Robyn Wiktorski-Reynolds, the advocate program coordinator for Crisis Services in Buffalo,
New York, has worked in the field of domestic violence and sexual assault for 12 years. Here she discusses
the collaborative nature of victim advocacy work.

SARAH
SCHWEIG: Hi. I’m Sarah Schweig of the Center for Court Innovation, and today I’m speaking with Robyn
Wiktorski-Reynolds. Robyn is the advocate program coordinator for Crisis Services in Buffalo, New York, and she has
worked in the field of domestic violence and sexual assault for 12 years. Welcome.

SCHWEIG:
Wow. I’m sure you’re pretty busy. And in addition to all the things you just described, you also currently chair
the Crisis Services Rape Crisis Advisory Committee?

WIKTORSKI-REYNOLDS:
Yes.

SCHWEIG: Is that right? Who is involved in this committee and
what kinds of initiatives is the committee currently working on?

WIKTORSKI-REYNOLDS:
Sure. This is sort of the rape crisis hat of my program. We’re a dual program, so both sexual assault and domestic
violence, and there’s a lot of overlap. But the focus of this committee is really to develop and continue to work
on a coordinated community response to sexual assaults in Erie County. So the major stakeholders at the table include
the district attorney’s office, the local law enforcement, local universities—we have about four universities that
sit on this panel—a variety of human service agencies that deal with anything from women’s reproductive health to
developmental disabilities, you name it. We also have our sexual assault nurse examiner coordinator and the various
SANE (Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner) representatives from the variety of like 11 hospitals in Erie County. So we
have a variety of people that sit on that. We meet on a bi-monthly basis. The forensics for Erie County sit on that
as well as the medical examiner’s office because they have their hands obviously in the forensic evidence kits or
rape kits, as well as the drug facilitator sexual assault kits. So we get everybody together. We review current issues
or trends on the table and try to address them. Really the SANE (Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner) coordinator was born
of this committee. You know, we applied for a grant through DCJS. I was able to fund a position and it’s just sort
of morphed—same with the drug facilitator sexual assault kit testing, and that was developed through there.

And through this committee, we’ve had about four conferences since 2002 really dealing with what’s going
on. You know, the most recent one was sex abuse by school personnel because there was a lot going on in our community
around that. And the way that different school systems were handling it, it was really disturbing, and we weren’t
quite sure what to do, so we were like, let’s have a conference. So we brought in school administrators from all
over to talk about the liabilities, offender ideology, we actually had a local offender who was arrested for having
sex with one of his students—we had him on video. So it was really great. We try to be creative in our approach,
but then also handling the day-to-day. And at the very end of the day, just getting all those people in the same
room on a bi-monthly basis just increases communication across the board. I also have a victim advocate sit at the
table. So there’s just a professional collegiality. It just helps things move smoother on a day-to-day basis.

SCHWEIG: Excellent. And I think I just have one more question for you about
yet another project you work on, which is overseeing the operation of the New York State domestic and sexual violence
hotline. What are the goals of this hotline and what kinds of services does it provide?

WIKTORSKI-REYNOLDS:
The state hotline, we were awarded this contract in September of 2010. So we have been in existence for many, many
years. And the goal of this state hotline was to give folks around the state a centralized place they could call—there’s
an English line and a Spanish line, but obviously people are calling with all different languages—to essentially
determine safety, get them linked to their local domestic violence or sexual assault service provider. The sexual
assault component of the hotline was only added in, I want to say in 2006—I could be off by a year or two. And so,
that was great that they really combined these issues and brought them together. And currently, the way that we operate
is under the same theory that we want to give people a general place that they can call, safety plan, you know, discuss
what their current issues are and point them to their local providers who have local expertise and the services that
are there because what we know and understand is that even though there are regulating offices, Office of Child and
Family Services, Department of Health for rape crisis or domestic violence, there are a lot of organizations that
serve the domestic violence and sexual assault victims within communities that aren’t necessarily recognized by those
entities. And we are not necessarily going to know that, so we want to link people back. There is no service other
than that. It really is that immediate phone work. We don’t pass them on to a case manager as if they were calling
our other hotline for our local piece. So really it really is a service to the entire state that we’re really trying
to enhance, and we just continue to provide quality service for.

SCHWEIG:
Excellent. Thank you so much for speaking with me.

WIKTORSKI-REYNOLDS:
You’re welcome. Thank you. This is great.

SCHWEIG: Wonderful. I’m
Sarah Schweig and I’ve been speaking with Robyn Wiktorski-Reynolds, advocate program coordinator for Crisis Services
in Buffalo. To find out more about the Center for Court Innovation, you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org.
Thank you for listening.

June 2011

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David M. Sargent of the Maryland
Network Against Domestic Violence has taught thousands of law enforcement officers how to implement the Lethality
Assessment Program, which uses a short survey to assess victims’ risk of being killed and a simple protocol
to encourage them to get help.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi, I’m
Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. This is New Thinking, our podcast series
where we interview justice professionals who are addressing some of the most challenging problems society confronts.

Today I’m talking with David Sargent about domestic violence. David served 21 years with
the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., and he now works with the Maryland Network Against Domestic
Violence.

Thanks for taking a few minutes to chat.

DAVID SARGENT:
You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure to be here.

WOLF: David’s
in our office today helping train a group of visitors that we’re hosting from Minnesota. The focus of your training
is on the process of the lethality assessment program, which is a screening tool that police use to identify high-risk
domestic violence victims. And then there’s a process around what you do with that information. So that’s
what I wanted to ask you about.

Who is a high-risk domestic violence victim, and how does the
lethality assessment program fit in?

SARGENT: Well when we say high-risk,
what we’re saying is that this victim is at the greatest risk of being killed.

The screening
process that we use is evidence-based, mostly on the work of Dr. Jacqueline Campbell from Johns Hopkins University,
who has done danger and lethality assessment work over the past more than 25 years. And we have used that information
with Dr. Campbell’s assistance to be able to take information that has been available on a clinician’s
level, since before 1981, to be able to take that information and to bring it to the level of the field practitioner
so that the field practitioner can make the same research-based assessment identification of victims who are at the
greatest risk of being killed.

With that information, what we do is we try to get victims into
domestic violence services. We use a very proactive approach to be able to accomplish that. For example, with police
officers, the officer uses the screen on the scene of a domestic violence call.

WOLF:
Before you go on, the police officer is called to a scene, and there has been an allegation of domestic violence,
and then the screen is a series of questions?

SARGENT: Essentially
after the investigation is completed, the officer goes through a process where he tells the victim that he would
like to ask her some questions to get a better idea of her situation.

He proceeds to ask the
11 questions that are a part of the field screening process. If a victim has answered yes to enough of these questions,
which an officer immediately is able to determine, the officer tells the victim that she’s in danger, that in
situations like this people have been killed.

And what he or she—the officer—would like to do
is to contact the domestic violence hotline to be able to get some information to pass onto her, but also for her
to think about getting on the phone with the hotline worker.

It’s always the victim’s
decision. If the victim answers ‘No, I don’t want to get on the phone,’ then we respect that, but we encourage
her again. And we say, ‘Well, that’s fine, you don’t have to, but I’m gonna call the domestic violence
hotline to get some information to pass onto you and while I’m on the phone, I’d just like you to think about
speaking with them.’

We’ve essentially hit the victim cold with this kind of information,
or this overture that we’ve made to her. So we’d like her to have an opportunity to be able to process
it and proactively have the hotline worker right there, prepared to speak with her. WOLF: Let me ask you, just to
give a sense, what kinds of questions are you actually asking that help you make this determination?

SARGENT:
The questions are, again, those that are most predictive of homicide, such as ‘Has he ever threatened you with a
weapon? Does he have access to firearms? Has he ever tried to—as we say in the screen—choke you?’ We know the word
is strangled, but choke is the word that the public commonly understands.

We ask questions like
that, that as we’ve determined from the research are most predictive of homicide. And not of re-abuse. That’s
a different level. Again, we’re trying to identify that portion of those victims who are being abused, who are
at the greatest risk of being killed.

WOLF: And just to understand
how this differentiates from common practice because I’m sure that police officers in many jurisdictions give
a referral of some kind when they leave. This sounds much more proactive, where the officer is actually making the
phone call in front of the victim. Is that sort of what distinguishes it from other methods?

SARGENT:
It is absolutely. You’re right. The normal approach is for simple referral. We decided early on during the development
of this screen that it was not sufficient to have just an instrument that identified victims who were at a risk of
being killed, but to have something proactively to be able to move that victim along to be able to take action.

What
we found with our victims that we work with, who call for service, is that that is generally a different kind of
victim than the victim who picks up the telephone in the middle of the night to call the domestic violence hotline
because she is ready to get help. The victims that we see are not in the same—at the same stage.

There’s
a process called the stages of change that victims go through. And generally the victims that we’re seeing on
the road are those victims who are in the early stages of change. They don’t recognize the situation they’re
in, and they are less apt to move forward. And so the process, the lethality process, by asking the questions—and
hard questions to answer to—and telling the victim that in situations like this people have been killed, which is
true and we know that from the research, to try to open her eyes and try to get her to take action.

Getting
the hotline worker is another part of that. And part of the job of the hotline worker when she has the opportunity
to speak with the victim is that the hotline worker will encourage the victim to come in for services, even to the
point of scheduling an appointment and telling the victim that ‘You know, when tomorrow comes and you’re thinking
about this appointment, you’re not gonna want to come in. Resist that and come anyway.’

We’ve
been successful in getting victims into services. The national percentages of victims who have been killed in domestic
violence situations—only four percent of them have ever availed themselves of the services of a domestic violence
program, because they didn’t know about it, because they weren’t ready to take action or they were afraid
to take action.

Well, now victims become aware of our services. And 38 percent of victims who
went in for services in 2010 in the state of Maryland, 38 percent of victims who spoke on the phone, excuse me, went
in for services. These are high-risk victims that we know of, none of that 38 percent which last year was nearly
1,200 victims, none of those victims was killed in a domestic situation.

