Currently serving his second term, Paul L. Howard, Jr. assumed the Office of Fulton County District Attorney in January 1997—becoming the first African-American to be elected district attorney in the history of the State of Georgia. He spoke to the Center for Court Innovation’s Carolyn Turgeon about community prosecution.
How did you become interested in community prosecution?
I had attended a conference in Washington DC where they addressed the issue of community prosecution and I had spent some time in the Brooklyn D.A.’s office and learned about its program. But the concept of community prosecution clicked for me only later, during a community meeting. Like most district attorneys, I’d spent a lot of time trying to get the trial statistics and conviction rates up, and at one community meeting I reported some really improved statistics and the community members were not impressed at all. So on the way home, my son asked me, “Daddy, why don’t those folks like you?” And I really started thinking about people’s reaction to what my office was doing and I figured out that numbers are not nearly as important to them as a general feeling of safety. And I realized that we needed to do something in our office to make the community feel safer. I thought the best vehicle to do that was the community prosecutor, so we actually applied for [a federal] grant and placed somebody in the community. Now we’ve gone from having that one person to having three offices with a fourth in planning.
Where did you open the first office? How did you choose the neighborhood?
We started with one neighborhood, what in Atlanta is called Zone Four, a neighborhood where we were very familiar with the police commander and her community policing program. The neighborhood also had some very progressive community leaders who had been pressing the city to do something about crime in this community. It contained a large number of middle-class residents, but it had some long-term criminal problems, and we thought that it was probably the best place to start.
What were the challenges?
People are accustomed to political leaders coming to their communities with some quick-fix solution, taking a couple of press photographs, and leaving. So when we told people we were actually setting up an office and that we planned to stay there, they were very skeptical. We had to overcome a lot of apathy on the part of the public, a feeling that had really grown out of their past experiences.
You can’t just spend all your time going around and shaking people’s hands. You have to produce some result for that community. I think we went through three community prosecutors, lawyers from my office, before we finally got the person with the right mix of experience and personality to make it actually work.
What did you find was the right mix to make that position effective?
I think that you’ve got to have somebody who can take a vision and plan a systematic way to realize it, and not everyone has the ability to do that. Our community prosecutors will also actually prosecute some of the cases in the zone that are of interest to the community and the Police Department, so I think you need a person who can do that, too, because that develops confidence and rapport in the community. That’s when people start saying: “That’s our prosecutor. We’ve got our own prosecutor who can prosecute our crimes.” You also need someone with a personality that allows them to walk around the community and talk and get along with people. Our first couple of lawyers would go to a meeting and no one would even know they were there. You need somebody who’s willing to walk to the front of the room, even if everybody there is complaining about the district attorney, and say, “Hey guys I understand, but we’re trying to get better. Can you help us?” And not everyone has that type of personality.
How did that initial effort go, once you got that right person in there? How long did it take to get results?
First, we formed our citizen group and worked with them. We got some of the traditional leaders. In Atlanta we have NPUs—neighborhood planning units—so we asked the presidents of the neighborhood planning units in our zone to come. We then got the president of a merchant’s association, along with one of the barbers from an old school barbershop. We got the principals of two schools, and the head of the student government associations. We had three ministers from the area become a part of it. So I think we ended up with about 24 people on our advisory committee.
We also did a study to see what the real crime problems were. Once our prosecutor was in place, we spent a long time just kind of talking to people, getting to know people, and working with our community advisory committee. I would say it probably took us a year before we finally started to say, “Look, this is what we’re going to do and this is how we’re going to go about doing it.” Because we wanted to make sure that whatever we were doing, people saw it as being important, and it was something that they would buy into and support.
So the citizen group identified problems and possible solutions?
That is correct. And one of the things we discovered is that people really expect you to come up with solutions. They will help you fine-tune and implement those solutions, but many of them feel that they’ve run out of their own solutions and that that’s why they’re in this fix in the first place. So we would look at a problem and come up with an approach to solving it. Like, for instance, the burglary problem. We had a lot of burglaries, and so we came up with the idea of a top 10 most wanted list. The police and the citizens would give us the names of the burglars.
