Scott C. Newman was elected Marion County District Attorney in 1994, and served until 2003. In this role he made community prosecution a key part of his overall crime-fighting strategy for Indianapolis and surrounding areas. He talked with Sarah Archer-Beck of the Community Justice Exchange about his interest in community justice and the obstacles he encountered—and overcame—as his office looked for new ways to address issues of crime and public safety.
When you began as the county prosecutor, the community prosecution program was not very large. Why did you choose to expand the program?
People were very frustrated in the early 1990s. People were seeing things that they had never seen before in their neighborhoods in terms of chaos and disorder.
Community policing was being successfully implemented at that time in parts of the city, and as I was going around to neighborhood meetings I saw police and citizens being drawn closer together. I also saw that they—both the police and the ordinary citizens—were feeling thwarted increasingly by the justice system. To the extent that their projects and initiatives weren't working, they tended to blame, in some cases rightly so and in some cases not, the justice system.
It struck me that the prosecutor wasn't at the table and that many of the projects that the police and the community were contemplating would need legal input for them to work.
My background in the corporate world—I had spent a couple of years in a private corporation—made me see the absurdity of managing only for process instead of for outcomes. Both prosecutors and police were tending to measure their performance by process—how fast we respond to 911 calls or how many cases we process—instead of measuring outcomes that really mattered to people, like whether they felt safer in their neighborhood or whether they were able to take a walk in the evening in their neighborhood. It struck me as kind of cynical on the part of police and prosecutors that they felt that there was nothing that they could do to affect the quality of life in the community.
What principles have guided you as you enlarged the scope of the community prosecution efforts in Marion County?
The first thing I knew we had to do was to be there, in the neighborhoods, and a natural place to be, it seemed to me, was the district police stations. So I approached the Police Department and basically tried to give them something in exchange for what I wanted. What I could offer them was the convenience of being able to screen cases at the police district instead of coming downtown. That seems like a trivial thing, but whenever I try to partner with another agency I try to first think: “What can I offer them? What's in it for them?” So I offered that deal, which would give our criminal prosecutors a good finger on the pulse of what kind of crime was occurring in that district. It also gave them an opportunity to work with the police and the neighborhoods.
I didn't give a lot of direction to each district prosecutor. The only direction I gave was: 1) Two or three mornings a week you need to be screening cases with the district detectives; 2) You need to have a drug strategy; 3) You need to have a domestic violence strategy for your district, and 4) You need to identify a third major problem that is of concern to the particular neighborhood that you are assigned to. It may be residential burglaries, it may be prostitution, but you need to hear what that third problem is. I told them to develop a strategy for that area.
I picked drugs and domestic violence because, simply put, I knew that those two areas were causing the most injury and death in our community. I wanted to make sure that we had a tailored strategy in each district for those two problems. As for the third problem, it was sort of “This Space Available.” That was our opportunity to tell the neighborhood that we were willing to share power in the sense that we're willing listen to what your priorities are and to adjust our deployment of resources to reflect that.
These changes must have seemed strange to some prosecutors. How have you built support for the community prosecution initiatives in your agency?
Inside the agency I try to personally broadcast the achievements of the community prosecutors—we call them Street Level Advocates, or the SLA program. I try to emphasize, first of all, that when an SLA comes to you with a strategic need in a case, that those people have clout—both because they are credible people with some experience in the office and because I think their work is important. If they give direction to a line prosecutor on a case about revoking a bond or seeking a type of sentence or a certain type of community input, I'm going to be very unhappy if they don't listen. I also try to emphasize an ethos throughout everything I do in the office that we're not just case processors, we're law enforcement strategists.
I choose respected deputy prosecutors to serve in the unit: people with some experience and credibility throughout the office. I give direct access to that unit: the supervisor of that unit reports directly to me. I've invited that unit to my house and had meetings with them on the back deck to strategize. They have a few little perks and cool stuff, like their own note pads and their own jean shirts. We give them a certain amount of flexibility in their hours and so on.
What have you done to build support for these initiatives in the community?
Outside the office, basically, we start showing the community what we can do. We stick to what we're good at. That's another piece of direction I always give to the unit. There's a tendency to expand the charter or engage in what I call mission creep, where you want to do everything for everybody and if another agency isn't doing their job you want to do their job for them. If we expand, and get outside what we're really good at, I think we start to lose credibility and we spread ourselves too thin. So I try to remind people, “Don't do other agencies' jobs for them. Try to collaborate with them to get them to do a more effective job. Leverage your resources and remember what kind of things prosecutors are particularly good at and uniquely situated to do and emphasize those things.”
We get out there in the neighborhoods and we perform. We do what we promise. We set reasonable, measurable, concrete goals for the community. Sometimes we deliver some ambitious projects, like the [Marion County] Community Court, which after two or three years of discussion we were finally able to open. We give community leaders in neighborhood associations terrific access to our prosecutors and, through them, to the justice system.
