Community Prosecution Research Articles

The One-Two Punch: Utilising Community Prosecution and Victim-Centred Strategies to Successfully Prosecute Trafficking in Persons in Uganda

Since the passage of the Palermo Protocol in 2000, most states have increased their efforts to investigate and prosecute trafficking in persons. According to the annual Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report, Uganda currently ranks as a Tier 2 country, partly due to ongoing difficulties in investigating and prosecuting of trafficking in persons. This article suggests community prosecution in Uganda could improve trafficking in persons prosecutions. Community prosecution is a non-traditional method of prosecution that focuses on preventing crime before it happens. By combining community prosecution methods with other prosecutorial best practices, such as prosecutor-led investigations, multi-disciplinary teams, and a continuum of care, prosecutors in Uganda could better prevent trafficking in persons and serve victims through a trauma-informed approach. This article outlines relevant community prosecution practices, including the advantages and challenges, and then proposes several recommendations for how Ugandan prosecutors could implement community prosecution methods specifically to address trafficking in persons cases.

Evaluating Community Prosecution Code Enforcement in Dallas, Texas

We evaluated a community prosecution program in Dallas, Texas. City attorneys, who in Dallas are the chief prosecutors for specified misdemeanors, were paired with code enforcement officers to improve property conditions in a number of proactive focus areas, or PFAs, throughout the city. We conducted a panel data analysis, focusing on the effects of PFA activity on crime in 19 PFAs over a six-year period (monthly observations from 2010 to 2015). Control areas with similar levels of pre-intervention crime were also included. Statistical analyses controlled for pre-existing crime trends, seasonality effects, and other law enforcement activities. With and without dosage data, the total crime rate decreased in PFA areas relative to control areas. City attorney/code enforcement teams, by seeking the voluntary or court-ordered abatement of code violations and criminal activity at residential and commercial properties, apparently improved public safety in targeted areas.

Trailblazing Transformative Accountability for High Performing Philippine Prosecutorial Services for the 21st century

This study is focused on the prosecution as a major service component of the criminal justice system and analyzes the changing role of prosecutors in light of the Philippine and global prosecutorial demands of the 21st century. This study employs an institutional development approach for strengthening the prosecutorial services from the traditional approach case processor to a proactive and cost-effective approach that could make prosecutors meet community demands in preventing crimes. Overall, the study will attempt to improve the National Prosecution Service (NPS) of the Philippines in terms of: (a) qualification, selection and training; (b) case handling; and (c) interaction with criminal justice actors. The study will further determine the involvement of the community in the successful prosecution of cases. Finally, the NPS will be able to make a design implement the community prosecution service in the Philippines during the 21st Century. Survey, group discussion, interview, and triangulation were done to answer the research problems. The survey questionnaires were gathered from the following respondents: prosecutors, judges, lawyers, probation officers and barangay officials. The result disclosed the need to improve the qualification, selection, and training; interaction with criminal justice actors; establish a better community partnership; establish information technology; and improve prosecutorial service outcome assessment in the Prosecutorial Service. It is recommended that a reform framework anchored on developmentally-oriented prosecutorial service, community prosecution be adopted and to update the law on NPS (P.D. No. 1275 as amended and R.A. No. 10071). Keywords - Civil Law, prosecution, transformative accountability, proactive, reactive, high performing reform index, descriptive research, Philippines

Does the "Community Prosecution" Strategy Reduce Crime? A Test of Chicago's Experience

A new strategy of criminal prosecution, called “community prosecution,” emerged in the past two decades. The strategy breaks with the traditional approach to prosecution in which a prosecutor works in an office adjacent to a criminal court, processes a large volume of cases, and measures success with conviction rates and sentence lengths. In community prosecution, a prosecutor works directly in a neighborhood, develops relationships with local groups, aligns enforcement priorities with residents’ public safety concerns, and seeks solutions to prevent crime. This article presents the first estimates of community prosecution’s impact on crime. Over a fifteen-year period, Chicago’s top prosecutor twice applied the community prosecution strategy in some (but not all) neighborhoods, and this sequence of two “off/on” policy episodes permits plausible identification of the strategy’s impact. Differences-in-differences estimates show that community prosecution reduced certain categories of crime, such as aggravated assault, but had no effect on other categories, such as larceny. The diversity of practicesundertherubricofcommunityprosecutionmakesgeneralizationdifficult,butthe

