In March of 2015, APA received an oral inquiry regarding the possibility of APA providing the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office (here after WCPO) in Detroit, Michigan with training and technical assistance to assist them in transitioning their office to a geographic or zone prosecution model. Thereafter, the WCPO submitted a formal request for assistance later that month. Following its receipt, APA worked with that office to develop an agenda to meet their requested needs and settle on some dates for the visit. An agreed upon final agenda was completed prior to the visit that included reviewing the office's current state and issues and discuss implementation of a geographic prosecution model.
On March 19, 2015, the APA TTA team traveled to Detroit, MI. The agenda proceeded pretty much as planned over the next two days with the exception of deferring the data integration and information sharing session of XXXX to a subsequent phone discussion. It was felt that that discussion would be more productive a point when more work on goals, objectives, and outcome measures had been developed by the WCPO management team. Though most of the agenda topics were covered, they were not necessarily covered in the order proposed. Present for the sessions were Prosecutor Worthy and her management team.
On Day 1, following introductions and a review of the site visit agenda, the WCPO made a presentation on the current state of the office and its organization, staffing, and caseloads, crime types, and its existing community prosecution effort and its planning efforts around geographic prosecution.
Following that presentation, APA presented on various zone models from around the country including those in Philadelphia, Rockland Co., NY, Maricopa Co., AZ, Milwaukee Co., WI, the Manhattan DA’s Office in New York, NY, and the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.
Following that presentation, a lengthy discussion ensued concerning the “Big Issues” from the site visit agenda. A large part of that conversation centered on the issue of what existing specialized units would be exempted from the geographic zone model. Particular attention centered on whether the Charging Unit and the Domestic Violence Unit should be exempted from the model and how the office should organize in relation to the Detroit Police Department’s Major Crimes Section. The management staff had a good feel for the relative pros and cons of following an expansive or more limited model and APA provided several examples from other jurisdictions on how this key issue was resolved. This is essentially a policy issue that each office must resolve consistent with its needs, challenges, and history. There is no “correct” answer. Following a lengthy discussion, Prosecutor Worthy expressed the desire for an expansive application of the model.
Another important part of the discussion centered on how to go about the process of dividing up the workload across the zones and how to divide up the existing staff to insure sufficient attorney and support services to each zone. Steps need to be taken to insure that the workload is proportional and that the experience level of the attorneys and support staff is distributed in a fair and effective way, commensurate to that workload.
Another important part of the discussion, which continued into the following day was the importance of development goals and objectives, and outcome measures for the shift to the new model. Despite previous successful implementations of zone models, insufficient attention has been given to documenting goals and objectives, and outcome measures to document those successes.
A further discussion of data sharing and case management systems, and specific outcome measures was deferred to a later point in time. It was felt that that discussion would be more productive after the WCPO had some time to work on defining some goals, objectives, and outcome measures.
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