WOLF:
So each one of those situations is challenging, really, to measure the impact on homicide, presumably, but you’re
looking for other indications like these are people who probably would not have gone for services if the officer
hadn’t been so proactive and the hotline operator also hadn’t been proactive.

SARGENT:
In the last three years, our intimate partner homicide rate has been reduced by 41 percent. We can’t attribute
that to the lethality assessment program, but when we are getting the percentages and numbers of high-danger victims
into services that we are, none of those has been killed. And I think we can say with some hope that the reduction
is due, in large measure, to the work in the lethality assessment program.

WOLF:
So I’m speaking with Dave Sargent, who served 21 years with the metropolitan Police Department in Washington, and
is now helping train people in Maryland and around the country in the lethality assessment program.

And
I wanted to ask you how it started in Maryland, when did it actually start, and now how widely is the process used?

SARGENT: We went through a development process with a large committee,
multi-disciplinary committee between 2003 and 2005. We implemented it in the state of Maryland in October of 2005
and 92 percent of our law enforcement agencies that respond to calls for service participate in the lethality assessment
program, including our state police. All of our domestic violence programs in all of our counties are participants
as well.

Yes, we have extended beyond Maryland. The lethality assessment program is now being
implemented by more than 140 law enforcement agencies in 13 states with their partner programs. And we’re preparing
to train even more jurisdictions in other states as we speak.

So this has had a broader impact
than we imagined when we first began. I think it just speaks to the simplicity of use, but also to the paradigm shift
that has occurred in how victims are worked with, both by law enforcement and by the domestic violence program. The
communication level between the two, between domestic violence services and between law enforcement, has been a big
byproduct of the lethality assessment program.

It’s improved and it will improve if the
agency and the program are working together to make sure that there are successful aspects of this, that they try
to get a victim on the telephone, the officers do. That the hotline tries to get the victim into services, and encourages
them to take that step. And it happens.

And our, in small sample surveys that we’ve done
with victims, they have told us that they have gone in for services in one respect based on the partnership that
they felt between the law enforcement officer and the hotline worker during that time of that call for service. They
sensed a certain working together that was occurring, and they felt support from both that officer and that hotline
worker. And that was the encouragement that propelled them to move forward, to seek out the services.

WOLF:
So obviously you recommend that groundwork be laid between the police agency and the hotline to coordinate this,
obviously, because it just doesn’t happen naturally, it sounds like.

SARGENT:
It has to happen. Both law enforcement agencies and the domestic violence program have to be willing to work together
to see this through.

WOLF: And the 11 questions, are they very user
friendly for a police officer? Can anyone do this or is it best if an officer is a special kind of officer trained
not only in this questionnaire but in the domestic violence issues?

SARGENT:
We do go through considerable training because we want to be able to convey the process that we believe is at stake
here, and we want the officers and domestic violence advocates to fully understand the process. But the actual practice
of it is very, very simple.

Yes, any police officer can ask the questions. Any person who’s
working in an agency, a receptionist who’s working for an agency that may see a domestic violence victim come
in during the course of its normal work would be in a position to ask these, and they’re not conveying any kind
of professional or expert information in doing this. So essentially they’re serving as a conduit to that domestic
violence program where the expert information can be relayed.

So yes, anybody can do it, and
part of the process is to train other community partners to be able to use the lethality assessment program, such
as hospitals, departments of health, departments of social services, even the faith community because we find that
victims go to their faith leaders and disclose domestic violence and to seek guidance in large numbers. And if they’re
going to this source for help, then we need to work with that, with those faith leaders to be able to allow them
to be able to serve as an appropriate conduit to the professional help that is available through the domestic violence
program.

WOLF: And if someone wanted to find out more about the
lethality assessment program, where can they get that information?

SARGENT:
Well it’s on the Maryland Network against Domestic Violence’s website, which is www.mnadv.org. All our
information is there, including our email information, which is info@mnadv.org.

WOLF:
Great, well I thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.

SARGENT:
Thank you so much, I appreciate the time.

WOLF: I’m Rob Wolf,
director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. I’ve been talking with David Sargent of the Maryland
Network Against Domestic Violence about the lethality assessment program. To find out more information about the
Center for Court Innovation you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

May 2011

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New York City Commissioner of Probation Vincent N. Schiraldi, who previously
ran the juvenile justice system in Washington D.C., describes his journey from gadfly to government insider and the
reforms he’s been implementing along the way.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: This is Rob Wolf, director of communications for the Center for Court Innovation, and today
I’m with Vinnie Schiraldi, who is the commissioner of the Department of Probation in New York City.

VINNIE
SCHIRALDI: Good morning Rob. Thanks a lot for having me.

WOLF:
So you’ve been on the job for 13 months or so and you’re route to this job is kind of an interesting one,
and I thought maybe you could talk a little bit about how you began after college working with justice-involved youth
and traveled this route from advocate to working in the government.

SCHIRALDI:
So I was a house parent in a seven-bed home for juvenile delinquent boys run by the State Division for Youth. That’s
what the Office for Children and Family Services was called. The best job I ever had, I loved working with young
people.

And then, you know, I just heard a speech by a really charismatic non-profit leader named
Jerome Miller who had deinstitutionalized the whole juvenile justice system for the state of Massachusetts and was
running a non-profit that did alternatives to incarceration. And I was hooked as soon as I heard this guy speak because
I really, really, really felt that incarceration was doing damage to these kids.

And so I chased
him out of the classroom when I was getting my master’s at Syracuse University. He hired me on the spot. I went to
work with a woman named Marsha Weissman, who lots of folks may know because she was at the Center for Community Alternatives
in New York. There I embarked upon a 25 year career in the non-profit world.

WOLF:
How did you end up running the juvenile justice system in Washington, DC?

SCHIRALDI:
Well, it was 2004 and I had been running the Justice Policy Institute, which is a major, major critic of over incarceration
in general, and specifically of the juvenile justice system in D.C.

I was writing op-eds and
screaming and yelling about how I wouldn’t kennel my dog in the D.C. juvenile justice system, and miraculously,
under enormous amounts of pressure, the mayor of D.C. hired me. Not pressure to hire me, pressure to do something
to fix this pathological system.

And he really broke the mold and everybody he had hired, or
everybody everybody hired before that had decades of experience running youth correctional facilities. And unfortunately,
this is a system where decades of experience can often be a minus in my opinion. Because so much of what goes on
in these systems is so bad. It’s just systemically bad. It’s not even just chronically bad.

And
so, to his credit, the mayor said you know what? I’m gonna try a different mold. I’m gonna bring a guy
in that really is outside the box. And that was Mayor Williams and then thankfully when Mayor Fenty got elected,
he kept me on.

WOLF: And so I understand you were the 20th director
in 19 years.

SCHIRALDI: That’s right.

WOLF:
But you stayed for five years. How did you manage to stay so much longer than anyone had and how did you—what kinds
of changes did you bring about? And how did you do it?

SCHIRALDI:
I did a couple things. One is that we really did articulate a vision that was very different than what was going
on.

We said, too many of these kids are locked up. Many of them should be in community service,
community programs. We designed a really good set of community programs and then we tackled awful, awful institutional
conditions.

We told every political leader that as we do this, there is gonna be enormous push-back.
The status quo will fight us back. Get ready because if you want to fix this you gotta know, the rubbers gonna hit
the road and you’re gonna have to take my back. If you’re not willing to do that, don’t bother hiring
me. So I told them coming in, don’t think this is gonna be an easy ride. This system is not gonna be shaken
up without fighting back.

And I had two votes of no-confidence from my unions within three months.
So they – I was right. And then people started leaking stuff to the press and, you know, to their credit, both mayors
and the city council, they took my back. They said we believe where this guy is going.

I’d
invite them up to activities we had there. We started a theatrical group. The kids were doing artwork. The kids were
taking guns that the police gave us, that had been disassembled, turning them into artwork, drawing together with
victims so that they could learn about, you know, victims of violence.

We were doing an enormous
amount of creative activity and every time I did it, I made sure the mayor, I made sure city council, I made sure
the judges, I made sure the media knew about it. Because I knew I was gonna take my hits so I needed to build up
a well of support.

WOLF: So what was the biggest lesson you’ve
learned from making the transition from advocacy to government?

SCHIRALDI:
I think the biggest thing I didn’t know is how much implementation and infrastructure matter, right? You can
sit back and think of all of the wonderful ideas in the world, but the trick with government isn’t just to come
up with good ideas. It’s to have those ideas implemented with some level of fidelity to what they were originally
about. And that’s, that’s really tricky.

I mean a lot of people don’t realize
that if I, today, decide I’m running a new program, it’s going to take a year before I can start that program.
I’ve got to write a scope of service. I’ve got to get it approved. A bunch of lawyers got to look at it. I’ve
got to get the money, you know? All of this stuff’s got to get together.

No actually, even
when I have the money, it’s going to take a year. So that’s something I really just, I didn’t know
anything about. I didn’t know anything about how difficult it was going to be to fix the boilers or procure
underwear for the kids in my facility.

These things were extraordinarily difficult in the government
context. And I, as an advocate, I had sort of always assumed that the bureaucrats that weren’t getting that
stuff done were dragging their feet, right? Because it just seems ridiculous that it’s gonna take six months
to procure new underwear for the kids so that they don’t have to wear recycled underwear when they come to the
facility. That’s a huge indignity and anyone who can’t fix that right away must be a bad person. So here
I am, and I’m a good person and I care about this, and I’m trying, and it’s taken me six months. So that was
a bit of a humbling lesson.

But on the other side, I do think that you don’t want to over
learn that lesson. What you don’t want to do is give up. You don’t want to start every reform with deflated
expectations. You got to have some rage in you and some fight in you, to believe that the unbelievable is true. So
even though it’s going to take you six months, you got to believe you can do it in two months. And you got to
fight like hell because if you do, you might get it done in six months, and then you might actually get it done,
which nobody did before, right?

