DAs Take to the Streets

by Dianne Molvig

Usually we think of the courtroom as the district attorney's milieu. But for Milwaukee County assistant district attorneys Derek Mosley and Shannon Carrick, the daily arena is a 242-block section of inner-city Milwaukee. Therein these two young lawyers attend neighborhood meetings, talk to youth at schools and detention centers, cruise the streets to scout for newly developing trouble spots, investigate citizens' complaints regarding suspicious activities such as possible drug dealing, and much more.

It's all part of their work in the Community Prosecution Unit, a new program of the Milwaukee County District Attorney's Office that places prosecutors in the community. The purpose is to give district attorneys a different kind of role to play in fighting crime.

"Typically, district attorneys take a reactive approach, after a crime already has been committed and the police have made arrests," explains Mosley, who was with the district attorney's office for five years before becoming a community prosecutor. "This is proactive. Everything Shannon and I do comes in on the front end, before a problem becomes a crime that gets down to the district attorney's office. We do a lot of crime prevention."

The community prosecutors program is the only one of its kind in Wisconsin. Portland, Ore., and Washington, D.C., were pacesetters in creating such programs, and the federal Department of Justice made funding available to help other cities follow suit. Milwaukee County district attorney E. Michael McCann, with the backing of police chief Arthur Jones and neighborhood leaders, spearheaded efforts to win a $200,000 grant for Milwaukee.

"The minute I read about this grant, I knew Mosley was the guy I wanted to run our program," McCann says. "He'd worked in children's court and in the drug unit - ideal experience to take this job. And he's an affable, sociable guy with a lot of good sense." In turn, Mosley knew whom he wanted to enlist as his partner. "Shannon and I went to law school (Marquette University) together," he says, "and I knew her from children's court. I asked her to do this with me."

Mosley and Carrick's neighborhood base centers around three locations, the primary one being at the city's District Five police station. There a former interrogation room, barely big enough to fit in two desks and two chairs, now serves as one of their offices. They also have offices in neighborhood centers in each of the two neighborhoods they serve: Harambee and Williamsburg Heights.

These two adjacent neighborhoods make up one of Milwaukee's most poverty- and crime-ridden areas. Among the 51,000 residents, 40 percent in the 16-to-55 age bracket are unemployed, and 51 percent are under the age of 18. The median annual household income is $16,000, and only 20 percent of the homes in the area are owner-occupied. Few neighborhood businesses exist other than liquor stores, bars, and convenience stores, where in some cases you'll find a gallon of milk selling for $3. Neighborhood residents are a captive market.

It's a far cry from what this part of the city used to be as recently as 40 years ago. Just north of downtown, this area was once Milwaukee's version of the Harlem Renaissance. Black-owned retail shops and restaurants thrived; jazz clubs were everywhere. Sons followed fathers into jobs in neighborhood factories that paid excellent wages; people could afford to buy their own homes. But then the factories closed, and workers with no other skills ended up jobless. A downward cycle began, eventually igniting the riots of the 1960s, which left the area in war-zone-like shambles. Visible scars still remain four decades later. And newer blights have emerged in the form of drug-dealing and other crimes.

Still, there's another side to the Harambee/Williamsburg Heights area. Touring the neighborhoods, you notice the many modest, well-kept-up homes mixed in amongst the deteriorating ones. The Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School brightens an entire city block with its striking sky-blue exterior trimmed by a band of multicolored African designs. This building serves as a symbol of neighborhood pride, as well as a school. On another block, you'll find a string of bright, storybook-painted houses where neighborhood children can gather after school, a project of community activist Sister Clara. Plus, scores of community leaders and volunteers work in countless ways to try to turn their neighborhoods around.

Indeed, hope and despair battle it out every day on the streets of Harambee and Williamsburg Heights. Through their work as community prosecutors, Mosley and Carrick are trying to give hope the edge.

An Ear to the Ground, an Eye on the Streets

Mosley and Carrick officially started working with the program last July, when funding began, but they actually got their efforts underway the previous October. They worked their day jobs and then headed uptown in the evenings to attend neighborhood meetings. "What we didn't want was for the grant to start in July," Mosley says, "and we'd begin with no connections and no relationships. When we first came to the community, people were skeptical. You know, 'You're from the government, and you're here to help us? Oh yeah.'"

