Community Policing and Community Courts

04/08/09 • -1 min

New Thinking, from the Center for Justice Innovation

After visiting the Harlem Community Justice Center, Katherine McQuay and Zoe Mentel of the U.S. Department of
Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) talk about reentry, community policing, and
the stimulus package.

ROBERT V. WOLF: This is Rob Wolf,
director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Welcome to another New Thinking podcast. I’m here
today at the Harlem Community Justice Center with Katherine McQuay who is a supervisory policy analyst with the Office
of Community Oriented Policing Services, and with Zoe Mentel, a policy analyst also with the Office of Community
Oriented Policing Services, otherwise known as the COPS Office. You came to learn a little bit about the Harlem Reentry
Court. Maybe you could tell me what interested you in it and what you thought about what you saw.

KATHERINE
McQUAY: Sure. The COPS Office is all about community policing, so we’re all about partnering, problem
solving, organizational change, and reentry is tailor-made for community policing because it’s all about partnering,
it’s law enforcement, with the community and the social service agencies, with other criminal justice agencies. And
we’ve been involved with reentry to a small extent in the past. We had a pilot program where we funded five pilot
reentry sites, and we’ve required community-based or faith-based organizations to partner with law enforcement agencies,
and faith-based mentoring is the centerpiece of those programs.

WOLF:
I know maybe it’s too soon. You’re still processing what you’ve seen, but are there some takeaways here, things that
you learned or think you might be able to apply?

MCQUAY: Well, I
think it really fits with everything we’ve learned over the years. Someone today said, you know, it’s all about partnering,
which, you know, that speaks to us, and it’s knowing what everybody else is doing and seeing how we can collaborate
because it’s not – no one person can do it alone.

ZOE MENTEL: And
what about other lessons that we’ve learned from hearing the parole officers is that offering services isn’t just
one more thing that you have to do in the course of your job. It’s something that’s going to make your job easier
or make it easier for you to have a positive impact.

McQUAY: And
I think that the discussion afterwards emphasized the need for law enforcement involvement because law enforcement
can be a detriment to these efforts or a great plus to these efforts.

WOLF:
I see.

McQUAY: And I think it really points to the need to partner
with law enforcement, to let law enforcement know what you’re doing with these efforts and to try to get them on
board so you can work in a coordinated fashion. We’ve talked to jurisdictions; there aren’t many but there are few
who do have law enforcement officers and probation-parole officers going out together, so really presenting a united
front and working together. And that seems to be a really good idea that’s starting to catch on.

WOLF:
As opposed to cross-purposes, it sounds like you can have different goals where the parole-reentry attitude sort
of encourages a certain amount of perhaps forgiveness with technical, very technical violations, and the police might
be presuming something else along the lines of zero tolerance.

McQUAY:
And the reentry parole officer talked about, you know, even if there is a technical violation of parole-probation,
that doesn’t mean they’re automatically going back to prison, so there seems to be a new attitude here where you’re
really trying to work with that individual and giving them every break possible to help get them on the right road.

WOLF: So why don’t you tell me a little bit about the COPS Office?
Tell me about its history.

McQUAY: We were created in 1994 as part
of the Violent Crime Control Act under President Clinton. And we were initially known for putting a hundred thousand
community policing officers on the street. And since then, we’ve done that and much more. We’ve created a network.
We call them the RCPIs: the Regional Community Policing Institutes that provide training and technical assistance
to law enforcement and the community on a variety of topics. We have a research and evaluation division that does
a lot of publications for us on a variety of subjects. We just distributed our 2 millionth publication. And we cover
everything from reentry to law enforcement agencies, internal affairs department, to hiring and recruitment to domestic
violence, to innovative ways for law enforcement to partner with the com...

WOLF:
I know maybe it’s too soon. You’re still processing what you’ve seen, but are there some takeaways here, things that
you learned or think you might be able to apply?

WOLF:
I see.

WOLF: So why don’t you tell me a little bit about the COPS Office?
Tell me about its history.

Previous Episode

Addressing Vacant Properties through Prevention, Enforcement and Redevelopment

Roxann Pais, an executive assistant city attorney in the Dallas City Attorney’s Office, describes how prosecutors
across the U.S. are responding to the crisis in foreclosed and vacant properties.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi. This is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Welcome
to another New Thinking podcast. I’m here with Roxann Pais, who is the executive assistant city attorney with the
Dallas City Attorney’s Office and the special assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas. And she
and I have both been in Washington a few days before President-elect Obama’s inauguration—but that’s not why we’re
here—to discuss mortgage fraud and the foreclosure crisis and how they are affecting communities and what law enforcement,
prosecutors and police can possibly do about it. Roxann, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me.

ROXANN
PAIS: Absolutely, Rob. How are you doing today?

WOLF:
I’m doing great.

PAIS: We have some friends here in Washington.

WOLF: Yeah, we have. It’s been very interesting. I’ve learned a
lot.

PAIS: It’s been so exciting to be able to see people so passionate
about their work and the hope of a new era.

WOLF: You know, when
I think of foreclosures, I associate that within a problem for individuals who are perhaps having problems paying
their mortgage and with the banks. Tell my why prosecutors should be interested in foreclosures and why you and the
Dallas City Attorney’s Office have become interested in it.

PAIS:
The prosecutors are in the business of ensuring that quality of life is improved in their neighborhoods. They are
in the business of reducing crime and prosecuting crime. They are in the business of making sure that justice is
served to the fullest extent possible under our laws.

