NEW IDEA TO TARGET CRIME HITS TOWN

Community courts hailed as a solution to neighbourhood blight

Vancouver is about to hear the latest answer to the perennial problem of
street drug use, curbside prostitution and vagrancy -- community courts.

It's an approach adopted by some three dozen big American cities to battle
neighbourhood blight such as we are seeing in the Downtown Eastside.

Community courts are part of what you might loosely call the Broken Windows
strategy towards crime -- prosecute petty offences such as vandalism and
you'll nip crime in the bud.

They call it focusing on "quality of life" offences.

I think the community courts program sounds suspiciously like, round up the
taxpayers, hire a prosecutor and run the bums out of the area.

And I fear it has the same built-in pitfall as drug courts and the so-called
Four Pillars approach touted by Mayor Larry Campbell -- a scarcity of
resources.

But on Wednesday night at the Roundhouse as part of Law Week -- the annual
celebration commemorating the anniversary of the Charter of Rights and
Freedoms -- you can get the straight goods at a Public Forum on Street
Crime.

It will feature two key proponents of the new tactic, an architect of the
program from New York City and a prosecutor from Oregon.

Julius Lang is a director of the Centre for Court Innovation -- an
independent, not-for-profit organization that does R & D for the New York
City legal system.

For most of a decade, it has run one of the biggest drug courts in the U.S.
and currently coordinates about a dozen judicial experiments. Its work is
funded by a combination of grants and fees for service. You can e-visit it
at www.courtinnovation.org.

Lang says community courts are a way to change the behavior of offenders,
reduce crime and improve public safety.

"I don't want to say this is what Vancouver ought to be doing," he told me
in an interview. "I'm just going to describe the response that was adopted
in New York and applied in a number of other cities around the country."

Community courts are a way of handling offenders who get short shrift from a
system that is rightly more concerned about processing murderers, rapists
and thugs. They look at the offender's situation and the effects of his or
her behaviour on the community -- they try to solve problems rather than
punish.

In Portland, where they have existed for a decade, Jim Hayden has been a
neighborhood-based deputy district attorney for nine years.

"It requires the system change its way of thinking from a centralized
version of justice into one that responds to the community," Hayden said.

He said the courts were effective in cleaning up areas in Portland suffering
from the same urban decay that saps the Downtown Eastside.

"My first line of defence as a community prosecutor is how do I simply get
[the offender] out of your neighbourhood," he explained. "While I am
concerned about what happens to them, I don't want them to come back. My
focus is on getting them not to come back in any way that I can -- not
necessarily through treatment."

That gets minor offenders into the grip of the system, and while they might
be sentenced to only erase graffiti, sweep the streets or clean local parks,
it's the beginning of intense state scrutiny of their lives.

"First of all the judge has better information in the community court
system," New York's Lang said. "That information can be brought to bear in
crafting an appropriate sentence for the offender in a particular case --
and it brings accountability into it."

Traditional court management focuses on how many cases get processed. This
court focuses on the outcome -- has the problem gone away?

"Compliance by itself isn't success," he insisted. "It's changed behaviour.
And jail is still on the menu for a community court judge."

So if the prostitute does her community service but is back on the corner a
month later, she's going to the big house.

But imprisonment for petty crime seldom works and where do these people go
when they get out?

The problem I see is that these crimes are hallmarks of personal crisis and
getting someone out of the ditch requires expensive and intensive social
support.

But taxpayers have balked so far at paying for personalized services and
have little stomach for letting judges dictate what programs governments
should provide.

Vancouver's drug court experiment, for instance, is costing $1.7 million
over four years to operate and each "graduate" of the program so far has
cost $74,000!

Therein lies the breakdown in all this good thinking.

These pilot projects make people feel good and sometimes do wonders for the
lucky neighbourhood and participant chosen for the experiment. They also
give politicians a handy response for voters concerned about these issues.

But in this day and age, as far as I can tell, no government is prepared to
provide the funding needed to support such a Cadillac social safety net.

In Portland, the community courts established in the suburbs are now back
downtown because of the costs, and the necessary social services never
actually materialized.

"I'll be honest with you," Hayden conceded, "we never had the resources to
fully realize what we hoped to accomplish in that regard."

The situation is no different here and without proper resources I believe
these well-meaning ventures will founder.

Besides, I think at some point people should take responsibility for where
they live and quit relying on institutions to do the hard work of community
building. But check it out.