their pending charges.

Where did you get the idea for this school initiative?
My wife was the president of the school board.  I attended a board function one day when I mentioned to the other board members that I was disturbed by the number of high school kids in my courtroom. They inquired as to the identity of the students and were surprisingly well acquainted with most. They were all well-known because most were major discipline and truancy problems. The traditional approach for dealing with them in court was giving them community service and an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal because they were thought to be good kids who made one mistake. The problem was that both the court and prosecutor had a lack of information, making it impossible to make an assessment.  So I turned my courtroom into a community court, a problem-solving court, which used the leverage of the court to compel better results.

When we got community prosecution going, I first met with police chiefs and their school resource officers and the school superintendents. They embraced the program. It’s now working countywide. We have a regular flow. We made a list of every school and the appropriate contact person for every judge. And the judges are finally on board. They were my toughest fight. They said, “Why do you want to make this extra work?” I said politely: “This is not about you.”

How did you learn about community prosecution in the first place?
I was always generally familiar with it but not clear on the specifics. A good friend of mine, Dr. Frank Straub—who retired as public safety commissioner of White Plains (N.Y.) [and was recently appointed public safety director of Indianapolis]—introduced me to it. He knew about the programs I was running as a judge, introduced me to the whole community prosecution philosophy, and helped me prepare for my campaign as D.A.

What would you say to others who want to implement a similar office-wide community prosecution strategy?
If you look at the whole picture it’s overwhelming. Don’t look at it that way. Take baby steps but don’t drag it out too long. And make sure you have some early successes. When we did our pilot, we brought in a youth-police initiative that ran sessions with at-risk kids. They bring the police and young people together, helping them build trust and change perceptions of each other: police toward the kids and kids toward police. We did it in the town of Haverstraw and it was a major success. The cops tell us the kids now stop them on the street to talk, or they wave as they drive by.