It was Tuesday afternoon at the Red Hook Community Justice Center and a teenage girl accused of robbing a classmate at school stood before judge Alex Calabrese. She had one arm around her mother's waist and the other dangling at her side. The youngster, whose purple hair hung straight down her back, intended to plead guilty, but first the judge had some questions. He wanted to know if her grades had improved, whether she was keeping her 8:15 p.m. curfew and how she was getting along with her mother these days.
These questions are not unusual in a juvenile delinquency case. But the mother's responses were. She beamed as she told the court her daughter recently received a grade of "100" in one class and now comes home on time.
In court, mother and daughter both thanked the probation officer, who arranged several programs for them, including parent-child mediation.
In Red Hook's juvenile court -- unlike family court in downtown Brooklyn -- parents and children can avail themselves of a vast array of services right in the courthouse. Counseling, mentoring and mediation programs take place at the center, making it convenient for families to use the services. An on-site social worker also meets with each youngster to help determine what services are needed.
The availability of programs also means Judge Calabrese can feel confident about sending a child home to his parents, instead of to juvenile jail.
The Red Hook court began for adults in June 2000 and started taking juvenile cases in April 2001. Now, any youngsters under age 16 who are arrested in Red Hook, Sunset Park, Park Slope, South Slope, Gowanus, Cobble Hill or Wyckoff and released to their parents by the police are sent to the community justice center. The probation department then decides whether to refer the case for prosecution or resolve it out of court. The out-of-court resolution can involve counseling or mediation between the parties, something that is frequently used with altercations that began as disputes between students at school and then escalated to the point of arrest. So far, approximately 45 percent of the cases in Red Hook have been successfully resolved out of court, compared to 10 percent citywide, according to Alfred Siegal of the Center for Court Innovation, a joint venture of the state court system and the non-profit agency, the Fund for the City of New York.
If the case is flagged for prosecution, the prosecutor's office can decide whether to file charges in Red Hook or a more conventional court downtown. Only 10 cases have been filed in Red Hook in the last year, which is fewer than authorities had expected. Arrest statistics for the neighborhood indicated the court would receive up to 50 cases per year.
Several people involved with the court said this was probably due to the reluctance of Peter Reinharz, the chief prosecutor for family court, to bring cases there. Reinharz, who was nationally known for his tough-on-crime approach, resigned effective Feb. 22.
The staff at the alternative court is hopeful that the Bloomberg administration will name a new prosecutor friendly to the court's goals. One sign that Bloomberg endorses the court's approach is that he tapped Center for Court Innovation director John Feinblatt to join the city administration as criminal justice coordinator.
The Center for Court Innovation, which started the nation's first community court in midtown Manhattan in 1993, has led the way in creating alternative courts nationwide. But, while alternative courts for adults have become accepted in the last decade, alternative courts for juveniles are still very much works in progress.
In addition to the court in Red Hook, the city is also experimenting with a juvenile court in Central Harlem that works on the same principle as drug-treatment court: a system of frequent court appearances, monitoring and graduated sanctions for non-compliance. "In Harlem, there was a specific grant from the federal government to create a juvenile intake court based on a drug court model" said Alfred Siegal of the Center for Court Innovation.
The youngsters who go through the Harlem court will receive "intensive contact and monitoring," said program director Jimena Martinez. In addition, drug-treatment provider Phoenix House will run on-site programs geared towards adolescent marijuana users.
The juvenile court in Harlem opened this January and has so far arraigned just one youngster, with seven more cases "in the pipeline," according to Martinez. As with the court in Red Hook, those numbers might increase with a personnel change in the prosecutor's office.
In the last year, Calabrese has sent to juvenile jail only one child out of the 10 youngsters who have come before him. By contrast, judges in regular family court sent more than 5,000 adolescents to detention out of some 9,000 cases -- although some of that difference comes from the fact that Red Hook doesn't handle the most serious cases.
The juvenile court in Red Hook only accepts cases where the police have released the child to a guardian after arrest, which happens roughly 80 percent of the time. In the other 20 percent of the cases, police take the youngsters directly to a juvenile jail, either because of the seriousness of the charges or because the parents don't come to the precinct to pick up their children.
Still, many juveniles eligible for the court in Red Hook are not prosecuted there as of yet -- a situation the court's acting director Robert Feldstein is hoping will soon change. Red Hook offers juveniles and the judge, "better information, better options, better accountability," said Feldstein. "We can do things better."