Prosecution in Arizona: Practical Problems, Prosecutorial Accountability, and Local Solutions

Abstract Arizona prosecutors focus on solving local crime problems and administrative challenges. Both workaday habits and provocative innovations emerge without much attention being paid to statewide or national concerns. Arizona prosecutors dramatically downplay their own power and discretion. They do not recognize the risk of disparity highlighted in the scholarly literature. They see themselves as operating within a context of established habits, office structures, and procedures including supervisory review. The local perspective is not a barrier to innovation, but innovations are largely restricted to the places where they take root. Institutions that invite statewide interaction and priority setting, such as the Arizona Prosecuting Attorneys Advisory Council, the Arizona Attorney General Office, and the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission, do not in practice facilitate statewide developments. Other collaborations, including various initiatives under the label “community prosecution,” work toward lo...

Does the 'Community Prosecution' Strategy Reduce Crime? A Test of Chicago’s Experience

The traditional prosecutor works in an office adjacent to the criminal court, processes a large volume of cases, and measures success with conviction rates and sentence lengths. In the past twenty years, an alternative strategy of prosecution, called “community prosecution,” has emerged. Community prosecution typically involves deploying prosecutors directly in a neighborhood, identifying the community’s public safety concerns by developing close relationships with neighborhood groups, and employing solutions that prevent crime ex ante rather than exclusively bringing prosecutions to punish it ex post. The community prosecution approach has grown rapidly but without any evidence that it improves public safety. This paper presents the first estimates of community prosecutions’ impact on crime. It exploits unique “on/off/on again” variation in the application of community prosecutions in some (but not all) neighborhoods in Chicago, Illinois. The paper reports differences-in-differences for numerous offense categories estimated from a panel of police beats observed monthly over nearly seven years. The results indicate that community prosecution reduced certain categories of crime: assaults (both aggravated and simple), robberies, burglaries, and vandalism. Other offense categories appear unaffected by community prosecution. The impacts vary widely by neighborhood, suggesting that community prosecution’s effectiveness may depend highly on the manner of implementation. The estimates suggest that community prosecution as applied in Chicago was cost-justified.

Sharing the Keys to the Courthouse

This study seeks to explain the shift from traditional conceptions of prosecution toward the adoption of community prosecution. Using a contingency theory framework, the authors hypothesize that community prosecution is dependent on organizational size, structural complexity of prosecutors' offices, and uncertainty in both the internal and external operating environment. Data from 749 counties in the 2001 National Survey of Prosecutors (NSP) were used to measure four community prosecution elements potentially used by prosecutor offices and organizational characteristics. Hypotheses were tested using the NSP data, county-level socioeconomic demographics from the 1990 and 2000 census, and drug arrests from the Uniform Crime Reports 1994 to 1999. The results indicate that adoption of community prosecution is principally predicted by organizational size and structural complexity. Implications for the research and implementation of community-based justice initiatives are discussed.

Community prosecution tenets and practices: The relative mix of “community” and “prosecution”

Community prosecution encourage prosecutors to collaborate with constituents to mutually determine solutions to community problems. However, the potential exists for prosecutors to continue seeking their traditional goals of maximizing convictions while nominally working within a community-prosecution framework. A random survey of 261 Georgia prosecutors helps to determine whether community-based prosecutors spend more time in community outreach and law enforcement coordination activities. The results show that attorney caseload measures correlate with time spent on community outreach and law enforcement. Being assigned to community prosecution or a specialized crime unit is not consistently related either of these activities. In short, consistent differences do not emerge between community-based and traditional prosecutors.

Community Prosecution

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington, D.C., initiated a pilot community prosecution project in that city in 1996. This article describes this innovative program and examines the impact of this project on the prosecutors, police officers, and residents of the Fifth Police District in Northeast Washington, D.C. It describes the successes that can be achieved by including prosecutors in the partnership between the police and community.

Community prosecution in the United States

Community prosecution in the United States

Community prosecution in the United States and its relevance for Europe

Community prosecution in the United States and its relevance for Europe