We also tap into the resources of neighborhood-level publications. A lot of prosecutors are very good with the mass media in their markets in the large cities. But we try not to forget the real tiny little newspapers or even the newsletters that particular neighborhood associations put out. We tell stories of our success through those.
Have the methods that the community prosecutors used to combat neighborhood problems faced any obstacles or legal challenges?
The main legal obstacle that we faced was that in some areas of the city we engaged in curfew enforcement in response to neighborhood concerns. We even partnered with some local churches and volunteer groups to process juveniles who violated curfew in community centers and churches. That sounded like a good thing and worked for several years, in fact, until finally the Civil Liberties Union in the state of Indiana sued us and had our curfew statute held unconstitutional by a federal district judge. That was a setback. The legislature this year passed an amended curfew statute, which we think is workable. We are now in discussions again about how to comply with that new statute and make sure we're doing it the right way. We'll still get sued, I have no doubt about that, but I think that we'll be successful and be able to enforce that statute.
A broader obstacle has been that many judges are reluctant to contextualize a problem. They take a very narrow view of what sentencing should be about in low-level criminal cases and they're very reluctant to find out the importance of a particular case to a particular neighborhood to place it in context. When we try to submit neighborhood impact statements, for example, some judges will disregard them and categorically refuse to hear that kind of evidence. I drafted a statute to try to give legal sanction or legal authority to submitting neighborhood impact statements and so far I've not succeeded in getting that statute passed. So there's been a bit of a problem with that.
What results have community prosecution efforts yielded in Indianapolis? Have they been measurable, anecdotal or both?
For now, the results are largely anecdotal, but they're powerful anecdotes. For example, in a particular neighborhood called Meridian-Kessler, the deputy prosecutor identified residence burglaries as a major neighborhood problem. The street level prosecutor in that area brought together detectives who had each investigated separate burglaries to identify distinctive modus operandi of these groups of burglaries. These diverse detectives from different agencies found commonalities and developed the threads into probable cause for search warrants. We were able to convict three major burglars working on the north side of the city. One of them was a heroin addict who confessed to some 200 residence burglaries. We immediately reduced burglaries in this neighborhood by about half. It was staggering what taking these three burglars of the streets did and it wouldn't have happened if not for the community prosecutor.
Another example would be a gang on the west side called the Ponds. It was the kind of gang that was scaring residents in a couple of apartment complexes but it wasn't big enough or bad enough to come to the attention of a metro gang task force. A young man was being pressed to join that gang and his mother went to her apartment complex manager, who is also a local minister, to express concern about that. Well, he knew our west side district prosecutor and went to her. We were able to get with this mother and child to help them relocate, to debrief the young man about the activities of that gang and were able to disassemble that gang through conventional vertical prosecution. It made a big difference in that neighborhood.
We have blocks of the city reporting that they sleep better at night, that they hear less shooting. You may call these anecdotal ways of measuring success, but I would just say we are measuring new things. We're taking less of a “911” approach and more of a quality-of-life approach, measuring the number of evening walks a couple can take in a neighborhood, for example.
Is it possible to quantify these anecdotal results?
We are working right now on a new system that will help us to document a little more rigorously our results by creating a new docket. Instead of docketing a case, as the line prosecutors in my office do, we want to docket problems that come into the Street Level Advocacy Unit. We'll grade each problem: Category One, Two or Three depending on its difficulty, and the number of different parties and agencies that need to be involved in its solution. For each problem, we will determine a measure of success or an outcome we are seeking. We will be able, at the end of the year, to say, “Through this unit we solved 27 Category One problems, 81 Category Two problems,” and so forth. This is a way of giving deputy prosecutors themselves a measurable success, because we are all kind of case oriented and we like to open cases and close them. In this case we will open problems and close the problems.
We would also like to be able to report to our city council what we're doing out there in concrete terms, because we see some of the grant programs that we've relied on to fund this unit perhaps withering away in the next few years. We need to convince city councilors that community prosecution needs to be part of the infrastructure of a prosecutor's office and should be funded accordingly.
What advice would you give to those who are interested in starting or expanding community prosecution programs?
I think the main warning I would have is that I think the days of “low-hanging fruit”—in terms of federal funding for community prosecution programs—may be ending. I think my fellow prosecutors who either have programs or are thinking of starting them need to keep an eye on the fact that local law enforcement block grants may be shrinking or going away. We need to start looking at institutionalizing what community prosecutors do and selling that to our local city/county councils and other officials because in the next few years it may not be so easy to fund a community prosecution program. I would issue a warning to prosecutors to start to measure what your units are doing because you're going to have to start to market this to get continued funding.
July 2001