The kids were always wearing recycled underwear. It took three
times as long as it should have, but they got underwear. So that was good. And that’s just one stupid little
example, but, although meaningful for kids, but we closed this facility that had been open since the ’60s.

You
don’t know how many of my staff people came up to me and said, “I never thought we were going to do this.” But
three and a half years in, I closed the old – Oak Hill it was called – it was the old facility, which was an awful,
awful place, and opened up a really beautiful, well-designed, new facility. That was, I got – I think that’s
the proudest moment in my entire career today. We padlocked Oak Hill and moved all those kids to that new place.
If you have a nice building and you want a good program, the synergy between the two really matters.

WOLF:
So let me ask you how you came to New York. What was the situation you were confronting?

SCHIRALDI:
The things I was confronted with here are very, very different than it was in D.C. because I think Marty did a good
job. Marty Horne, who was my predecessor, and Pat Brennan, I think, did a good job. I think, you know, New York’s
had some pretty, really terrific probation commissioners: Mike Jacobson, Catherine Abate, you know, a bunch of folks,
just tops in the field. So this wasn’t coming into a crippled, bitter place like I did in D.C., which is terrific
cause I can build.

Now’s the fun part, right? Now you can really sort of take the high level
and dream of making it higher, as opposed to having to slog through things like broilers and underwear, right?

I
think that by and large, people see us as a place that has a lot of decent people in it. So it’s not like they
don’t like my staff or don’t like the administration. But I feel like people view our services as generally
mediocre. And so in that respect, I do think that we could do some improving, particularly on the very essence of
the interaction between our staff and the people on probation. I think we can actually produce a better product.

But I can only do that cause Marty helped do all the stuff he did before. And the stuff he did
on juvenile justice, where he declared Project Zero, and he called the state centralized bureaucracy as a place where
nobody from New York City should go. He did that in 2004, and now Mayor Bloomberg came out and said, “We want to
take every single one of our kids out of that system in 2010.”

I think those were connected.
I don’t think that we should view them as independent acts. Marty laid down a marker. He started programs and
John Mattingly, [the commissioner] at ACS [the city’s Administration for Children’s Services], started
programs that have reduced the number of kids we put upstate by 62 percent. That’s an extraordinary reduction
in state commitments from New York City. And now we’re down to 300 kids left from New York City, in OCFS facilities.
And the end is within sight.

WOLF: That’s Office for Children
and Family Services facilities?

SCHIRALDI: That’s right. That’s
the state institution system.

WOLF: What is wrong, what has been
wrong with the state’s centralized bureaucracy?

SCHIRALDI:
What’s wrong with New York’s state centralized bureaucracy, called OCFS, is the same thing that’s
wrong and has been wrong with almost every state-centralized bureaucracy for juvenile institutions since the history
of these 220 years ago, which is that they turn into loveless, mediocre at best, often far less than that, brutalizing
at times, but dehumanizing almost always, environments for kids that get shipped far away from home, who come back
certainly no better and often a lot worse than they went.

In New York you hear about the justice
department’s lawsuit, kids getting their teeth broken and bones broken for things like asking for extra dessert
or talking in line, or putting too much sugar in their orange juice—silly stuff like that. And those are the highlights,
but—or low lights—but it’s also the day to day sort of lack of love. And I think what’s been said that
the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s apathy. And I think that that’s really what characterizes most
of these training schools around the country and certainly in New York.

That and this enormous
distance between where these kids are and where they end up going—to the Finger Lakes and Adirondacks, and all these
crazy training schools—I think adds to it. I think if the kids were home we could have community vendors and community
institutions like churches and youth groups working with them so that when they come out, they are already engaged
with those folks.

WOLF: Your job involves also not just young people,
but 27,000 adults who are on probation as well. Maybe you can talk a little bit about innovations that you’re
pursuing there.

SCHIRALDI: We have, like you said, 27,000 adults
that we’re supervising at any given time, and what we’re trying to do it take a lead from the National
Institute of Correction’s playbook, which talks all about evidence-based interactions between probation officers
and people on probation, to try to do what the research says should help people: Get a good risk-assessment instrument,
find out who’s high, medium, and low, do very little with the low, with the medium and high really focus resources
on dealing with the issues that matter from a crime-control standpoint. What should really correlate with re-arrest,
right?

We’re going to train all our staff on how to do that, we’re going get an evidence-based
risk assessment instrument to help them, right? But the thing I think that will be different from us, that we’ll
do than the NIC playbook is we’re gonna take a lead from the Center for Court Innovation’s playbook, and
we’re going to do all of that in a very community-based, community-development setting, right? One of which
we hope we’ll do together with you guys in Brownsville, right?

So we’re saying, yes
it matters that we follow evidence as to how we interact with people. But it also matters that people reintegrate
into their own neighborhoods, which by the way, characterizes the vast majority of jurisprudence in the world prior
to about 150 years ago.

Prior to about 150 years ago, most times people broke the law, it got
solved—it happened within a few blocks of where they lived, a few miles, a few feet, and it got dealt with right
in that neighborhood.

We have professionalized that and moved everything to downtown courthouses
and downtown probation departments and upstate prisons, and I think by doing that we make things worse. I don’t
think we make things—I don’t think we make things uniformly better. There were some things that got better,
but I think the part where the community actually has a stake in what happens to its miscreants, if you want to call
them that, right? We lost that. And that, I think, matters.

So like CCI has brought that back
in places like Red
Hook and Greenpoint
and Harlem,
we want to do that too and we are overtly standing with you guys and we thank you for allowing us to do so.

WOLF:
Well, it’s exciting to think about the Brownsville project, which is one of our newest projects in planning—a new
community court with a youth-focus.

I’ve been speaking with Vinnie Schiraldi, the commissioner
of the Department of Probation. Thanks so much for coming by our office today to give a presentation to staff and
spending some time to talk with me.

SCHIRALDI: Thanks Rob, it was
a really good way to end the week.

WOLF: And I’m Rob Wolf, director
of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. If you want to find out more about our work, visit our website
at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

May
2011

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Mallory O’Brien, a researcher at the Public Policy Institute at Duke University, describes how the Milwaukee
Homicide Review Commission brings together law enforcement and public health to solve individual homicides.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi. I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and today
I’m speaking with Mallory O’Brien who’s the founding director of the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission. She’s
also a researcher in the Public Policy Institute at Duke University. Thanks, Mallory, for taking the time to talk
with me.

O’BRIEN:
So we have the cop that may have responded to the incident. We have the community prosecutors, corrections, ATF,
FBI, U.S. attorney, city attorney, juvenile corrections, public schools, ICE, the housing authority—anybody that
you define to be in the criminal justice world is at the table for those discussions. So at the end of the discussion,
we oftentimes come up with recommendations for change. They might be recommendations that revolve around a particular
case and it’s follow-up that needs to be done.  It might be a recommendation on a policy change that the
Department of Corrections should be implementing. It might actually be a policy-level change that needs to be done
by the legislature. So we run the gamut from an individual to a real population-based policy change.

WOLF:
So to be clear, you’re talking about a specific case and you may brainstorm among this whole group of people from
these diverse agencies. And will they share information and actually try to make suggestions about how further the
investigation of a particular case? Is that also one of the by-products?

O’BRIEN:
That is one of the by-products. So not only is it developing prevention, intervention, and suppression strategies,
but it’s also helping to clear a particular case. So for example, we may have a witness in a homicide who we learn
at the Homicide Review is actually on paper with Corrections. Well, the Corrections agent can then leverage that
witness to be more cooperative with the law enforcement. So that’s it, a case-specific example.

WOLF:
And so, then, to the point of prevention which is a key, I think, component of any public health approach, emphasizing
prevention, as you say, you also collectively try to come up with broader policy recommendations or changes. I wonder
if you could give any examples of those that might illuminate how this collaboration can maybe come up with a creative
solution that no one on their own, no individual agency might have come up with.

O’BRIEN:
Well, I think what these reviews do is they actually create a forum not only for information sharing but strategy
development. And this didn’t happen overnight. And we had to develop trust among all of the agencies to start sharing
the information because it’s not a public meeting but we’re all in a room together and we’re all sharing some of
our faults. So that took a while, but once we got to the point where we had developed that trust, that’s when these
discussions start to develop. So before we get to me answering your question, let me just make—let me tell you the
rest of the process and then I’ll get to your—

WOLF: Sure. Absolutely.

O’BRIEN: So we do the criminal justice review once a month, but we also do
a community service provider review. And we do that review every other month, and there we pull together the community
service providers in the neighborhoods. We pull together the community liaison officers, the community prosecutors,
the faith community—specific agencies that might have touched the victim, the suspect or even the location that the
event occurred. So when we talk about creating a really in-depth picture of the homicide, we’re talking about criminal
histories. We’re talking about, do we know anything about their attendance at school?; do we know anything about
the property?; were their calls serviced?; did the Department of Neighborhood Services respond?; were their license
premise violations ?—all of those kinds of things to try and develop different types of strategies so that we’re
not just focusing on a purely law enforcement response but a collaborate response. So to answer your question, let
me give you an example. One thing that I did a couple of years ago is I pulled together a sub-committee where we
were focusing specifically on gun violence reduction. So, at those meetings I have the U.S. attorney—no, not the
U.S. attorney but a representative from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, ATF, district attorney—

WOLF:
Alcohol, tobacco, and firearms?

O’BRIEN: Sorry. Yes. The prosecutors,
the city attorney’s office, the office of violent prevention, the health department; corrections is also there. We
brainstorm about different things each agency could be doing themselves and collaboratively. While we were analyzing
some of the data that is available through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and Explosives that relates
to firearms—and who were the individuals that purchased the firearms?; how long did it take for the gun to be purchased
and then end up in crime?; who were the associates involved?; what kind of crime?; was the firearm recovered—those
kinds of things. We were analyzing that information and I was looking at firearms with the short time-to-crime. ATF
uses a definition of two years or less. I use a definition of one year or less. So I was really looking at those
guns that made it into the hands of criminals in a very short period of time. And what I noticed when I was doing
the analysis was that there was a disproportionate number of young black females that were purchasing firearms and
then they were ending up in crime. Now because we had the health department at the table for those discussions, they
came up with an initiative, an education campaign to target women, specifically women of color, and they went to
the beauty parlors. They developed a campaign and it was implemented at the beauty parlors, trying to reach the women
that they felt were most likely to purchase a firearm for their man. And the message was, “Don’t buy for your guy.”

