QUESTION:
The last time we crunched the numbers, we found that among Oregon’s five largest counties, Multnomah County has the lowest rate of prosecution and conviction in domestic violence cases. What would you do to change this?
ETHAN KNIGHT:
I’ve done some domestic violence work over the years, and it’s very challenging and very important. And I think what’s going on in Multnomah County is they have half as many prosecutors per capita as they had 20 years ago. You can chart the decline in those prosecutions with that, and those are very resource-intensive cases to do. I would say to county commissioners that you can’t chronically defund this office and expect them to be able to handle these cases. Property crimes, if you’re really looking at the number of hours put in, are much quicker and easier to do than domestic violence, sex crimes with more vulnerable victims, the cases we really need to spend time on. But they’re labor intensive. Making sure you get victims to access the services they need, to get them to court, often those cases go to trial at a higher rate because those defendants are more willing to roll the dice because they think victims will not go to trial. You have all these granular legal issues with these cases that make them harder to do and that you need more bodies for.
It’s that simple. There’s no silver bullet there. And that’s what’s happened over the past 20 years; those numbers have gone down. I’d be an advocate for why we need people to do that work, on the victim advocacy side and the prosecution side.
MIKE SCHMIDT:
I’d be curious to look at that data and look at the types of cases that are being declined and figure out why that is. In my work at the Criminal Justice Commission, I’ve been working with folks around domestic violence shelters, helping get them additional funding through our justice reinvestment program, so I think partnering with the shelters and seeing what they’re seeing is another important source of information, not just relying on the District Attorney’s Office information. What are they seeing in the community would be another way to get at why is that rate lower than what it is in other counties. It would start with looking at the data, analyzing it. Is this a resource issue? Is it because we don’t have enough prosecutors? When I look across the country at per-capita number of prosecutors in cities over 250,000, Multnomah has nine for every 100,000 people who live here. Other comparably sized cities have upwards of 14 and 18, so some cities have even double the amount of prosecutors.