Conflict Intervention as Crime Prevention

Policy Recommendations

The ability of service providers to prevent crime, fear, and disorder is directly and dependently linked to MOCJ’s active support of those efforts. That support is demonstrated through official policies, funding priorities and allocations, in/formal provider-oriented advocacy, and a close, collaborative relationship between provider and MOCJ personnel.

The following policy recommendations are centered on these mediums of support. These recommendations are informed by the preceding overview of providers’ numerous categories and mechanisms of impact, and are intended to enhance the scale and efficiency of each, respectively. Generally, these recommendations are focused on maximizing the potential of service providers’ existing programs and on outlining a future path that allows MOCJ to further leverage providers’ expertise in ways that advance MOCJ policy objectives. Specifically, they are as follows:

1. MOCJ should support the expansion of service providers’ work in early-stage, risk-targeted, and scalable conflict interventions.
2. MOCJ should optimize its fiscal relationships with service providers to better leverage their preventative potential and minimize infrastructural and contracting impediments.
3. MOCJ should leverage its influence to formalize referral, training, and other helpful relationships between service providers and City agencies.
4. MOCJ should adjust its scope of service recipients to include not only those already involved with the criminal justice system, but also those at risk of, directly or collaterally affected by, and otherwise influencing such involvement, and – as they relate to Catchment services – younger and development-proximal individuals.

Each of these recommendations is accompanied by a rationale to justify its inclusion, as well as a series of related action items intended to help inform and facilitate their expedited implementation. Modifications of or augmentations to these action items may be required based on subsequent provider feedback and MOCJ’s own operational realities. As such, they should be viewed as a realistic, yet flexible path toward achieving the related recommendations.

While the time horizon during which these recommendations should be implemented is likely dependent upon factors beyond the focus of this evaluation, their timely attention is encouraged and will only hasten providers’ ability to further contribute to the reduction of crime, fear, and disorder throughout the City.

1. Expand Risk-Focused Services

MOCJ should support the expansion of service providers’ work in early-stage, risk-targeted, and scalable conflict interventions.

Rationale

In addition to borough-wide and location- specific Catchment Area services, the expansion of early-stage, risk-targeted, and scalable conflict interventions will significantly extend service providers’ preventative impact. Services sequenced earlier in the conflict lifecycle are better received⁴²¹ and accumulate far greater downstream effects.

Risk-targeted services are those that (1) minimize the acquisition, accumulation, and affect of conflict-related criminogenic risk factors, and/or (2) seek to offset the negative consequences associated with select criminogenic risk generators. In NYC, two of the primary conflict-related criminogenic risk generators are negative encounters with NYPD (i.e. arrests, summons, and SQF) and punitive, exclusionary discipline meted out in the City’s public schools.

Finally, scalable interventions are those where a sufficient volume of conflicts exist such that productive interventions would generate quantifiable impact, and are supported by a sufficient allocation of organizational resources. Opportunities for such scale are primarily associated with criminal justice system partnerships, but can originate elsewhere, as well. As such, MOCJ is encouraged to acknowledge the preventative potential from and support the provision of services delivered to clients regardless of their originating referral source.

Action Items

1.1 NYPD Access. Work with NYPD leadership to create opportunities that provide regular, precinct- level access to service providers for the purposes of educating officers on the applicability and availability of their services, encouraging referrals to those services, and eliciting information helpful in refining providers’ ongoing community outreach.

1.2 NYPD Training. Work with NYPD to support an expanded – ideally citywide – rollout of NYPI’s current training of officers in constructive conflict de-escalation and engagement skills.

1.3 NYPD Referral Pilot. Work with NYPD to develop a pilot referral program targeting repeat reports of residential noise violations where no previous responsive officer actions have been recorded.

1.4 NYPD Referral Institutionalization. Work with NYPD leadership to institutionalize CDRC referral procedures, such as through their inclusion in the Patrol Guide and other relevant documents.

1.5 DOE Program Expansion. Work with the NYC Department of Education (DOE) leadership to embed onsite restorative practices or peer mediation programming in 15 new schools during each of the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 academic years.⁴²²

1.6 DOE Suspension-Triggered Interventions. Work with DOE leadership to encourage the expedited scheduling of a mediative or restorative intervention following a student’s receipt of a second in-school suspension.⁴²³

1.7 DOE Proactive Use of Special Education Mediation. Work with DOE leadership to encourage a more proactive, school-initiated approach to requesting mediation in special education contexts. Currently, the majority of current requests are advanced-stage and parent- initiations, well after associated criminogenic risks may have already accrued.