WOLF: So that’s an interesting example of bringing in a health department or
public health expertise in the area of public education. And you’re using them to deliver a message that serves both
the public health by lowering violence but also a criminal justice end because obviously violence generally is connected
to criminal behavior as well. So that’s a great example. Was there a measureable impact? Were you able in any way
to evaluate it?

O’BRIEN: Well, I haven’t looked at the data, but
that was done relatively recently.

WOLF: I’m speaking with Mallory
O’Brien who is the founding director of the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission. I wanted to ask you really one
other question because I think you have a very unique position where you’re a public health expert who is a consultant
working very closely with law enforcement, in this case the Milwaukee Police Department. And I wonder when you bring
your public health eyes and your academic background as a researcher in Duke University to this sort of paramilitary
organization that, you know, perhaps operates very differently, what are you seeing? What have you learned and what
lessons can you offer about creating successful collaborations between public health and police agencies or law enforcement
agencies?

O’BRIEN: One of the things early on was finding the right
people within the organizations that you’re trying to work with because law enforcement and public health don’t seem
like, on face value, don’t seem like logical partners. And part of it is that law enforcement, in my experience,
has been—they have been skeptical about sharing their detailed information on what goes on in their cases, especially
open cases. So, what I found to be one of the keys was finding the right people in the agencies that I needed to
deal with and developing a relationship, developing trust so they felt as like they could trust me, that I wasn’t
going to harm their agency in any way, that I was there to be a neutral convener to assist all of the agencies in
developing strategies. So when I look at success, I think the reason why we have been successful, not only in initiating
the Homicide Review Commission, but in sustaining it over time is that we have developed these trusting relationships.
We have been able to move strategies forward, so if we develop a strategy, we actually do something with it. And
then, we can say, hey, this worked or it didn’t work, because we’ve been collecting all this information for so many
years that we’re in a position to assisting and evaluating the outcomes.

WOLF:
Well, it’s been fascinating talking with you, and I wish you continued luck in your work. I’ve been talking with
Mallory O’Brien who’s the founding director of the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission. She’s also a researcher
in the Public Policy Institute at Duke University. And we’ve been speaking just outside of the meeting room where
we spent the day at The California Endowment here in Los Angeles, where leaders in public health and in law enforcement
were meeting to discuss basically what they could learn from each other. I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications
at the Center for Court Innovation. To find out more about the Center for Court Innovation, you can visit our website
at www.courtinnovation.org. Thanks for listening.

April 2011

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Anthony Iton of the California Endowment talks about the public health approach to crime and safety problems.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, the director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation
and I’m in Los Angeles today with Tony Iton, who is the senior vice president of Healthy Communities, which
is an initiative of the California Endowment. And in fact we’re here at The Endowment, at a round table or what’s
been called an executive session that’s bringing together leaders in law enforcement and in public health to
talk about basically what public health has to teach law enforcement.

And you gave a fascinating
presentation at the outset about the public health approach. You broke it down into four components and I thought
maybe you could just say briefly again what those are.

ANTHONY ITON:
Yeah the framework that I offered is really a disease response framework which is sort of at the heart of public
health, it’s basically trying to stamp out new and emerging disease. So the framework is four components. The
first is one is surveillance, trying to figure out the who, what, where, when.

When a new disease
comes on the horizon you’ve got to characterize it, understand who’s vulnerable and how the disease might
move through a population. The second component is disease control: How do you interrupt the cycle of transmission?
What are the basic strategies that will interrupt its movement? And that may be vaccines. It may be pharmaceuticals.
It may be physical measures like quarantine and isolation. It may be using things like education, condoms, needle
exchange, what have you.

The third element is coordination. And it’s probably the most important
element in public health. It is to essentially figure out what resources to bring to bear to mitigate the problem,
you know, during and afterwards.

And then, finally, the fourth is communication. And that’s
typically thought of as the three P’s: How do you talk to the politicians and policymakers? How do you talk to the
physicians? And how do you talk to the public?

And so that’s the framework and it has applicability
to law enforcement, as well, particularly the surveillance and control aspects, but also the communication and coordination.

WOLF: It’s interesting. There are some obvious parallels: Surveying
the community; identifying where crime is. But the point you made which I thought was fascinating was that public
health doesn’t just stop at: “Oh there’s an outbreak here. Let’s treat the people.” You
try to dig down and find the source.

And I think law enforcement at times has tried to do that,
and increasingly so tried to do that. But it’s not as much part of the DNA of law enforcement and I wonder if
you could talk about that a little bit.

ITON: Yeah, so that’s
the challenge, really. To be purely reactive is really to just operate constantly in that model of surveillance-control.
Which is trying to interrupt the cycle, but isn’t necessarily trying to prevent future incidents of the disease
or looking at the vulnerabilities-the conditions that make a population more susceptible to a particular type of
disease.

And so public health has evolved, and has started to look much deeper at what is sometimes
referred to as the social determinates of health: looking at the quality of housing, for instance, that might make
a disease more easily able to move through a population, if there’s housing overcrowding, for instance.

Look
at the quality of education: What people know and their ability to, essentially, to navigate, you know, information-to
be able to acquire the kinds of information they need to protect themselves. Looking at the quality of employment:
I mean, if people are for instance working at jobs that are very low pay, and they don’t have things like sick
days, paid sick days, then they are much more likely to come to work sick. Much more likely to spread those diseases,
you know, at work, which could have a much more profound impact on the population.

So trying
to get at some of the underlying drivers of vulnerability in a population is as critical as sort of acutely interrupting
the cycle of transmission. Because if you just interrupt it, it’s like, as I like to say: If you go into a community
and fires are burning and you just put out the fires, well, you’ve done a good service. But if you come back
the next day and fires are burning in the same place, and all you do is put out the fires again, well then you’re
not doing such a good service, because you’re not recognizing that there’s something that’s making
those sites more amenable to burn. And if you don’t tackle that issue, then you are just going to be putting
out fires day-in, day-out.

WOLF: And how do you see that mindset
and that approach transferable, if at all, to law enforcement? And I’m thinking of, you know, law enforcement
already looks at data, CompStat, you know, they’re quick to look at trends. What more can they do or what can
they take things from public health and your approaches that do seem to go deeper and look at more fundamental causes
of disease, but in their case crime and safety issues?

ITON: Well,
part of it is how law enforcement is held accountable. Law enforcement is held accountable for homicides and violent
crimes and sort of a reactive kind of mentality. And I think that that’s understandable but a little bit unfair,
because law enforcement didn’t create the conditions that lead to the crime. They’re just trying to put
out the crime once it starts. So law enforcement would benefit from partnerships with public health, at a minimum,
to try to be able to understand the root causes or the drivers of high crime. And then would certainly benefit from
getting credit for preventing crime as opposed to just suppressing crime–if, in fact, the crime statistics go down.

Now, I think that they are different disciplines with different focuses, but the synergy between
the two disciplines is substantial. And what typically does not happen is that law enforcement doesn’t spend
a lot of time with public health and public health doesn’t spend a lot of time with law enforcement. So there’s
this sort of foreignness of the territories that leads to this sense that, you know, “we don’t do what
you do; you don’t do what we do.” And the more time, and the jurisdictions where I’ve been, and those
that I’ve seen that have had successful collaborations, actually just spend a lot of time together, so they
understand each other’s sort of relevance to their own discipline.

And there’s a huge
amount of potential, particularly when it comes to data analysis and some of the community oriented policing strategies,
to borrow from public health strategies that are much more deeply rooted in community and in prevention than the
typical suppressive approaches that many law enforcement agencies are forced to adopt.

WOLF:
I can see how you talk about, you know, prevention, maybe in terms of environment for transmission of an illness-
like you gave examples of not enough sick days and people going to work. How would that translate to something that
is more overtly criminal justice related? Shootings. Any kind of pattern of–I don’t even know if it even does
apply–robberies, car break-ins, truancy perhaps? You know, even smaller things, but maybe that are entry level criminal
issues for young people?

ITON: One of the things we know that correlates
extremely well with crime is essentially idle time. Kids that get out of school at 1:50 in the afternoon or 2:10
in the afternoon, every day, and have nothing to do between that time and when their parents get home at 7 o’clock
or whenever. We know–all of us have been through this, we were adolescents at one point–that you are much more
inclined to engage in mischief if you are unsupervised and you have nothing constructive to do.

So
we know, for instance, that a public health approach to that problem is essentially trying to figure out youth development
strategies. And, very simply, you can look at thinks like boys and girls clubs; you can look at after-school programs–a
whole host of things where young people are essentially exposed to graduated responsibility. They’re asked to
engage in some civic participation. They’re held to very high expectations.

All of those
things are associated with a much lower likelihood of engaging in the behaviors that are associated with crime and,
by the way, with illness. Like sexually transmitted diseases, car accidents and the like.

The
ability for law enforcement to participate, to forge relationships with young people in communities at that stage–and
it’s sort of a pre-adolescent stage quite frankly–is the most optimum time for that kind of relationship to
develop. So that the youth not only is actively engaged in constructive activities, like the Police Activities League,
and a variety of other, you know, police oriented after-school programs, but they also have a different perspective
on law enforcement. And they don’t necessarily see them as a threat. They don’t necessarily see them as
the enemy.

They’ll see aspects of leadership in law enforcement that they may want to emulate
themselves. And that of itself is a crime prevention strategy.

