Street Roots asked Ethan Knight and Mike Schmidt how they could improve the community court
QUESTION:
Do you see any opportunities for improvement in the way Multnomah County’s Community Court functions? It could be shaped many ways, such as the service mall in Clackamas County. Do you have a vision for how this could be reformed or modified?
ETHAN KNIGHT:
Absolutely. I think if you ask anyone, even in the DA’s office, they’d say the system’s on life support now. There are a couple ways we can improve it. The first is, I would love to have a court operating somewhere else besides downtown.
The original idea when we had one in the Brentwood-Darlington Community Center in Southeast Portland years ago, is it took (community court) out of that environment where it is so clearly a court, with all the attendant issues, and it was out in the community so that people didn’t have to travel as far and they were sited in the neighborhood that they were in. The members of the community were more involved in what was truly going on in that courtroom, and the community service nexus to it was more direct.
The next one is, for folks who are in custody, you shorten the turnaround time for getting into court. On the original model when they were working on this in New York years ago was you wouldn’t want to hold someone for very long. If somebody was arrested for something they were detained for, it was the day before, and you got them in that courtroom immediately. That’s a model I would love to see, so it’s not a situation where you’re giving out citations until someone’s taken into custody and they sit for a week and then they go into community court. The idea is you move someone in there as quickly as possible because you have that connection to services, and that access point.
The last piece is how robust is the support structure and the service structure? That gets into the Department of Community Justice and the role they play on those low-level offenses. I’ve often thought the probation money could be well spent early on in the process. We’ve learned that certainly in the juvenile system that if you give people that support early on, and not wait until they’ve been through the system a bunch, you can decrease the chance that they’re going to come back. Community court could be a good opportunity to try and really defer a lot of those choices early on.
MIKE SCHMIDT:
I haven’t been in the DA’s office for six, seven years, but the last time I saw it, it was a high-volume docket that resolves a lot of low-level cases as quickly and expeditiously as we can. It’s not really a problem-solving court.
I’ve talked to some of the judges about what we could do to make the community court more of an actual community court instead of just a “rocket docket” to resolve cases. There is an opportunity to really think, “What are we trying to accomplish?” and “Is this working or is it not working?”
The community court model might have been innovative 20 years ago, but the research has moved on from that type of court. Oregon doesn’t have any specialty courts that are specifically targeted toward the houseless community, to get people into and connected to resources into being housed. I think there’s about a dozen states that have that type of specialty court, and that’s something I would like to look at for Multnomah County. It’s not always necessary to go through the whole charging process in the specialty court. Looking for ways to handle things in the community would be a good way to do it too.
Street Roots interviewed the candidates for Multnomah County district attorney. Both candidates recieved three questions specific to their campaigns, along with six common questions they both answered. Read their responses to more of our questions.
