DAs Take to the Streets
Stationed in two inner-city neighborhoods,
Milwaukee's community prosecutors fight crime -- and build hope.
by Dianne Molvig
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Derek Mosley and Shannon Carrick, Milwaukee County assistant DAs, work
to prevent crime in a 242-block section of inner-city Milwaukee. Their
work in the Community Prosecution Unit helps them be proactive in
fighting crime. Photo by John Greco.
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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
"Typically, district attorneys take a reactive approach, after a
crime already has been committed and the police have made arrests. 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."
– Derek Mosley
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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
"Kids do these stupid things for their friends and don't realize
they could face life in prison, too. 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."
– Shannon Carrick
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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.'"
Dianne Molvig operates Access Information Service, a Madison
research, writing, and editing service. She is a frequent contributor to
area publications.
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