It’s just a very simple example
of a kind of public health approach to crime prevention. Certainly many police agencies around the country have already
invested in these kinds of activities for young people. Typically, for kids that are a little bit older-and we think
that getting into that preadolescent state is really critical-but that’s an example of a public health approach
to crime prevention.

WOLF: And I’m just thinking of one other
thing. When you speak about public health, when I think of when there is an innovation, a vaccination, or a strategy,
and if it’s proven to work, it just seems like it spreads like wildfire. Everyone does it. It’s understood
to be the best practice. You’re not going to let a disease spread if you understand how to handle it.

Whereas
in law enforcement, it seems to me, you can look at, and someone said here at the meeting, Director Malekian, director
of the Community Oriented Policing Services office at the Department of Justice, said: “If I say to someone
‘what’s community policing?’ If you do it, all the chiefs are going to raise their hand. But if I
ask them to write down what it is they’re doing, they’ll all say something different.” And I wonder
if there isn’t something there, as well, that they can learn from public health. In terms of it being more of
a science and you sort of accept, I may not be articulating it well, but it seems to me that there’s a very
cultural difference there. That you’re dealing with a very fractured understanding of how to do things, in terms
of law enforcement vs. public health.

ITON: You know, I think there
is some truth to that. I do think that public health and health in general is much more scientifically rigorous in
the approaches that it pursues. That’s not universally the case. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff done in
health and in public health that is still kind of anecdotal. But in law enforcement there doesn’t seem to be
as great a culture of, essentially, peer review. You know, scientific rigor. And there’s a much more sort of
anecdotal flavor to a lot of the approaches that people take, and there’s, I think in the sort of the political
sphere, there’s much more emotionality about law enforcement issues, about–crime can be very emotionally rending
and people want sort of very immediate solutions that don’t necessarily look at long-term investments to reduce
likelihoods of youths’ participating in those kinds of activities.

WOLF:
I want to thank you for taking the time and you’re off to do something else. I’ve been speaking to Tony Iton, who’s
senior vice president of Health Communities, w hich is a program of The California Endowment, which is one of three
co-sponsors of the executive session that we’re at today here in Los Angeles. The other co-sponsors are the Center
for Court Innovation and the Community Oriented Policing Services Office of the Department of Justice. I’m Rob Wolf,
director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. To find out more about the Center for Court Innovation,
visit our web site at www.courtinnovation.org.

March 2011

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Susan Herman, who served for seven years as the executive director of the National Center for Victims of Crime,
talks about her book Parallel Justice for Victims of Crime.

The
following is a transcript

ROB WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director
of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Welcome to another New Thinking podcast. I’m here with
Susan Herman who is an associate professor at Pace University, and formerly the executive director of the National
Center for Victims of Crime in Washington. She has been involved with, in some form or another, working with victims
of crime for nearly 30 years. She recently has published a book called “Parallel Justice for Victims of Crime,” which
presents an approach for integrating victims into the way we think about crime in the United States, and how we can
respond to crime, how we should include victims in, as the title suggests, a parallel justice, so Susan, thanks for
taking the time to speak with me.

SUSAN HERMAN: You’re welcome. It’s great to be here.

WOLF: Why don’t we just start out with you explaining to me a little bit about your experience focusing
on victims issues and how they brought you to this place where you’ve come up with this book and the ideas behind
it?

HERMAN: Many years ago, before I went to law school, I started out as a self-defense instructor
working with victims of sexual assault and rape crisis counselors. I saw firsthand what the trauma of crime can do
to people, how debilitating it can be, how the reactions of people can last for a long time, and can produce more
limited and more unproductive and satisfying lives in people. I started thinking about what our response to victims
of crime should be, how we can respond better as a society, how we can respond as government, as community members,
and as individuals. That’s what Parallel Justice is all about. It’s a set of principles and values that
provide a framework for communal response to victims.

WOLF: I’m going to ask you a little
bit more about those principles in a moment, but let me ask you how you engage in a nuanced discussion about victims
in a world where there seems to be generally the sense that you have victims over on this side, and if you’re
doing something good for victims it means locking up as many offenders as you can, and being as punitive as you can,
or if you’re on the side of the offenders, you’re really looking at preserving their rights. I mean, there’s
a whole spectrum of responses to offenders, but somehow there is not a dialog between these two camps. It’s
…

HERMAN: There’s very little dialog between these camps, and when there is, sometimes
it’s quite poisonous. It’s really fear-based politics. There’s this sense that if you listen to victims’
emotions, or understand their needs, that the whole process is going to become too irrational, too emotional, maybe
too retributive. There’s a sense that if we devoted more resources to victims, that means we’re taking
away resources from offenders. In my view, we have arrived at this polarized conversation because we have neglected
to see a few things. We’ve neglected to really understand the full impact of crime and the cost to our society,
the connection between victimization and drug and alcohol abuse, the connection between victimization and homelessness,
poverty, poor academic performance, and it leads to, in many cases, offending behavior.

If you
look at juvenile delinquency, for instance, the greatest risk factor in juvenile delinquency is not what people think.
It’s not drug or alcohol abuse. It’s not teenage pregnancy. It’s victimization. The most prominent
risk factor that’s recognized in the research leading to juvenile delinquency, which later leads to adult criminal
behavior, is victimization. We don’t address victimization, in my view, at our peril. I think victim assistance
could be one of the greatest crime prevention strategies we could employ.

WOLF: I understand that
one of the greatest challenges you face as a victim advocate is that so many people who are victims don’t even
report crimes.

HERMAN: Why would you report a crime if you think that the only thing that’s
going to happen has nothing to do with you? If what you need, if you’re a person who’s afraid, you’ve
been beaten up in your neighborhood and you’re afraid to go home, and your laptop and your cell phone have been
stolen, and you can’t function anymore on the job or at school, if you don’t think that reporting to the
police is going to address any of those problems, and all it’s going to do is make you take time off to go to
court, or try and find somebody, and the police have said that they don’t have a lot of evidence and nothing
is going to happen anyway, why report?

We have to create a process where victims feel that we
care about the impact of crime. We care about what’s happened to them, that we acknowledge that what’s
happened to them is wrong, and that they believe we’re going to do everything we can to help them. We don’t
have that now.

WOLF: Will they get their laptop and their phone back or will they be compensated
for that?

HERMAN: Who reports? You know, people have their cars stolen or damaged report, because
unless they report they won’t get any insurance, right?

WOLF: Right.

HERMAN:
There’s a goody that comes from reporting.

WOLF: Right.

HERMAN: I think we have to have this mindset that there has to be some response that addresses the
needs of victims. Otherwise, why should they tell us about this? That might be more compensation. That might be counseling
and support. It might be helping them fix the broken window that the burglar went through right away. You’re
actually addressing their need to be safe rather than just saying, “I see you have a broken window. That’s
how he got in. I’ll see if I can find him.”

WOLF: I’m speaking with
Susan Herman who’s formerly the Executive Director of the National Center for Victims of Crime. She’s an
Associate Director at Pace, and the author of the new book, Parallel Justice for Victims of Crime. Tell me about
some of the principles that you referred to earlier?

HERMAN: One of the things that we know from
research is that when you’re a victim of crime, and this is really across the board, almost any kind of crime,
you are more vulnerable to crime for a short period of time at least, than you were before that crime occurred. You
are vulnerable to what we call “repeat victimization.” One of the principles of Parallel Justice is the safety of
victims would be a high priority. That means for the police, for the prosecutors, for the courts, for healthcare
people, for anyone who is responding to that victim. They would take the time and do what they could to prevent repeat
victimization. For instance, instead of the first responder just determining whether there was a crime that occurred
and gathering evidence, you would take the time to figure out what that victim might do to make it less likely that
another crime was going to take place. Another principle is that victims would be presumed credible unless there
is reason to believe otherwise. That’s pretty fundamental that when someone comes to you and says, “This
happened to me,” that we treat them with the respect and dignity they deserve by believing them until or unless
there is a reason not to, rather than starting out as skeptical, or non-believing, or trivializing, or dismissing
what they say.

WOLF: Is that common? I mean, I would think that most places would formally say
their policy would be to, you know, at least the police departments would say …

HERMAN: Most
people would say their formal policy … sure, except if you look at police departments across the country who are
under great pressure to have their crime statistics as low as possible, and then you talk to victims who feel that
their complaint either wasn’t taken, or it was downgraded, that violates that principle of parallel justice.
They were not presumed credible.

WOLF: Is there a hierarchy of victims, where people who have
been a victim of a violent crime versus a non-violent, or identity theft versus rape, or, I mean, obviously there’s
things are more severe than others. But does the system also see it that way too and treat victims differently in
a way that you feel perhaps should be corrected or is not appropriate?

HERMAN: Yeah, I think over
the last 30 years we’ve created a statutes at the state level, federal laws, thousands and thousands of victims
rights, pieces of legislation that are primarily directed at victims of violent crime. Two-thirds of victims of crime
in this country are victims of property crime, or non-violent crime, and they are left out of most victims rights
legislation, which means we know that victims of property crime take days off from work, lose money, often have the
same financial, psychological, sometimes even physical responses of violation and depression, and mental illness
that victims of violent crimes do. Just imagine if you’re the victim of crime on the street, somebody’s
knocked you down and taken your wallet, and taken ten bucks out of your wallet. You have the right to be notified
of the proceedings, to know what happens to the offender, to know where he or she is in the system. You have the
right to speak in court. If you are the victim of identity theft and your entire savings has been wiped out, you
may not have those rights. Does that seem fair?

WOLF: Wow, no, not when you put it that way. Can
you offer some examples of programs or jurisdictions that have begun to incorporate the ideas in Parallel Justice?

HERMAN: I’ve seen a lot of positive change. Vermont is doing a lot. Vermont has created a resource
bank where there are 45 business that are providing free or discounted services to victims of crime, anything from
food to massages. Things that are just nice extras, you know, “We can help you feel better,” to necessities
like clothing and furniture to help you set up a place that’s been destroyed.

WOLF:
Who coordinates that stuff?