But slowly, trust began to evolve. And by the time July rolled around, Mosley and Carrick had a stack of citizen complaints waiting for them to tackle. Roughly 80 percent of their work entails investigating nuisance properties - whether it be a convenience store parking lot, a house, or any location where trouble appears to be brewing. Citizens report activity they deem disruptive, illegal, or just suspicious, such as loud music, loitering, people carrying weapons, or signs of drug dealing. Complaints may come in by telephone, or through one of the "hot-spotting" forms that Mosley and Carrick distribute around the neighborhoods, or a resident might call a neighborhood association office, which relays the information to the community prosecutors.

This process helps to overcome one of the chief hurdles law enforcement faces: people's fear of retaliation from street thugs. "Drug dealers will take over an area," points out Bruce Scott, community liaison officer for Milwaukee Police District Five, "but a lot of people are afraid to come forward. They don't want to talk to uniformed officers at the station or out in public. But they'll talk to Derek and Shannon and tell them where there are problems. Then Derek and Shannon can pass that along to us."

Not only do people feel safer registering their complaints with Mosley and Carrick, but they also know they can voice concerns that may not - or at least not yet - warrant a full-blown police investigation, such as mere speculations about drug dealing. "If police are going to go in, they have to have probable cause," Carrick points out. "But we can call a landlord or property owner when we have a little information, mention that people are complaining, and say, 'Let's talk about this.'"

Some complaints do turn out to be dead ends. People are visiting on a porch, and someone assumes they're dealing. Mosley and Carrick can look into it, without wasting police time, and then close the file until they hear additional complaints.

Whatever the nature of the complaint, the prosecutor team investigates. Part of that involves street work - talking to neighbors and driving by a reported property to witness what's going on. That's where their camera and binoculars come in handy - which, by the way, the twosome bought with their own money, along with their cell phones, because grant dollars don't stretch quite far enough.

Other parts of the investigation they can do right at the District Five police station. They search computerized city records to find out who owns the property and whether it has outstanding city code violations. They check how many times police have been called to the property in recent months. What's the point of all that research? "It's leverage," Mosley says. "When we sit down and talk to the property owner, we have a lot of weight when we can pull out this sheet and say, 'Here are the problems. What are you going to do about it?'"

Adding even more weight is the fact that Mosley and Carrick have been out to see the problems, arming themselves with first-hand knowledge rather than second-hand reports. Most landlords cooperate to correct problems, and they can learn how to avoid future problems by enrolling in the city's Landlord Training Program. Those who don't cooperate ultimately may face having their property declared a nuisance, which means the city attorney's office initiates action to confiscate the property.

Area landlords come in all types. Some are the stereotypical absentee landlords, who receive their rent in cash through the mail, never set foot in the neighborhood, and turn a blind eye to what's happening in their rental houses. At the other end of the spectrum are many elderly blacks who have owned their property for decades and still live in the neighborhood themselves, but are afraid to confront trouble-making tenants. Mosley and Carrick work with the full gamut of property owners to try to remedy problems.

In just seven months, they've already had several successes. One of these is a residential block that had a number of crack houses and had degenerated into a block-long open-air drug marketplace. Carrick and Mosley began to organize the landlords. "We got them together," Mosley says, "so they met each other and knew they were in this together. They weren't just individual landlords on a block, but part of a group of landlords that had the same goal." Now the crack houses are shut down.

Out With the Love Roses

Convenience stores are another focal point of the pair's neighborhood work. Many of these stores were selling everyday items that easily convert into tools for drug use. For instance, a Chore Boy's purpose is scouring pots and pans, but a snippet of the copper meshing makes an excellent filter for a crack pipe. Small zip-lock bags, called gem packs, are another problem. Their primary use is among jewelers, who store diamonds in these miniature bags. But they're also the perfect size for packing a crack rock to sell on the streets. Then there's the love rose, a sentimental gift for sweethearts consisting of a glass tube, stopped by corks at both ends, with a small paper rose inside. Pop the corks, remove the rose, add a Chore Boy filter, and it's a ready-made crack pipe.

Carrick and Mosley began their campaign to get convenience store owners to stop stocking these items. They met resistance initially - not surprising considering these items often were the stores' hottest sellers. But by visiting stores one at a time, the pair of prosecutors succeeded in getting the vast majority of owners to sign good-faith agreements to remove the would-be drug paraphernalia from their shelves and to stop selling tobacco to minors, another prevalent problem. Copies of these agreements go to the appropriate city alderpersons, and undercover agents drop by the stores now and then to check compliance.

Mosley and Carrick work various angles to get owners' cooperation. "One leverage we have," Carrick says, "is that when their license is up for renewal, the neighbors around the store will complain about loitering, noise, and other problems. The store owners could get their licenses taken away." By agreeing to remove the drug-related items, the owners also eliminate the accompanying problems that draw neighbors' ire.