The police department has become famous worldwide for its successful, computer-driven assault on crime, but when detectives file their investigative reports, they do so in triplicate, using carbon paper. In its daily work, as Police Commissioner Ray Kelly sums it up, his department has no internal email, no computer network, no access to sophisticated outside data bases. It is like a Porsche with the engine of a Volkswagen.
The whole system is inadequate, said Kelly, speaking at a lunch sponsored by the Manhattan Institute at the Yale Club. Those triplicate files that detectives create, DD5 forms, are sent to three separate offices--precinct, command, and borough--where they are stored in standard file cabinets to be retrieved manually when needed. Kelly paused for a moment to let it sink in that the data contained in those cabinets is essentially inaccessible.
The drive of analytic policing today, particularly in combating terrorists, is to connect the dotted lines, to pick up the relationships among seemingly disparate occurrences. Terrorist cells, noted Kelly, often finance crimes through petty crime, such as breaking into cars, identity theft, burglary. Since September 11 the details of certain petty crimes have developed an importance out of all proportion to the individual crime itself.
Kelly knows what technology can do for routine productivity because he had it in his last few jobs, including as head of the U.S. Customs Service. The New York Police Department needs a computer system, he argues, that allows "all case information to be entered in one data base for cross checking." Customs uses the Treasury Department's Treasury Enforcement Communication System (TECS), which links all the Treasury enforcement bureaus with one another, including Customs, the Secret Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. TECS may still be 1980s technology, says Kelly, but it is leagues ahead of the New York Police Department. Customs is now exploring an Internet-driven investigative database that would permit the storage of surveillance footage, wiretaps, and interviews together in a digital file.
The other half of the technology problem is, as always, personnel: "We need our senior people to have the basic tools and technologies needed to lead any organization today."
There's no easy fix for this, but one route is more sophisticated recruitment.
Interest in police work is at an all-time high, and the NYPD is at the top of the food chain. Mayor Bloomberg's 2003 budget calls for a reduction of 1600 police officers, though Kelly seems to regard that as something of a phantom number. He says that 40,110 officers is the "preferred head count," and that the NYPD is now down to 38,000 through attrition. Its target is to have 39,000 officers on July 1 of this year.
The department is trying to make it easy to apply. The application form is online and it's free. Kelly thinks New York is the only major metropolitan police force in the nation to do this.
They are also sending recruiters to schools that have never seen NYPD recruiters before, such as Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. According to the New York Times, the effort was not very successful ("Police Recruiters Draw Little Interest, Good or Bad") at Columbia. Himself a graduate of the JFK School of Government at Harvard, Commissioner Kelly says the recruitment campaign is as much symbolic as substantive. Which is a judicious position to take since, as the Times points out, the NYPD's starting salary of $31,305 is less than the annual cost of attending Columbia. Rather like trying to buy a Porsche at a Volkswagen price.
Julia Vitullo-Martin, a long-time editor and writer on urban affairs, is the former director of the Citizens Jury Project at the Vera Institute of Justice. She is now writing a book entitled The Conscience of the American Jury.
In the post-September 11 world, the New York Police Department has already lost hundreds of experienced officers to death, retirement, and private sector jobs. Now Mayor Bloomberg comes along and, facing a $4.7 billion budget gap, proposes reducing the force by 1,600 officers to save money. He intends to do this by not replacing the officers who have left the department in the last few months. There are, of course, many objections to using attrition alone to reduce a labor force, not the least of which is that attrition deprives management of discretion. As Bloomberg himself has noted repeatedly, the private sector's demand for good New York cops is likely to go up, not down. Meanwhile, the department's low starting salary of $31,305 impedes recruitment.
This would not be a bad time for Commissioner Raymond Kelly to bring back zero-based budgeting--the budgeting theory from the 1970s that urged policy makers to return to zero each year, building up their budgets and management structures completely fresh. Many expenditures should now be reconsidered. For example, how many former city officials have police protection? Former Police Commissioner Howard Safir had round-the-clock protection from two detectives until he was quietly asked to relinquish this perk by the Bloomberg administration. Who else, no longer on a government payroll, is protected? Every such expenditure should be scrutinized.
Similarly, all deployment of police officers to caretaker jobs should be examined. Should police officers patrol street fairs, for example? Parades? Community events? And if they are on duty, should they simply stand around, as was the custom under previous administrations?
Should another push toward civilianization be undertaken? Are there NYPD jobs--receptionists, clerks, phone operators--now held by police officers that would be more suitably handled by civilians?
