Jan Scully has been the district attorney of Sacramento County since 1994. She spoke with Center staff about her office’s community prosecution program.
How did the Sacramento County District Attorney’s office first get interested in community prosecution?
Community-oriented policing had really assisted law enforcement agencies in developing stronger relationships within the community and I thought it was important that a D.A.’s office that represented citizens in the courtroom develop stronger relationships with the community. We also recognized that addressing quality-of-life issues requires forming partnerships with community organizations. To me, community prosecution is another side of the face of a prosecutor—meaning that it’s a positive, proactive face. Typically, when citizens deal with a prosecutor’s office it’s because they’ve been involved in a crime of some fashion and are being forced to participate in the system, whether as a victim, witness or defendant. When prosecutors actually go out into the community to help identify issues, it’s a more positive relationship.
How does the program work?
We have six community prosecutors assigned to specific geographic areas. Our district boundaries align themselves with our board of supervisors and their individual districts, but we focus on the unincorporated parts of their districts. We don’t have the resources to have community prosecutors everywhere—that’s why we focus four prosecutors on unincorporated areas. In another case there’s a shared agreement with the unincorporated area plus the city within that supervisor’s district, and then we have another community prosecutor who works downtown within the city of Sacramento and is paid for by a downtown partnership alliance and our regional transit authority to work on specific issues that present themselves in our downtown area.
What kinds of problems do they focus on?
They typically work on quality-of-life types of issues, like absentee landlord issues where you have code violations, or rundown hotels. As you know, if you don’t address those lower-level quality-of-life crimes then the neighborhoods, whether business or residential, continue to decline and actually attract people engaged in criminal conduct. More serious crime ends up occurring in those areas if you don’t focus on them.
Have you seen a decrease in crime in the community prosecution areas?
Yes, we have one area in which there were a number of run-down hotels, for example, with a lot of code violations. The county agencies had been working on them for years, trying to get the owners in compliance with codes and so on, with little success. Code enforcement folks were saying you have to do this, you have to do that, but it didn’t have a lot of bite. When we assigned the community prosecutor to work on these issues, then, we had a variety of options before us in terms of how to solve the problem. We can make lightning strike, depending on the circumstances. When people know that there’s actual consequence, not just the threat of consequence but actually a follow-up, they’re more likely to comply sooner rather than later. In this case, we threatened criminal prosecution and in fact did prosecute some of the landlords who failed to comply. We had the area cleaned up in a matter of months, and it made a big difference to that community.
Our goal in community prosecution is to solve a quality-of-life issue for the long rather than the short term. We use anything from civil remedies to criminal remedies. We had a case where we had a Burger King that had been left in disrepair, that attracted vagrants, and that had a lot of issues. We took the Burger King corporation to court, and it ended up, in a civil settlement, having some penalties but also having to make a contribution financially to the community they had put at risk. That money was used for community programs that community members were interested in, like after-school programs for kids. Those are just examples.
Community prosecutors do some other things, too. They send out questionnaires to neighborhoods to try to find out what their issues are. They hold community meetings to educate the community on various public safety issues and potential solutions. They go into middle schools to teach kids about gun violence. We also have a 10-week citizens academy where we, in partnership with a law enforcement agency, bring in community leaders and educate them on the criminal justice system and each of its components, with special emphasis on the roles and responsibilities of the prosecutor.
All these things pay huge dividends in terms of folks having a more positive attitude towards the D.A.’s office and our system of justice. The community prosecutors do their advocacy and work in the community and the mainline prosecutors do their work in the courtroom, and they’ve ended up working as a team in certain situations to get the best possible results in a case and for a neighborhood.
What’s in the program’s future?
Our main goal is to have community prosecutors throughout our entire county, whether areas are incorporated or unincorporated. Right now prosecutors are overextended just because their areas are so large. I also see them developing better and stronger relationships with communities and entities within the community, not just schools and neighborhoods but with businesses and law enforcement. The goal is to get people accustomed to community prosecutors, and to support them. There are a lot of relationships to continue to build.
What are some of the other things community prosecutors do to engage the community in problem-solving efforts?
Well, the educational forums. For example, our community prosecutors have also worked on helping us in developing relationships with our various ethnic communities. Sacramento is very diverse, and so I’ve established a community group of people of various ethnic and immigrant backgrounds that I refer to as my multicultural community council, which really helps us to identify areas of education and relationship building that we can do. We also specifically target individual ethnic communities that traditionally distrust the criminal justice system and don’t necessarily bring us their issues. We have done that in the Muslim community, for example, and the Asian Pacific Islander community, the Slavic community. We’ve gone in and talked about issues that have been important to them. If we have cases they’re concerned about, we’ll give them an opportunity to discuss and be able to ask questions, get input on things that are important to them.
Do the community prosecutors all meet regularly?
They all come together once a week for updates and to learn what each other is doing because obviously by sharing information they may be able to end up doing things in more than one area, whatever that might be. And the community prosecutors report directly to my chief deputy because we need to know what’s going on out there. Unlike prosecutors in the courtroom, the community prosecutors are out there exercising judgment and making decisions in the community all the time. So as a manager it’s very important that we be on top of what’s going on.
What advice would you give to people interested in starting community prosecution programs?
Before an office would consider starting one itself I think that it should go and visit some jurisdictions that have an active community prosecution component to their office and shadow them for a while, see what they’ve done, see what the early pitfalls or bumps in the road are so they can anticipate those. And they should be careful; there are community prosecution programs that are really more fluffy, that go to meetings but don’t engage in aggressive enforcement and intervention efforts.
I think that you need to do your homework, and you also need to help educate and prepare people in your office who are used to one kind of culture. You have to orientate them to help prepare them accept that a community prosecution component to the office can benefit not just the community but the office as a whole.
So the community prosecutors are pretty integrated in your office?
I’m sure you’re aware of the traditional culture of a prosecutor’s office, where you’re kind of as good as your last trial, your last verdict. To raise the issue of community prosecution initially, not only did I need community support but I needed support within the office. It’s a totally different way of doing business, so it wasn’t openly embraced. People didn’t try to do anything to make it fail, but it wasn’t openly embraced. And so I got my most experienced prosecutors who were well respected trial attorneys and put them out in the community. I think they were able to appreciate the impact they could make almost immediately.
In the courtroom, when I prosecute a case, I can make a difference one defendant or one case at a time. When I’m working out in the community, I can impact an entire neighborhood. I also brought in some line community prosecutors from another jurisdiction—I believe it was the state of Washington—to talk about the kinds of things they worked on, how they impacted and reduced more serious violent crime through these kinds of enforcement efforts.
And so it’s evolved to where there’s a mutual respect, and we look for opportunities where community and mainline prosecutors can work together on different issues. It could be that we file a gang case or a graffiti case or some sort of case where the community prosecutor can educate the prosecutor handling the case on the importance of it to the community. If you need to get certain information or bring certain folks to the table, the community prosecutor can be that liaison. It can work both ways. The community prosecutor can work with communities and then when they identify a specific case he or she might take that case and handle it themselves. A few of them they do--or make sure that the coordination is there so that victims and communities’ views and sentiments get heard by the court and the prosecutor.
Prosecutors are aggressive, they want to advocate, they want to fight on behalf of the community. They’re just used to doing that in the courtroom and they have to realize that there are a variety of ways you can advocate and fight on behalf of citizens. And community prosecution is one important component.
May 2006