Community Court: Cleaning Up Downtown Spokane with Compassion

By Jim Ryan

 

[This article appears in the February, 2014 edition of The Message.]

 

2013 began a period of rapid and exciting change for the Spokane County Medical Society Foundation. As we prepared for the full implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to significantly reduce the Project Access workload, it became clear that the knowledge we’ve gained and the networks we’ve built over the years could—and should—be effectively applied to other gaps in our community’s public health system.

 

Specifically, we increasingly saw that we were valued as facilitators of collaboration between myriad medical, behavioral and social services organizations and professionals with the goal of providing more comprehensive, coordinated care for the most complicated individuals in our community. The early successes of the Hot Spotters Group and the city’s H3 (Health Homeless Housing Systems Integration Pilot)  grant have clearly demonstrated that this work is vital and has the potential to drastically reduce wasteful spending while vastly improving  health outcomes for a population that has historically been impervious to lasting change. When the Foundation met with the team heading up Spokane’s new Community Court, we knew it was a good fit.

 

Municipal Court Judge Mary Logan, city prosecutor Adam Papini, public defender Francis Adewale and chief probation officer Donna McBride compose the team that brought this alternative court to realization in December after years of research, work and patient “waiting for the right moment politically to make it happen.” Housed in the Spokane Public Library downtown, Community Court takes a different approach to recidivistic perpetrators of the kinds of non-violent, quality-of-life crimes that have long plagued Spokane’s downtown corridor and the municipal court’s docket. These include charges like public urination, pedestrian interference (panhandling), and public intoxication. In the past, these charges would have resulted in a failure to appear in court, resulting in an arrest warrant, leading to a short and costly stint in jail and a fine that was unlikely to ever be paid. Often, this process would then be repeated over and over again, at great cost and no benefit to the taxpayers.

 

The idea behind alternative courts all over the nation is that the regular judicial system is relatively inefficient in its handling of certain populations. Drug courts, for example, have become extraordinarily effective in addressing the particular challenges endemic to addicts and their families by attempting to deal humanely with the underlying medical-behavioral issues rather than simply writing them off, tossing them in jail and allowing the cycle to continue. While Spokane’s Community Court certainly sees its fair share of individuals with substance abuse problems, the scope is more broadly defined to encompass the combination of social, medical, and behavioral issues that have contributed to the “street people” culture that has created a sense of seediness downtown.

 

Considered pragmatically, yes, this is an effort to clean up downtown in response to the complaints of business owners who feel, perhaps rightfully so, that customers are being driven away by concern for personal safety. It is also, however, an acknowledgement that past attempts to solve this problem have generally been shallowly focused on the cosmetic problem. In addition to being inhumanely designed and implemented, these attempts have been unsuccessful in the long-term, as they have failed to get at the root of the problem. Community Court seeks to address the human problem, rather than the commercial problem.

 

In an early meeting to determine whether the Foundation’s involvement made sense, prosecutor Papini and probation officer McBride shared with us a list of repeat offenders with outstanding warrants. With just a brief glance through the stack of pages, we found no less than a dozen names that overlapped with our work on the Hot Spotters Group and H3 grant, some of whom had resisted our attempts to connect them to health and social services. The potential became immediately clear: the court has the authority to make demands of these individuals while we have the network and knowledge needed to make those demands meaningful and beneficial.

 

Now that may sound a bit authoritarian, but rest assured that these clients have every right to refuse what is asked of them at Community Court and proceed through the system as usual. The court merely offers them an alternative to the usual rigmarole. When an offender arrives at 10:30am on Monday morning, s/he is greeted by a host of community service providers, including: Suellen Pritchard and Robert Martin, in-person assisters that can help clients sign up for Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act; a team of screeners from Frontier Behavioral Health; Rosemary Wear, an attorney who provides legal assistance with Social Security Disability claims; case managers from Goodwill Supportive Service for Veterans Families. In addition, the Department of Licensing will come once each month to facilitate state ID cards for individuals who lack any form of personal identification, which can be a major barrier to services.

 

The court relies on the Community Health Worker team from the Spokane County Medical Society Foundation—Sarah Bates, Jim Ryan, Margie Locher and Lee Taylor—to assess the needs of these individuals and recommend a course of action that will give them the best chance of breaking out of the cycle they’re in. Our recommendations are then paired with court imposed community service requirements and the defendant is given a timeline within which to complete those requirements while not picking up new charges. Most often, the “birth-to-death” timeline of one of these cases is set at six months, but the client is usually asked to accomplish certain goals within the first week or two. All of this is laid out when the client appears before Judge Logan during the 1:30 court session. 

 

These sessions are surprisingly informal, with the prosecutor, public defender and judge going to great lengths to show their support and encouragement for the defendant. At the first session in January, they were especially enthusiastic in their admiration for a defendant who, just one week earlier had appeared before the court in an extremely strung out and non-lucid state. To everyone’s surprise, he returned to court, as required, sober and actively striving for rehabilitation by availing himself of the support the court offered. While this gentleman and many like him have a long way to go, cases like this one offer early promise for the Community Court model. We are proud to be involved in the early stages of this effort and look forward to being a part of its continued growth and success.