Since its launching in 1990, the Multnomah County’s Neighborhood D.A. Program has tackled numerous problems, among them: graffiti, gangs, illegal camping, chronic truancy, car prowls, pan-handling and elder abuse. What follows is a description of one strategy the office employed to address public-safety concerns. Traditionally, in order to obtain a search warrant Portland police and prosecutors had to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that drugs were being sold on a property. This was a very high standard, one that usually required at least three undercover buys but also one that went above the requirements of statute and case law. After a thorough examination of case law, prosecutors determined that they only needed to prove that there was “probable cause” to believe someone was selling drugs on the property in order to obtain a search warrant. This determination allowed the neighborhood prosecutors to develop an alternative method of obtaining a search warrant. From this arose the “community-driven search warrants,” which leveraged community resources by allowing neighbors to get involved. Prosecutors successfully argued in court that neighbors’ observations of suspicious activity—such as people coming in and out of a house at all hours of the day and night—supported by two or three hours of observation by police were enough to establish probable cause and obtain a warrant. An important part of this plan was that the neighbors’ identities be kept confidential. “An affidavit from a police officer saying that these observations are accurate allowed us to keep warrants anonymous,” said Michael Kuykendall, a former neighborhood D.A. who helped develop the strategy. “The warrants would note how long the informant has lived in the neighborhood, the lack of criminal history, the fact that they were personally known to the officer, and then we’d have an officer sit on the property to prove the reliability of the neighbor’s observations.” The citizen-driven warrants have gone through several iterations. Initially, prosecutors asked neighbors to keep detailed logs of drug house activity over weeks and even months. But they found that they were asking too much. “It’s difficult to get the neighbors to sit there and watch this place for four hours a night over months. And they’d pay attention to things that weren’t important or necessary to secure the warrant. For example, they would obtain license plate numbers, but they might work so hard to get them that they would fail to observe the patterns of activity we were interested in to obtain the warrant,” Hayden said. Prosecutors then abandoned the detailed logs and created instead an affidavit for a search warrant that was essentially a checklist police officers could use to interview neighbors. The checklists are detailed but also easy to complete, allowing the officers to obtain thorough information quickly. The checklist warrants describe all the possible patterns that indicate likely drug sales, like people surreptitiously exchanging small items, including money, or cars driving by the residence slowly, or people looking nervously up and down the street as they enter and exit the house. A log took months to complete, but a checklist can be done in an afternoon. Police officers then attempt to corroborate the information provided by the community. Corroboration can take the form of pre-existing “police reports, or undercover drug buys, or just purely our own observation,” said Police Officer Roger Axthelm, a neighborhood officer assigned to the Northeast Precinct. “We’ll either set up an observation from a vehicle, or a nearby house. We usually watch a couple of hours. ” The best thing about the community-driven search warrants is “they’re really quick,” Axthelm said. “The fastest we’ve ever done one is two days between the time we first talked to the neighbor complainant and served the warrant.” Those arrested as a result of the warrants are taken to community court (Multnomah County has four community courts, which focus on low-level offenses), where they are charged with a drug-related misdemeanor and usually receive a sentence of community service in exchange for a guilty plea, Hayden said. Meanwhile, the Police Bureau, city and the neighborhood D.A. officially contact the landlord and inform him or her that the property is in danger of being boarded-up by the city if the problems persist; more often than not the landlord decides evicting the problem tenant is the best course of action. Out of 17 community-driven search warrants executed in the Northeast Precinct from April 2002 to May 2003, nine resulted in evictions. Four, involving owner-occupied buildings, resulted in owner citations and, in the case of a 70-year-old owner, referrals to a range of social services. “In most cases the activity has gone away and not come back,” Hayden said. “We work with the landlords to ensure they don’t rent to more problem people.”