I remember we had a guy that everybody knew. His was one of the first cases that our community prosecutor handled. When we get to court—this is on a bond hearing— [the community prosecutor] brought in everybody from the affected community. The judge had never seen this before, all these community members sitting in court at this guy’s bond hearing. So the judge wants to know who these people are and she told him: these are the folks from his community. The defense attorney made a bond motion and he argued that this guy lives in the community, he has roots in the community, and he is not going to flee, so he should be given a bond. The community prosecutor Wanda Dallas got up and in closing told the judge, “Judge in regard to this question about fleeing, these neighbors want him to flee!” And then the neighbors all stood up and applauded. So that’s the kind of thing we did.
We also put together forms for the NPU group that we would pass out at meetings. If they had a defendant that they wanted our office to track, we would put them on our top 10 list. We had some defendants who had been arrested as many as 66 times but had never served any significant prison time. So at one point we had every person on the top 10 list in jail. As a result of that, the crime rate started to be reduced significantly.
So it meant looking at these people’s crimes in a totally different way?
There’s always been a theory among criminologists that 20 percent of the defendants commit 80 percent of the crimes, and what we found out is that this is exactly correct. And so we utilized the citizens and the Police Department to identify that 20 percent, and people were really pleased because they had been trying for years to get certain defendants out of their community. One of the other things we found is that when the defendants saw the community prosecutors working aggressively to put them in jail and discovered that the community would actually show up, they started entering pleas.
What are some other innovative approaches to crime that are coming out of these various programs?
There’s the Neighborhood Fresh Start concept, which is probably the centerpiece of our program. What we did was seize a crack cocaine house and then place a policeman in the house to live for a year or so. The idea was to remove the crack house, renovate it, reduce additional crime in the area through the police presence, and then sell the house to a low-income family. When the policeman moved into the neighborhood, we had a ceremony with the community and I have to say it was my proudest day in public office. Usually people are kind of skeptical about the D.A.’s, but when they actually saw that house remodeled—sparkling new, with new sidewalks—and when they saw the other city officials at the house and actually saw this policeman moving in, it said to them, “We are important. Somebody has finally done something.” At one point, everywhere I went people would say to me, “Boy I know about that house over on Atwood, I’m glad you guys did it.” So the publicity surrounding it also had a lasting effect with the community.
Police reported that the crime in the area was reduced by 70 percent by the removing of that crack house and, more importantly, by putting a policeman in that same location. And that really put a dent on crime not only on the street but in the surrounding area. It sent a really strong message that we were taking back this community.
We have now seized a second house we’ll do the same thing with.
And does that police officer just live there, or start actively working in that neighborhood?
He actually formed a neighborhood watch and met with the neighbors. I have to say that when he moved in, the neighbors didn’t like him too much. We were planning on keeping him for just a year. Now the neighbors have requested that he not leave. So he really became a lot more attached to what they were doing than we ever imagined.
How do you promote community prosecution to skeptical D.A.’s?
You know people come up with programs to get their names spread around, and I say to them, “I’ll tell you the best way to promote good will about yourself is to do something that people can actually see." Because you can ride by that house and people will point it out. "The DA took the crack house." And I have said to them, “It is a great way to increase your public support.” And I point out to them that when I ran for reelection the second time I had a dogfight. I did the community prosecution and ran a third time, and guess what happened? I didn’t even have any opposition. And so then they get kind of interested.
What advice would you give to those interested in starting a community prosecution program?
I would tell them that you ought to identify a place not only with a problem but identify a place where there are some community resources that could really help you solve that problem, like community groups that could work with you. It also really does help to have a cooperative Police Department and particularly someone who is directly involved with the neighborhood you’re moving to. I think those things are important. And then you need to select the right person from your office. We’ve talked to many prosecutors who’ve said, “My boss made me do this, I don’t really want to do this,” and that’s a bad thing. The community can see that. They know these guys want to be downtown trying some murder cases so they can be on television, not be community prosecutors. You’ve got to get somebody who really wants to do it.
May 2005