Former prosecutor that he was, Mayor Rudy Giuliani regularly used the courts as a second front in his war against crime. Even when he lost, his litigiousness bought him time.
Among his most controversial tactics were his traffic checkpoints, which he used for all sorts of purposes--stopping drug traffic, checking for seat-belt use, looking for unlicensed or drunk drivers. Now a state judge has ruled that police checkpoints set up to screen traffic on high-crime blocks are unlawful because cops are subjecting citizens to illegal searches and seizures. The decision specifically declares unconstitutional the NYPD's Model Block Program, by which the police barricaded the ends of target blocks and stopped vehicles, asking to see driver's license, registration, and proof of insurance. Only drivers who lived on the block, had business there, or who were visiting family were allowed to enter.
In People v. April Pope, Acting Bronx Supreme Court Justice Robert Cohen ruled unconstitutional an NYPD stop of a vehicle at the corner of West 174th Street and Grand Avenue, where a checkpoint had been set up to counter prostitution and drug dealing. When an officer was unable to find April Pope's licence number in computer records, she admitted that the license was fake and that her license had been suspended. She was arrested.
Citing a November 2000 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Indianapolis v. Edmond, Judge Cohen said the New York program was similar to the Indianapolis checkpoint program, whose primary purpose was to find illegal narcotics. This, said the Supreme Court, was an infringement of a motorist's Fourth Amendment rights because the vehicle stops were not based on individualized suspicion of criminal activity.
Judge Cohen wrote that, "Although laudable in purpose, the checkpoint program at issue is ultimately for the purpose of crime control." Crime control did not meet the limited exceptions set forth in by the Supreme Court.
Commissioner Kelly said the NYPD was still reviewing the decision, which would not "immediately affect" the program. He added that checkpoints are nearly always set up at the request of the community.
Judge Cohen apparently thinks he's speaking for the community in his decision since he wrote that, "The impact of this program upon all citizens in this neighborhood is egregious and violates the Fourth Amendment." Who's right, Kelly or Cohen, about what the neighborhood wants?
In a second U.S. Supreme Court case cited by Judge Cohen, Delaware v. Prouse (1979), the court virtually invited state and local governments to introduce another kind of checkpoint--one that questions "all oncoming traffic at roadblock-type stops." This case proved useful to the Giuliani administration when model block checkpoints were criticized by some neighborhood activists in 1999 just as issues of racial profiling by police were heating up. Deflecting criticism that checkpoints were only used in minority neighborhoods, Giuliani quietly instituted a new kind of checkpoint--one that blocked, stopped, and questioned all incoming traffic in neighborhoods without high-crime rates. The East Side's Third Avenue, for example, became a frequent checkpoint in which cops said they were looking for things like seat belt violations. This in effect had been pre-approved by the Supreme Court.
Drivers caught in such checkpoints--which caused massive traffic jams and hour-long delays--were often furious by the time they reached the front of the lines and were casually waved on by the cops. Doubtless such New Yorkers would enjoy the Delaware v. Prouse dissent written by Chief Justice Rehnquist: "Because motorists, apparently like sheep, are much less likely to be 'frightened' or 'annoyed' when stopped en masse, a highway patrolman needs neither probable cause nor articulable suspicion to stop all motorists on a particular thoroughfare, but he cannot without articulable suspicion stop less than all motorists. The Court thus elevates the adage 'misery loves company' to a novel role in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence."
The New York Police Department now faces the odd situation of having had its crime-related checkpoint--the Model Block Program--declared unconstitutional, while the checkpoint concerned with trivial matters like seat belt violations is just fine with the courts.
What Kelly will do with this is anyone's guess. It was never clear that the general checkpoints, like the ones on Third Avenue, served any legitimate police purpose. Such checkpoints should be relegated to the past. The checkpoints in high-crime areas are more difficult. The city will surely appeal Judge Cohen's decision, but the question is ultimately as much a policy issue as a legal one. Were these checkpoints effective in reducing drug traffic and violent crime? Were they supported in their neighborhoods? Did residents feel their rights were infringed? Is this intense use of police personnel efficient?
Since the legal distinction drawn by the court is one of universality--you can set up a checkpoint and stop absolutely everybody constitutionally--the city can keep the Model Block Program if it chooses. It just has to make sure that absolutely everyone coming into the neighborhood is stopped--and inconvenienced.
Julia Vitullo-Martin, a long-time editor and writer on urban affairs, is the former director of the Citizens Jury Project at the Vera Institute of Justice. She is now writing a book entitled The Conscience of the American Jury.