Seeking to Make Them Safer, Prosecutors Hit the Streets in NE

By Bill Miller

A small team of prosecutors is spending as much time in the community as in
the courtroom, working with neighborhood residents in Northeast Washington to
target car thieves, drug dealers and owners of longabandoned buildings.

The 19 lawyers are part of a community prosecution effort begun last year in
the D.C. police department's 5th District, a pilot program in which the
prosecutors deal with everything from serious crime to nuisance complaints.
Although no one is calling it a cure for crime, their work is winning praise
from neighborhood leaders.

"I think it has a lot of potential," said Sally Byington, a Capitol Hill
resident and community activist. "I hope it gets to continue to be a city
model."

Former U.S. attorney Eric H. Holder Jr., who left office six weeks ago to
become deputy U.S. attorney general, launched the program amid much fanfare
15 months ago as a way to bring his lawyers closer to the people they
represent. It was patterned after similar ventures in Portland, Ore., and
other cities.

Holder said he hoped eventually to expand the program into all police
districts. Interim U.S. Attorney Mary Lou Leary has asked Congress to provide
$5.8 million for 39 additional lawyers and 35 support staff to handle
community prosecutions citywide.

"Our core mission still is successful prosecution. We haven't lost sight of
that," Leary said. "But prosecutors also welcome the opportunity to interact
more with the community, to work on the prevention end and be out front."

The 5th District, a bustling area with about 100,000 residents, long has been
plagued by homicides, robberies and other crimes. Prosecutors have continued
to give priority to those cases. But in the last year, they also have given
more attention to the conditions that make some neighborhoods more vulnerable
to crime: abandoned houses, broken street lights, vandalism and loitering.
They've worked with neighbors, police and various city agencies.

"Stolen cars, abandoned cars, vacant houses where people are using drugs,
trash problems, general criminal complaints. It's a totally different job,"
said Assistant U.S. Attorney Denise M. Abrahams. "It's been very rewarding.
After getting a house boarded up, you have people calling and saying thank
you. To them, it's a major, major improvement in their quality of life."

Abrahams works out of a satellite office at the 5th District station, in the
1800 block of Bladensburg Road NE, as does Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephanie
G. Miller. Like Abrahams, Miller has found the new duties a challenge.

She has devoted much of her time to tracking the owners of neglected
properties, trying to get grass cut on abandoned lots and developing leads on
lessthansensational crimes, such as the siphoning of diesel fuel from
delivery trucks.

The other prosecutors on the team work out of the main U.S. attorney's office
but spend much of their time on the streets with police officers and
residents. Their supervisors, Clifford T. Keenan and Brenda Johnson,
encourage them to attend community meetings, meet merchants and mingle as
much as possible.

Most of the prosecutors in the U.S. attorney's office follow a more
traditional approach, drawing cases from across the city. They have
specialties, handling cases such as homicides, robberies, sex offenses,
domestic assaults and misdemeanors. In the 5th District, prosecutors are
given a specific neighborhood and nearly every kind of case that originates
there, ranging from drugrelated killings to car thefts.

The initiative is an offshoot of community policing, a law enforcement
philosophy that calls upon officers to help improve everyday conditions.

Police Chief Larry D. Soulsby recently reorganized his department to put more
officers on the streets with their own narrowly defined geographic areas,
known as patrol service areas. In the 5th District, the prosecutors not only
work with the same residents daily but now they also work with the same
officers. They have helped train the police in ways to make cases stronger,
and the police in turn have helped show the prosecutors where the trouble
spots are.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy J. Heaphy, who covers Lincoln Park and nearby
neighborhoods, said he has been more effective questioning suspects and
building cases because he now knows the key players in the drug and car theft
trade. "I never realized before when I would get a file dropped on my desk in
a drug case how that person fit into the whole fabric," Heaphy said.

Police Capt. Ross E. Swope said he had doubts about the prosecutors' resolve
when Holder announced the program last year. "I've dealt with bureaucracies
my whole career," he said. "It starts out with a bang, and then, three weeks
later, `Where's the meat?' But this continued to evolve."

Swope said his officers used to encounter resistance from the U.S. attorney's
office when arresting people for lesser crimes. Now, he said, prosecutors
appreciate the need to deal with social and physical disorder. "It's a
completely different culture with the community prosecutors," he said.

Dennis J. Hartzell said prosecutors helped get three houses on his street
the unit block of Rhode Island Avenue NE boarded up after repeated
complaints about drug dealing and other activities. He said he was stunned by
the quick response from Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark J. Carroll and others.

"We'd all gotten in the mentality of not expecting anybody to be
accountable," said Hartzell, a leader of the Bloomingdale Civic Association.
"He [Carroll] is accountable. He called back, and he came here on his own
time and gave out business cards. He closed down some drug markets.

"It was the only thing that ever got done about all the awful stuff in my
neighborhood."

_ Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company