HERMAN: The Vermont Center for Crime Victim Services
and the Parallel Justice Project there, which is run out of the police department, and the Community Development
Organization in town.

WOLF: That’s in Burlington?

HERMAN: That’s
in Burlington, thank you. They’re working with the Chamber of Commerce there.

WOLF: They’ve
adopted the term “Parallel Justice?”

HERMAN: They use the term. They have a parallel justice specialist
who works out of the police department, actually right next to a traditional victim advocate, and so they’re
very clear that they’re distinct roles. One, the victim advocate, is helping you understand what the criminal
justice process is like. The parallel justice specialist is helping you rebuild your life. It’s saying, “What
do you need? Do you need child care while you’re at court? Do you need help cleaning up the crime scene? We
can do that with you.”

WOLF: As you have said, the idea, and as embodied in the name, Parallel
Justice, really is not necessarily in any way dependent on the criminal justice response.

HERMAN:
Not in any way.

WOLF: It can exist wholly apart from the …

HERMAN: That’s
right. Parallel Justice really involves a separate set of responses to victims that it’s not just about reforming
the criminal justice process. It’s saying that whenever a crime is committed, there would be a separate and
distinct set of responses that flow from the government, from the community, and from individuals regardless of the
status of the offender. It shouldn’t matter whether we ever identify or convict an offender. That should have
no impact on our decisions to help a victim of crime once we believe that they are a victim of crime. You can have
a victim who really doesn’t need much and you still may want to prosecute the offender, and you can have a victim
who really would appreciate to be relocated, to have psychotherapy, to have someone to talk to every once in a while
regardless of whether the offender is ever caught.

There’s some wonderful examples of really
being open to what victims need that have come out of this Vermont work. For instance, there’s a woman who was
sexually assaulted while she was going for her run in the park, and she didn’t really want to be a part of a
victims’ support group. She didn’t really think she needed psychotherapy. If you asked her, “What do you
want?” She said, “I want someone to run with me because I’m too afraid to run by myself at this point.”
That’s where the Parallel Justice and the Resource Bank come in. They worked with a running shop in town to
find people who would be appropriate to escort her for a while.

WOLF: Susan,
how can people find out more about Parallel Justice, and where can they buy your book?

HERMAN:
Oh, great questions. Here’s the website, paralleljustice.org. You can certainly buy the book through that website,
individual or bulk rate, or you get it on Amazon. Either one, but I hope people see this as a positive image of justice
and something that everyone can take a part in implementing.

WOLF: I hope so too. Thank you. I’ve
been speaking to Susan Herman who is formerly the executive director at the National Center for Victims of Crime
in Washington, D. C. She’s also an associate professor at Pace University, and she’s author of the new
book, “Parallel Justice for Victims of Crime.” I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court
Innovation. To find out more about our work at the Center for Court Innovation you can visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org.
Thanks for listening.

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Court Administrator Susie Martin and Chief Probation Officer Lucinda Yellowhair explain how the Navajo Nation’s
pilot community court will draw on their culture’s traditional restorative justice principles.

The
following is a transcript.

ROBERT
V. WOLF: Hi. I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. The Navajo
Nation covers 27,000 square miles and has more than a quarter million people and is in the process of developing
a pilot community court for their Aneth District Court. Recently, a group of visitors from the Navajo Nation spent
several days at the Red Hook Community Justice Center. I, along with Aaron Arnold who is the director of our Tribal
Justice Exchange at the Center for Court Innovation, had an opportunity to sit down and talk with two of the visitors,
Susie Martin who’s the court administrator for the Aneth district court, and Lucinda Yellowhair who’s the chief probation
officer for the Navajo Nation. At the outset of our conversation, I asked Susie Martin to explain the kinds of cases
the Aneth district court handles.

SUSIE MARTIN: We handle pretty
much a wide variety of cases. It could be anything such as civil case where domestic violence is involved, could
be temporary protection order; or it could be a name change, a simple name change case. We handle juvenile cases,
as well as criminal cases, adult criminal cases—anywhere from battery to sexual assault, assault.

WOLF:
So maybe since you’re here visiting the Red Hook Community Justice Center, you could explain what interest you have
in developing a community court.

MARTIN: Well, how this all started
was the chief justice of the Navajo nation with some other judges came out about a year ago I believe, maybe a little
bit more than a year ago, and decided to look at their community court and they thought it was really interesting
how their concept follows the actual traditional Navajo concept. They’re willing to give the person another chance,
allowing the person to speak for themselves, instead of just hammering them down with “this is what you’ll do, you
don’t have a voice in this” and just being adversarial, allowing the person to have a say in their rehabilitation.
It’s more or less restorative justice, and that’s how the Navajo concept is. So that’s what they saw and they said,
“well, why can’t we do it; this is part of our culture.” And that’s why she volunteered to have it as a pilot project
for the Aneth District Court. That’s where we started from.

WOLF:
And that’s Judge Irene Black, right, who’s also here on the tribal visit.

MARTIN:
That’s correct.

WOLF: Maybe you could describe to me how you might
integrate some of what you’ve seen here into what you’re doing.

LUCINDA YELLOWHAIR:
The chief justice’s emphasis is to get out of the Western formalities of the legal system in our courts and the Navajo
courts and into what he saw here he thought was very interesting. He’s trying to get away from the Western adversarial
system and be able to bring our people in and say let’s try to use the restorative justice in this innovative court,
you know, environment.

WOLF: So just so I understand the court system,
even though you have these traditions that are very much like what you’re seeing here in Red Hook, the court as it’s
practiced right now sort of evolved and adopted a lot of the Western traditions even though they’re not your traditions.
And so, then, coming here and seeing this is sort of a way to—it’s sort of like a circle. You’re going back and saying,
“Wait, wait, wait. We—this is in our traditions, as well. We can not only—we’re not just borrowing from Red Hook;
we’re actually using Red Hook to get back to what we already know and what we do.”

YELLOWHAIR:
And enhance it.

WOLF: And enhance it.

MARTIN:
There’s a former justice, Raymond Austin, refers to it as “back to the future.”

YELLOWHAIR:
Right.

WOLF: I see. Well, so I wonder maybe it’s too soon, but I
just wonder after you’ve been here for two days, what kinds of takeaways you’re getting. What are you seeing that
you like and you think you might be able to adapt? And perhaps you’re seeing some things you don’t—you don’t think
would fit.

MARTIN: We’re so used to the adversarial system where
everything is procedural. Everything is we have to do it in a certain way and it has to be done according to a schedule.
But we need to relax. We need to realize that in order for people to feel comfortable, you have to allow them to
be themselves and so that they can express themselves freely, but at the same time there needs to be some control.
So we have to find that balance I think. Right now we’re too set in this adversarial system where we feel like it’s
got to be procedure; it’s got to be authoritative; and we have to bring the hammer down. That’s what we’re believing
right now, and we need to come out of that mode.

YELLOWHAIR: And
I think by coming here and seeing the other side of that, we were going to take back the you know observation that
we saw and say, you know, this could work like Susie said. We’re going to be able to take it back and see if we can
balance that, talk to chief and say, “Okay, now chief, this is what’s going to happen and this is what we saw. Are
you ready for that?” One of the other things that I’ve noticed is the bar right here in front, you know, right in
front of the gallery. Okay. And in the other court, formal court setting, it’s closed out. There is a gate, you know,
a half door.

WOLF: Right.

YELLOWHAIR:
This, there’s none. And I think chief would like this idea because right now our chief justice does not wear a robe
when he’s on the bench. He doesn’t believe that. And so, his bench is lower and he doesn’t wear a robe.

MARTIN: And just to add to that, one of the newer courts that was built, Delcon
Court, which is in Arizona, they don’t have a bench there at all. It’s just an open—it’s shaped in a hogon style.
And the judge is sitting on the same level as the defendants, and they’re in an open setting. So they’re more or
less moving away from the concept of the adversarial system, the formal, the judge sitting higher and the defendant
is down here. They can’t speak unless they speak through their attorneys. We’re trying to move away from that.

WOLF: I wonder, you know, here there’s sort of this balance between sort of
breaking with tradition by linking defendants to services and trying to, you know, an emphasis on healing or trying
to restore them. But there’s still the use of court as an authority, for instance through monitoring. I wonder if
any of that resonates with you as well, where you sort of have both, to have authority but you also have an emphasis
on healing.

YELLOWHAIR: Yes. I think now I see why—there’s two new
courts that are going up. And in the building planning of these two buildings, I was thinking about it earlier this
morning as, you know, when the clinical portion of the court is right across the hallway from the courtroom.

WOLF: Yeah. Here in Red Hook.

YELLOWHAIR:
Right. And I remember thinking back, the new buildings, the schematics, the design of the new building does have
that setting where the social workers and the clinical physicians that are going to be coming aboard have an office
right next to the courtrooms. And I thought, okay, somebody was thinking ahead. And I’m thinking, okay, puzzles are
actually fitting. And then I thought, oh my God, is it possible that one day we’ll be able to just walk across the
hallway and get an assessment within an hour rather than a month and a half that we actually—

WOLF:
It takes a month and a half?

YELLOWHAIR: Realistically, today, it
takes a month and a half.

WOLF:  And is that because of
the distance I heard referenced to before or just a resource issue?

YELLOWHAIR:
The lack of resources issue and the distances, yes.

WOLF: Both.

YELLOWHAIR: Yes.

WOLF: Wow.

YELLOWHAIR: And so, maybe this whole concept of innovative court system is
actually—it’s coming. We just didn’t realize it.

MARTIN: Of course,
we’re going to be a little bit different because we don’t have the resources readily available. But we have to find
ways to make this happen. And one unique program I think we have is peacemaking, which Red Hook doesn’t have. But
we can use that; that’s a resource. And we have to find our own resources to try and fit into this program. And that’s
what we need to do, and those are the ideas we’re receiving from this visit we had.

