APA in the news:

State's Attorney Brings Community Prosecution to Baltimore

On a cold December evening, Baltimore's top prosecutor stood before a roomful of city residents, most of whom would have given anything to be somewhere else. They had all lost a loved one to violence and were assembled to remember the dead. "Although I've only been the state's attorney for just about a year, it is something that I am single-minded about," Gregg L. Bernstein told the audience. "We are working harder and harder every day in an effort to reduce violence." Being there was part of his plan. Bernstein believes that connecting with the community is key to making the city safer - so much so, that he's overhauling his office to do so. Today, the first anniversary of his official swearing-in, Bernstein will launch a "community prosecution" concept. It's his biggest initiative to date, and it will alter the way the city handles serious crimes. "It's a sea-change," Bernstein said in an interview. Community prosecution is an umbrella term used to describe a range of programs that connect prosecutors with residents. Community prosecution has roots in Manhattan, where the district attorney's office assigned a "community affairs officer" to work with police and neighborhood representatives in 1985, according to the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys. A few years later, an Oregon district attorney launched the first formal community prosecution program to help reduce drug crimes, and soon others followed. Brooklyn, N.Y., was the first to try the zone model, dividing many of its 400 prosecutors into five geographic areas in 1991. The Association of Prosecuting Attorneys released a guide last year of "performance indicators" that prosecutors can use to measure their success. The guide recommends surveying the community and victims who deal with prosecutors and calculating interactions, among other things. "It is changing from the traditional model where you would measure performance on maybe conviction rates or attrition of cases through the office, and now you're looking at other areas," said Steven Jansen, vice president of the association and a former director of the National Center for Community Prosecution.

The Baltimore Sun

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