If you take a look at the mortgage crisis,
the foreclosure crisis, what you’ll find is that this results in vacancy of structures on blocks. And typically,
these vacancies are occurring in some of the most crime-ridden, poorest neighborhoods in our country. And as a result,
crime begins to flourish with vacancy. Austin, Texas did a study where they found a block that had a vacant structure
on it had crime two times more than a block next door that didn’t have a vacant structure on it. So you could imagine
the cost that police incur in addressing crime with vacant structures on the block.

WOLF:
What kinds of crimes are we talking about?

PAIS: The drug dealing,
the gangs. The National Fire Protection Association estimates that about 6,000 firefighters are injured every year
just to put out fires in these abandoned vacant structures. There’s been a lot of talk about domestic violence increases
as a result of the foreclosure crisis and the stress that it has placed on families. There’s been talk about juvenile
delinquency and the amount of pressure that it’s putting on children who are being torn from their neighborhoods
and put somewhere else where they don’t know anyone.

WOLF: And is
it true that if you have a vacant property that that can lead, that can generate more vacant properties?

PAIS:
It’s an extreme domino effect and it can lead to potentially serious, serious problems not only resulting in crime
but even in city budgets, for example. We have a vacant structure. The value of the property is less than if it was
occupied. So when cities have lower property values, their tax base is lost. And when they have a lost tax base,
the municipal budgets are lower than they were in the preceding year. When you have a lower budget, municipal budget,
you have less services, such as police and fire services.

WOLF:
Well, so tell me, what can prosecutors do in response to this crisis and to prevent this crisis?

PAIS:
I’ve had the great opportunity to actually look across America and study various jurisdictions to see what they’re
doing. It’s important as we discuss a holistic approach to solving problems that we look at making sure that a jurisdiction
has prevention methods to prevent foreclosed or vacant structures, that they have enforcement methods, and that they
have a plan to reuse the property. And I’ve studied probably 80 different jurisdictions and have come up with about
80 different ideas on how to attack the problem through prevention, enforcement and reuse methods.

WOLF:
Wow. And so, there is a lot going on.

PAIS: Prevention methods,
for example: we have jurisdictions that are having t...

Next Episode

Herb Sturz Works Behind the Scenes to Spark Innovation

Herb Sturz–the subject of a new book, A Kind of Genius, by New York Times reporter Sam Roberts–talks about
innovation, the power of private-public collaborations, the founding of the Midtown Community Court, and his current
work at the Open Society Institute.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi.
This is Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Today I’m at the Open Society Institute with Herb Sturz. It’s difficult for me to even begin
to describe who he is because he’s done so much. What draws me to him today in particular is a new book out by Sam
Roberts called A
Kind of Genius: Herb Sturz and Society’s Toughest Problems, published by PublicAffairs.

Your
career has spanned so much over the last four decades or five decades. The Vera Institute of Justice, for instance: you spearheaded its creation and
led it. And Project Renewal,
the Center for Court Innovation... Maybe I should start out just by thanking you for having launched the Midtown Community
Court which led to the creation of the Center for Court Innovation, which has been my home for the last 10 years.

HERB STURZ: I’m delighted.

WOLF:
I thought I might begin with a big picture question, which is, in your incredible experience with public policy and
government, what are the biggest changes that you’ve seen in terms of people’s attitudes about what government can
do and just the most important changes in public policy that you have seen?

STURZ:
It’s a large question, Rob. I don’t think I’ve seen a great change over the 50 years as it relates to what government
can do. I think we—back then people thought that government could do almost anything. One felt really that it took
the government to do things, and the role of the private sector was less out front than it is today. And I think
there’s been a much greater awareness both on the private, non-profit side or business-side and government that you
could do a lot more when you marry private non-profit and government together. They’re not necessarily on the opposite
sides of the line. In fact, they add to each other.

The Center for Court Innovation is a kind
of perfect example where you started with one experiment working closely with the court, police, D.A. It wasn’t always
easy, but it took both sides and a lot of finesse and thought and understanding on both sides. To that extent, I
think it just opened people’s eyes more rather than saying ‘it’s a new role for government,’ if you want to call
it a new role, as government has helped welcome the private sector. And that’s something that Vera helped certainly
start early in the sixties. I doubt it that it was original, that it never happened before. But we made that very
central to the way of modus operandi in those years and I think to this day.

WOLF:
You have had an extraordinary talent, it seems to me, to connect with the right people, to bridge differences between
people. I wonder what your secret is.

STURZ: It is not a secret.
What I have done and do to this day is I’m persistent. If I care about a problem, I stay with it and I try to understand
it. I try to understand it from everyone’s point of view. And you’re arresting somebody or stopping and frisking
someone down on the street, what is the impact on the person who’s stopped? What’s the impact on the person’s family.
From the police point of view does this really cut down serious crime, as they would suggest, by making it more certain
that people would leave loaded weapons or hard drugs home or not? But those are the – so you’re trying to understand
what is at play and what are the collateral effects and what’s more central. And so, it’s really a way of looking
at a problem and not assuming you have a lock on knowledge, and also trying to understand, I guess, the motivation
of individuals. And certainly in government, what do they need versus the private sector, non-profit sector, and
trying to uncover what’s involved in a problem.

WOLF: So much of
public policy, criminal justice especially, is fraught with ideologies and things are interpreted through, you know,
left and right, and conservative. How do you get people to see beyond that into just the practical aspects?

STURZ:
Not d...