YELLOWHAIR:
Not only the peacemaking but the case manager officers for juveniles that are in the facility right now. We have
case managers and the grant—it’s funded under a grant right now, but chief justice would like for it, for the program
to eventually come on board to the court system. And they call it nahamdebahasla; that means
kind of taking a whole—the whole thing. But these are—this is regarding kids that are in custody right now.

WOLF: And I just think it’s very exciting to hear you talk about it. And it
just sounds like an exciting time. And I just wonder if Aaron who’s familiar with Red Hook and has visited you and
seen things, I wonder what observations you have about potential for community court concepts to work in the Navajo
Nation.

AARON ARNOLD: Well, I certainly couldn’t say it any better
than Susie and Cindy have already said it. But the one thing that I have taken away from this year and a half long
learning experience, this sharing experience, is that there are aspects of the Navajo court system that are light
years ahead of where we are. They have resources; they have history; they have traditions; they have foundations
that we don’t have. In some ways they’re way ahead of where we are in the state court systems. And in other ways,
the state court systems, you know, have things that we learned to our work that we can share. And listening to these
two wise women speak now, it really is great for me to hear because I think we’re all on the same page realizing
that this tribal community and tribal communities in general have so much foundation, history, and tradition that
they can use and they already are using. And just by adding those little pieces that the state court system has honed
and has learned through the problem-solving court movement is a way to kind of blend tradition and formality. It’s
a way to blend the adversarial process with the traditional process in a way to bring together the best of both worlds
to strengthen everyone’s court system. So it’s terrific for me to hear. And the one thing I wanted to ask Susie and
Cindy is, you know, we’ve talked a little bit about how the Bureau of Justice Assistance is really thrilled that
Chief Justice Yazzi approached us and we had this ongoing collaboration over the last year and a half. And I know
that when we travel to conferences and with other tribal communities, other tribal communities are starting to get
wind of this and they’re getting excited to see how it turns out. And I’m wondering how it makes you both feel or
how you both react to know that there are people who are really excited about this collaboration or anxious to see
how it turns out.

YELLOWHAIR: Well, what’s happening and what has
unfolded here before us, as you remember, Aaron, when you came out the last time you were out there, Susie and I
sat there and looked at each other and we’re like, “Oh my God, this is something we’ve already been doing.” You know,
these are things that we have already used and techniques we’ve been using over the years. And I remember back then
being in probation, helping people is very difficult, and especially when you acknowledge them or when they acknowledge
you through their kinship. Like a little boy that said I’m your dad, or a little child that says, “You’re my mom.”
I don’t have a mom and you become their mother. And back then we used to say wow, what are the possibilities of the
things we’re doing now? What if it unfolds one day and somebody actually sees it, and we see it happening. Well,
it’s happening; it’s happening. It’s something that was just a dream one time ago, something that we just thought
who is out there that would pick up the concept that we’re using; who would it be to do that. And it’s happening
today. And I think that’s what’s so rewarding. We just feel like everything you worked for, everything you said,
pleading with your clients—children and adults, grandfathers of plus-70 years old that I used to say to them, “What
are you doing here, grandpa? You’re supposed to be teaching me. Why are you here, me scolding you?” You know, and
then it’s here; it’s reality now. And when we get back, we’re going to say, “Wow, so, long years of work, hard work,
that has finally unfolded and somebody finally said, ‘Hey, I have an idea. Why don’t we put this into reality?’”
And I hope someday when we get it back to the Nation, we will be able to sit there when we’re 80 years old in our
rocking chair and say, yeah, we took part in that and be very proud of ourselves and knowing that we had a hand in
it.

ARNOLD: It’s such an honor for us to be involved in this whole
thing. We’re happy that we can do this all together and looking forward to see where it takes us.

WOLF:
I want to thank you so much for taking the time to share with me and, you know, people who visit our website. I’ve
been speaking with Lucinda Yellowhair who’s the Chief Probation Officer of the Navajo Nation; and Susie Martin, the
court administrator of the Aneth District Court, Navajo Nation; and Aaron Arnold who is the director of the Tribal
Justice Exchange of the Center for Court Innovation. And I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for
Court Innovation. Thanks for listening.

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Dianne Gibson, the manager of the community courts in Dallas, Texas, explains how the South Dallas Community
Court uses a combination of partnership and problem-solving to link homeless with services while eliminating neighborhood
eyesores.

ROBERT V. WOLF: This is Rob Wolf, director of
communications at the Center for Court Innovation. I’m recently back from Dallas where the Center for Court Innovation
sponsored with the Bureau of Justice Assistance Community Justice 2010, the first international conference of community
courts. Today I’d like to share with you a conversation I had with Dianne Gibson, who is one of the hosts of the
conference as the manager of the three community courts in Dallas. My role at the conference was to interview participants
for a video about community courts that the Center for Court Innovation is producing with support from the U.S. Bureau
of Justice Assistance. On our way to the South Dallas community court, which is one of three mentor community courts
in the United States, Dianne and I stopped at a parking lot near a carwash that had been once the site of a homeless
encampment. She described to me the conditions that used to exist there and how the community court collaborated
with various partners to address the problem.

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Professor David Kennedy, the director of the Center for Crime Prevention & Control at John Jay College
of Criminal Justice, shares some of what he’s learned about new approaches to addressing gang violence and open-air
drug dealing.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi. I’m Rob Wolf, director
of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. This month’s podcast is the second in a row to offer excerpts
from a presentation given to Center for Court Innovation staff by Professor David Kennedy, director of the Center
for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Kennedy spoke about his work helping develop
the Boston Gun Project, Operation CeaseFire, and the Drug Market Initiative. All of these projects, to some extent,
harnessed informal social control to help change offenders’ behavior. In fact, Kennedy says, mothers and neighbors
and friends could do far more to influence behavior than police patrols and fear of justice system and consequences.

KENNEDY:
At root there turns out to be broad and fundamental and important common ground here, so I began with police and
communities—I will add to that now because this is the way I’ve come to think about this—offenders like the three
core groups involved in all of these are law enforcement, communities and offenders. And it turns out that all three
groups agree on very important things. Nobody wants anybody who doesn’t absolutely have to go to jail. Everybody
agrees on that—almost. There’s a small, small departures in each of these areas. But in many places at any rate,
most of all these constituencies agree on all this. And nobody wants anybody who doesn’t have to, to go to jail.
Nobody wants people to get hurt. Nobody doesn’t want even seasoned bad guys to turn their lives around and succeed.
The hardest bitten cop unless he’s a bit of a sociopath would rather somebody get a job than go to federal prison.
They may not believe that that’s possible. But if they’re faced with a choice, that’s the way they feel about it.
Everybody it turns out—and this is hard to articulate for many people, but it is, in fact, true—everybody would prefer
that any remaining criminality be non-violent and non-intrusive. So nobody really thinks that we’re going to get
rid of all misbehavior. And if you have a choice between misbehavior at a certain level, accompanied by high levels
of public chaos and gun violence, and that same misbehavior, absent the public chaos and gun violence, most people
are willing to say that B is better than A. And that’s a lot of what’s happened in New York.

I
got in enormous trouble at the National Network Conference in December by standing in front of the room at a plenary
presentation and saying “I have been in friends’ apartments in Manhattan when the weed guy came by.” And I thought
he was another guest; he wasn’t. He was somebody very, very neatly dressed with a beautiful silver Halliburton briefcase.
And when he opened it on my friend’s kitchen counter, it was full of beautifully packaged, very expensive weed. So
there’s lots of dope in New York still. There’s very little public drug dealing south of about 160th Street and outside
East New York and Brownsville. That’s a good thing. And it’s very, very hard for especially people in law enforcement
to take this as anything but surrender or an implicit dirty deal or something like that. It doesn’t have to be any
of those things. There are lots and lots of and lots of places in which there is rampant criminality and the communities
fundamentally safe. And a lot of the reason that’s true is because serious bad guys aren’t stupid enough to do drive-bys
over their girlfriend’s new boyfriend because it’s bad for business and it brings heat. And this is a conversation
you can have with chaotic thugs. You can say do you think the Mafia behaves like this? No, they don’t. They don’t
do it because they’re good people; they do it because they know it’s stupid. If you’re going to be a thug, be a smart
thug. And they get it, right? And you can have that conversation without surrendering. It’s not a dirty deal; it’s
just true. And you can, in fact, say to the—everybody’s playing both ends against the middle on this. Everyone in
the community says there’s just as much dope in the suburbs as here, but you guys are racists because you’re only
kicking their doors in. The true answer is nobody’s getting killed in the suburbs; and that’s true. So if we can
create suburban conditions here, that would be just fine. And everybody thinks that, in fact, it’s not just fine,
but it’s better than where we are.

And at root it turns out that everybody’s miserable right now.
We may not know it because we’re so used to it. But the cops are miserable; the prosecutors are miserable; the judges
are miserable; and probation officers are miserable. The thugs are getting killed and hurt and nobody’s getting rich.
The people in the community are scared and intruded upon. Nobody’s having a good time.  And it turns out
that you can recognize that; you can say it out loud; and you can go through what is in fact a reconciliation in
truth-telling process that says all of these things are true; here’s the way it’s really working. Nobody likes it.
Can we agree on the following? Can we agree that the small, hard core that’s driving the worst stuff should be identified,
should be spoken to, should be put on notice about what further misbehavior will bring, that we should avoid to the
extent humanly possible leading with enforcement and actually we should try to keep them out of prison, we should
help them if they’ll take it, and that they should hear from people they respect that they are loved and valued but
that certain aspects of their behavior are wrong and need to stop. You say that to people and virtually nobody says,
“Well, actually, I like it better the way we’re doing it right now.” And then you can do this stuff and things change.

WOLF: That was David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and
Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice sharing some of what he’s learned through his decades of experience
innovating new approaches to gang violence and open-air drug dealing. He was speaking during a presentation to staff
at the Center for Court Innovation. You can hear more excerpts from his presentation by listening to last month’s
New Thinking podcast. To learn more about the Center for Court Innovation, visit our website at www.courtinnovation.org.
I’m Rob Wolf. Thanks for listening.