Another salespoint is that the convenience store owners can take a step to improve owner-resident relations, which tend to be strained because the owners live outside the neighborhood. Most are of Arab descent, and animosity has erupted a little along the lines of the infamous frictions between New York City's blacks and Koreans. This is a way for owners to show they care about the community and its people, beyond just making money off them.

More Than 'Law and Order'

Community prosecutor work, however, is about more than handling nuisance complaints and talking with convenience store owners. The program is "not just a 'law and order' piece," points out Sherman Hill, executive director of the Harambee Ombudsman Project. "Derek and Shannon are doing things that are good for the community."

The DA duo attends block-watch meetings, which often occur over coffee in someone's home at 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning. "These two young people have been instrumental in helping us get started with block-watch clubs," says resident Cordelia Taylor. "And they have been very accessible to us, even to the point of visiting our homes. I'm starting to feel a lot more comfortable about our neighborhood, and hopefully others will, too." Taylor owns a block-long stretch of group homes for low- and no-income elderly in Williamsburg Heights. She also bought a vacant lot in the neighborhood and built a new home of her own. "I'm here to stay," she says.

Mosley and Carrick are bargaining with the city to get neighborhood vacant lots - now primarily sites for abandoned junk, drug use, dealing, and prostitution - turned over to a neighborhood association. The city would pay the association to maintain the lots, and the association would hire youth to cut the grass and pick up trash. Some of these lots could become urban gardens to provide food for residents.

In another effort, they've already negotiated busing arrangements and found space for a neighborhood Safe and Sound program, offering recreation, computer access, and study resources to teenagers between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. - the hours when statistics show teens are most likely to find trouble.

Another way Mosley and Carrick reach out to young people is by visiting middle schools and high schools. Through a presentation called "The Law and You," they give pointers to help youth avoid trouble. "Kids do these stupid things for their friends and don't realize they could face life in prison, too," Carrick says, "or that one felony on their record will follow them forever. We're probably not going to reach the hard-core kids, but we're trying to reach those who are just being stupid."

Still, they've met surprising responses from even the hard-core set, Carrick adds. When she and Mosley first decided to give talks at juvenile detention centers, they figured they might be wasting their time. They envisioned a tough, tuned-out crowd. Instead, they've encountered rapt audiences. "A huge part of it is that they want attention," Carrick notes. "They've raised themselves on the streets, and they don't care if you're on the 'other side.' They just want someone to give them attention."

Yet another project they're involved in that's just under way is the Offender/Unemployed Initiative, a joint effort of several groups. "We're really excited about this," Mosley reports, "because it's everything needed to get this neighborhood back to what it was. It's jobs, education, home ownership." The initiative targets people exiting correctional institutions who are returning to the neighborhood, perhaps no better prepared to lead productive lives than they were before incarceration. This program will give them job training and provide jobs at family-sustaining wages. After successfully completing one year in the program, participants are eligible for no-down-payment, low-interest mortgages. "They'll have homes in the neighborhood they grew up in," Mosley says, "and that's what we want. We want them to be stakeholders who care about what goes on in their community."

Long Hours, Strong Rewards

Besides the list of Carrick's and Mosley's activities already mentioned, there are the little things such as helping an elderly man whose credit card had been stolen, or talking to a murdered young man's mother, who needed to know the justice system hadn't forgotten about her son.

And they do the extras that don't exactly fall under the job: helping out at a neighborhood clean-up day, mentoring a teenager, or chaperoning a group of youngsters on a circus outing. It's definitely not a typical 9-to-5 gig. They work nights and on weekends, depending on what's happening in the neighborhood.

"We are using our legal skills and legal knowledge to help this community," Carrick says, "and that's very rewarding personally. I love my job."

"I'd do this for free," Mosley says, only half joking.

Doubts about continued funding, however, are one dark cloud on the horizon. Funding runs through the end of 2001, but uncertainty hovers regarding the future of the program launched by the Clinton administration. Mosley and Carrick already are searching for other funding sources.

"When we first started this program," Mosley says, "people in the neighborhood said we'd be here a couple months and then be gone. We said no, we're going to be here. I'd feel miserable if in December we have to pack up and walk out."

If Milwaukee's program vanishes, it will hurt the community, says Harambee's Sherman Hill. It would send the message that "once again something that's working is being snatched away," he contends, "which happens a lot in this community. You rally, you plead for people to get involved. And they do. And then someone comes along and says, 'Okay, that worked, but we aren't going to fund it anymore.' So the next time you go out to push for something, it's harder to get people's attention. They remember and they say, 'Oh man, here you come again.'"

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