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News
Street Roots • April 15-21,2016
Why are we still spending millions to process non-violent behavioral offenses through jail and criminal court?
BY EMILY GREEN
STAFF WRITER
ore than a thousand quality-of-life
crimes are prosecuted in
Multnomah County each year.
These crimes are typically non-violent,
low-level offenses believed to lower the
quality of life for people who live in or
frequent the area where they are
committed.
They include infringements such as
trespassing, disorderly conduct and
offensive littering - the charge someone
would face for urinating in public - and can
result in arrest, being booked into jail,
criminal prosecution and in some cases,
lengthy jail sentences.
Police departments across the nation
began to increase arrests for these types of
crimes in the 1980s and 1990s after
criminologists George Kelling and James
Wilson suggested a new approach to policing
they claimed effectively lowers crime rates.
They called it “broken-windows theory” in
an article they penned for The Atlantic
Monthly in 1982.
The theory is that if police crack down on
minor offenses such as vandalism and
loitering, it will prevent more serious crimes
from creeping in.
Former New York City Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani credited broken windows policy for
the significant drop in crime his city saw in
the years following its implementation. His
city long served as the shining example of
how well broken-windows police tactics
•work. *
But recent research shows broken-
windows policy may have done his city more
harm than good, and it’s been concluded
other factors, such as increased police
presence and a drop in unemployment,'
likely had a larger effect on New York City’s
crime rate than did misdemeanor arrests.
A 2013 study published in Justice
Quarterly found there was no link between
broken windows policing and the city’s drop
in crime, and after more than 30 years, '
Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at
George Mason University in Virginia lists
broken-windows policing as something it
needs to know more about before endorsing.
M
In many cities, arrests for quality-of-life
crimes has drawn increasing criticism as
evidence emerged it has resulted in the
over-policing and over-jailing of people of
color.
Critics say this approach to policing
creates instances where minor crimes have
led to excessive force in otherwise harmless
situations - such as in the case of Eric
Garner, a man who was choked to death
during a struggle with Staten Island police
when they attempted to arrest him for
selling loose cigarettes.
Putting an end to broken-windows
policing is a top priority of the Black Lives
Matter movement
In Multnomah County, where less than 6
percent of the population is black, 24
percent of people charged with quality-of-life
crimes are black, according to data from the
district attorney’s office obtained by Street
Roots.
Now, even in New York City, policies are
shifting away from prosecuting minor
offenses.
On March 1, Manhattan District Attorney
Cyrus Vance announced, with the blessing
of the New York Police Department
Commissioner William Bratton - one of
broken windows’ greatest supporters - that
his office would no longer prosecute certain
quality-of-life crimes.
The top prosecutor said in a press
release, “By ensuring courts are not
unnecessarily bogged down with minor.
offenses committed by those who pose no
threat to public safety, we help focus police
and prosecutorial resources on those who
commit serious crimes.”
Last year in Portland, gang violence
occurred at record-high levels. Earlier this
month, Mayor Charlie Hales held a press
conference in the wake of another spate of
shootings, saying the city is on track to
break those records again in 2016.
Meanwhile, Portland police struggle with
what Chief Larry O’Dea told The Oregonian
is a significant shortage of police officers
due to vacancies. The bureau is still
adjusting to past budget cuts, with additional
proposed cuts looming on the horizon. And
Multnomah County Circuit Court is so cash
strapped, those who dial its main phone line
between 10 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. get a
message from Presiding Judge Nan Waller
explaining, “due to the ongoing funding
reductions to the circuit court, we have
limited telephone service during the court’s
business day.”
Despite shrinking court and police
resources, a steady flow of low-level, non
violent offenders continues to be corralled
through an overburdened criminal justice
system.
Why?
Your friendly
neighborhood prosecutor
In Multnomah County, there is a special
team of prosecutors who focus, in part, on
issuing charges for quality-of-life crimes.
These prosecutors work in the District
Attorney’s Neighborhood Unit, a program
that emerged as a pilot project around the
same time broken-windows theory was
gaining popularity
A crowning achievement of the
prosecutor’s office, the Neighborhood Unit
What’s a quality-of-life crime?
While some schools of thought consider all nonviolent misdemeanors to be "quality-
of-life crimes.” for the purposes of this article, only behavioral crimes, such as
disorderly conduct, drinking in public and interfering with public transit, were
considered to fall into the quality-of-life category. While the Multnomah County
Neighborhood Unit also issues charges for crimes such as low-level theft, firearms
possession, drug possession and traffic-related offenses. Street Roots did not include
any of those offenses in data referenced in this article.
was the first of its kind in the U.S. when it
was created in 1990. It’s been highly lauded
and replicated around the country in years
since.
The model is known nationally as
“community prosecution,” with prosecutors
assigned to specific geographical areas. In
Multnomah County, most occupy an office in
their neighborhood’s police precinct They
work with the surrounding community and
police to solve livability and low-level crime
problems.
They also issue charges for about 5,000
misdemeanor crimes each year, although
they don’t prosecute the cases themselves.
Between August 2014 and August 2015,
they filed charges for 1,900 quality-of-life-
crimes referred to them, mainly by law
enforcement. This included 414 disorderly
conduct, 534 trespassing and 165 offensive
littering charges.
These deputy district attorneys (DDAs)
can be assets to community members who
want to get rid of a neighborhqod nuisance
or get legal advice regarding a collective
issue.
They might work with property owners
and police to issue trespassing exclusions to
remove an unwanted element from a
business district or neighborhood park, or
rely on help from anonymous neighbors’
observations to obtain a search warrant for
a drug house. |
However, as Executive Director of
Metropolitan Public Defenders Lane Borg
points out, the program puts an area’s
problems in the hands of prosecutors,
whose main function is to charge people
with crimes.
“If you’re a hammer, every problem looks
like a nail,” he said. “We need to have social
workers and housing people working on
these problems.”
The National District Attorneys
Association produced a study on the
program between 1990 and 2005 suggesting
the neighborhood DDA program contributed
| to Portland’s drop in crime - much like
broken windows was believed to reduce
crime in New York City. But during the
j same time span, crime was steadily
See BROKEN, page 5