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Professor David Kennedy, the director of the Center for Crime Prevention & Control at John Jay College
of Criminal Justice, explains how the Boston Gun Project laid the groundwork for the Drug Market Initiative pilot
in High Point, N.C.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi. I’m Rob Wolf, director
of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. For this month’s podcast I’m going to share with you some excerpts
from a presentation given to Center for Court Innovation staff by Professor David Kennedy, director of the Center
for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Next month will be part two of Kennedy’s
presentation. Kennedy spearheaded a number of justice innovations, including the Boston Gun Project’s Operation CeaseFire
and the Drug Market Initiative. The strategy share common elements and they also build on each other as Kennedy and
his collaborators learn as they go. In this first excerpt, Kennedy talks about the development of the Boston Gun
Project and how its success led Kennedy to start thinking about how to shut down open-air drug markets.

DAVID KENNEDY: Many of you will have heard about Operation CeaseFire and the
Boston Gun Project and all that sort of thing. When we did that work in Boston, it identified on the basis of stories
that we were told by frontline law enforcement, and which we were then able to apply some very simple research tools
to, it identified about 60 drug groups in Boston that turned out to be responsible for probably two-thirds, three-quarters
of the youth homicide in Boston and 50 percent of all homicides citywide. We also learned from the frontline cops
something that they have been doing to calm down particular groups, a crackdown—a very sophisticated robust but actually
recognizable crackdown. What was unusual about what they did, in addition to that, was they also had community partners—black
activist churches and neighborhood groups and such like that—who they would also focus on these groups to say to
them, “This is dumb; there’s a way out; here is access to other opportunities to mediation and interruption,” and
that sort of thing.  And they had built bridges to employers and agencies in the city so they could offer
concrete services and job placement and that kind of thing.

But they did all of these on a context
that while this was all being focused on the group, they would say to the group we are doing this because you are
shooting the place up. And if you want us to go back to business as usual, not to what you do whatever you want but
just to go back to the status quo, the shooting has to stop. What we added to it was an attempt to take it citywide.
So rather than doing it one group at a time, we identified probationers and parolees from all the groups in the city;
we had them brought to a meeting as a condition of their supervision; we read this basic script to them in the meeting
and said to them, look the next group that kills somebody after you all leave the room, that’s where this crackdown’s
going to happen, and if you want that kind of attention, let somebody you run shoot somebody. And after two meetings
the shootings stopped for all practical purposes, and that was the Boston Miracle. So effectively, what CeaseFire
did was discipline the drug crews and that left behind the next most important toxic public safety issue in these
neighborhoods, which is at that point untouched open-air drug market. There is nothing short of open public violence
that’s more of an insult to a community than a street drug market. And so, naturally enough, we started chopping
logic on whether this new set of ideas we’re working with might fit this problem. My recollection is that I had the
core of the drug market operation in my head by late 1996 or early 1997. 

WOLF:
That was Professor David Kennedy explaining how the Boston Gun Project laid the groundwork for the Drug Market Initiative.
It took him seven years to find a jurisdiction willing to test the strategy. That jurisdiction was High Point, North
Carolina, which applied the strategy to a neighborhood called West End in 2004. In this excerpt Kennedy explains
how the strategy focuses on the market rather than the drugs.

KENNEDY:
So one idea was that this was about drug markets and not about drugs. When I taught this at the Kennedy School, my
favorite moment was coming into my graduate seminar and closing the door and saying, “Okay, you’ve all spent the
last week doing readings about drugs and drug markets, which was all trouble neighborhood, street minority stuff.
So let’s talk about drug markets. Show of hands, who can buy drugs in this building?” And my graduate students would
look shocked. And every single time, two-thirds of them would raise their hand. And then we had a discussion about
why the Todman building at the Kennedy School government was a drug market which it is, of course, as schools are.
And then about why nobody thought about the Todman building at the Kennedy School, when we started talking about
drug markets, and the reason for that, of course, is that there’s no street-walking; there are no guns; there is
no drive-through buying; there are no groups of young men terrifying the residents. And that’s the difference between
framing this as a drug issue—and what that implies is we need to get rid of the drugs—and framing it as a drug market
issue, which says there are more toxic and less toxic forms of drug markets. Now what the West End was doing was
the most toxic form of the drug market. And if we could change that drug market even without doing anything at all
necessarily about drugs as such, that would restore the core community conditions.

WOLF:
Another key element of the Drug Market Initiative is the banked case, which is a case that’s prepared against the
key drug market participant and then effectively pocketed for a rainy day. The idea is to create a certain consequence
if the offender insists on continuing to participate in the drug market after being warned. But here’s Kennedy explaining
it better than I can.

KENNEDY: If we do the investigation, have the
case, keep the arrest available, that means we can say to somebody the next time you go out, your prison risk is
one in one; and because we have that ready to go now, we can put you on prior notice. And one of the astonishing
things to narcotics enforcement people is that guys who they believe don’t care about going to jail because that’s
what they say when you got them in handcuffs, when they’re put on prior notice like this, they don’t want to go to
jail at all. And this turns out to have a very, very powerful deterring impact.

WOLF:
In his presentation to the Center for Court Innovation, Kennedy also talked about other elements of the Drug Market
Initiative, including the importance of informal social control, that is, having community leaders and drug dealers’
families come out in unison and say, “We want you to stop dealing in drugs.” He also talked about the importance
of offering services to drug dealers to help them get jobs and skills. And he also dealt at length about one of the
key steps in the initiative, which is bridging the wide gap between law enforcement and community perceptions of
each other. As Kennedy explains it, the gap was so wide that when he initially tried to interest jurisdictions in
the Drug Market Initiative, they basically laughed him out of their offices.

KENNEDY:
The main reason that turned out that people thought this was beyond laughable was because both key, or so I saw at
the time, both key partners in this—and I was thinking them at the time as law enforcement and what we usually call
the community, which is good people in the community—both of those groups had entirely written off the other. And
if you are the way I am about this, which is the way most of us are about this, you have heard this and either you
identify with one side or the other or you just can’t take it in. And I was in the latter camp.  I have
been hearing it for 20 years, and it had bounced off my consciousness and fallen on the ground with a big clank because
I just couldn’t—I couldn’t deal with it. And it’s pretty simple.  On the community side, when you talk to
the community about drugs—and I’m talking about for the most part very, very long-term historically damaged, presently
devastated African-American communities—at best the community has written the police off. They have not done us any
good. We call; we plead. We still got drug dealers on the corner; we still got the crack house next door. The next
step from there, which is prevalent in all communities and dominant I think in most to them, is a belief that law
enforcement is either behind or actively taking advantage of the drug trade in order to do the community deliberate
damage. And this is the idea that the CIA invented crack and pumped it into the neighborhoods with Ollie North. 

And everybody looked at this lady in the back. You are doing what we do when we hear this. We smile; we
roll our eyes; we nod, right? And sorry, I pick on people. But this is what happens, right? People who are not of
this set of beliefs smile and roll their eyes and nod, and nobody knows what to say about this. It’s too insane for
words to actually believe that the government is doing this on purpose as a deliberate intervention to do racially
motivated harms in these communities. And that is, in fact, what many in many communities—most people actually believe.
And the first time I ever set foot in a drug market, I heard this from black residents in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s
and I’ve been hearing it ever since.

If you have that same conversation in law enforcement circles,
what law enforcement believes is the drug dealers are psychopaths. They are doing incredible damage to themselves,
their community; they don’t care. Their families are broken or they wouldn’t let their kids do the stuff. There is
no moral backbone left in the community because nobody stands up against what’s going on and says there’s right and
there’s wrong and act like it. Everybody plays the victim card at all times. And the cop kills the kid and there
are 5,000 people marching on city hall. But that’s not what’s driving the body count. And when a black kid kills
another kid, nobody says a word.

And you start a sentence—and this is a true story from Richmond,
Virginia where we were trying to get some of the stuff going—you start a sentence which begins it’s very hard to
work with the communities on this; and my second clause was because they are historically so angry at the rest of
us, and the narcotics guy, and this is what he did in Richmond, jumps in and says because they are all living off
drug money and that is what the cops really believe.  So I love my narcotics cops, friends; I really do.
They are amazing people and they are destroying the village in order to save it. They don’t mean to, but that’s what’s
going on. They stop everybody that moves; they kick on doors.

Anybody who’s ever done street drug
enforcement in any of these neighborhoods knows that rampant illegality is the norm; it just is. People get stopped;
they get searched; they get handcuffed; they get put on the ground; their rights are violated. There’s no respect
for probable cause. It is just the way it works. And the community does not like this. We work in areas like the
West End. We arrest cohort after cohort after cohort of young men. Majorities of males end up with criminal records.
They will never get a decent job. They have no reason to finish school. The collective objective damage of drug enforcement
on the neighborhood is catastrophic. And the cops know they’re doing it in order to protect the community. And they
are and I accept that and they believe it. The community looks at that and says this is just the Klan by other means.
And there’s this weird symmetry, right? The cops look at the crack dealers and say they’re not getting rich; it’s
not working for them; they’re not getting anywhere; they’re doomed. Everybody knows this isn’t going to work. They
keep on doing it, so obviously, they’re, you know, irrational and psychopathic. The community looks at the cops and
says they do the same thing over and over again; it doesn’t work and they know it doesn’t work. Obviously, they’re
corrupt and racist.

WOLF: You’ve been listening to David Kennedy
talking about the incredible misperceptions that can separate law enforcement from some of the communities that are
trying to help. He was speaking during a presentation to staff at the Center for Court Innovation about the Drug
Market Initiative, which he piloted in High Point, North Carolina. Next month we’ll hear excerpts from the rest of
Kennedy’s presentation. In the meantime, if you want to find out more about the Drug Market Initiative, you can visit
http://drugmarketinitiative.msu.edu. To learn more about the Center for Court Innovation, please visit our website
at www.courtinnovation.org. I’m Rob Wolf. Thanks for listening.

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