1.8 DOE Mediation Acceptance by CSEs. Work with DOE leadership to encourage a more uniform acceptance of parent-initiated mediation requests involving Committees on Special Education.

1.9 DOE Mediation in Lieu of Resolution Sessions. Work with DOE leadership to explore the expanded use of mediation in lieu of resolution sessions prior to impartial hearings.

1.10 DOE Incentivizing Attorney Involvement. Work with DOE leadership to explore the inclusion of financial support for attorneys participating in special education mediations, such as is already provided for attorneys participating in impartial hearings. Such parity would create a significant, systemic incentive encouraging greater utilization of special education mediation that minimizes involved students’ criminogenic risk profiles.

1.11 DOE Administrative Training. Work with DOE to provide additional administrative-level training in restorative principles and constructive conflict engagement skills.

1.12 DOE Institutionalizing RJ Principles. Work with DOE leadership to explore further institutionalizing restorative principles into its Citywide Behavioral Expectations to Support Student Learning (i.e. discipline code).

1.13 NYCHA MAP-Connected Staff Training. Work with NYCHA leadership to secure training for administrative staff stationed at current MAP initiative housing developments. This training should include (1) an introduction to service providers’, their available interventions, and appropriate referral contexts; and (2) housing-oriented conflict skills training.

1.14 Expansion of Conflict Skills Training. Given its ability to influence countless daily interactions, training may well represent one of the most consequential, propagation sensitive interventions service providers offer. As such, MOCJ should support an aggressive expansion of basic and context- specific conflict skills training in criminogenically vulnerably locations and populations.

1.15 Discourage Overly-Restrictive Targeting. To maximize the propagation of their impact, MOCJ should support service providers in delivering interventions to a diverse audience and in maintaining a portfolio that, on the whole, serves clients with varying criminal, housing, or referrer affiliations, including primary prevention-targeted programming.⁴²⁴

2. Optimize Fiscal Relationships

MOCJ should optimize its fiscal relationships with service providers to better leverage their preventative potential and minimize infrastructural and contracting impediments.

Rationale

Three opportunities currently exist for further optimizing MOCJ’s fiscal relationship with service providers. First, more closely aligning MOCJ’s risk objectives with its level of fiscal support will encourage greater progress toward those objectives. Second, targeted investment in service providers’ infrastructure needs will ensure they have the capacity to fulfill their substantially under-leveraged potential. Third, improving MOCJ’s contracting procedures and timelines such that they are more responsive to providers’ fiscal realities will improve providers’ ability to function as contracted and with greater consequence. More detailed instructive rationales for each are offered separately below.

Risk Informed Financing

Future financial support to service providers should be more thoroughly based on their aforereviewed preventative impact, rather than on unrelated historic funding trends. Currently, the City’s investment in conflict interventions fails to reflect those services’ ongoing performance and potential as effective, evidence-based, and community- oriented contributors to the prevention of crime, fear, and disorder.

While policy priorities will dictate how allocations specifically materialize, one approach would be to support the work of service providers in a way that more directly and substantially offsets notable contributors to the City’s aggregated criminogenic risk profile. For example, a annual allocation by MOCJ of $4.5 to $5.0 million would more effectively offset the marginal criminogenic risks associated with enforcement-related police actions and school-related exclusionary discipline; risk generators with whom service providers are strongly positioned to collaborate and risks their interventions are uniquely capable of counteracting.⁴²⁵ A coordinated scaling of the City’s investment to this level over the next several years would help prepare the providers for the commensurate levels of operations and expectations. Absent this additional investment, providers will remain effectively locked in a cycle of triaging geographically-limited, reactionary responses to what can and should be a more comprehensive, proactive citywide response to decoupling conflict from crime.

Infrastructure Investments

Service providers face notable administrative and programmatic challenges related to systemic, long-standing deficiencies in infrastructure investment. These include overworked and under-compensated office staff, irregular continuing education activity, nominal capacity to recognize significant volunteer contributions, tenancy insecurity, and unfunded awareness-raising budgets, to name a few. The existence of these is fueled, in part, by the starvation cycle⁴²⁶ endemic in the nonprofit sector, and exacerbated by providers’ labor-intensive service reality.⁴²⁷ Still, funder-initiated and -encouraged efforts that work to remediate these conditions through support of infrastructure and core missions can extend providers’ preventative and broader social impacts.⁴²⁸

Responsive Contracting

Each of the service providers is significantly reliant upon the timely registration and execution of their contracts with the City. At a minimum, delayed contract registration and payments present the prospects of last- minute adjustments to staff assignments and program implementation timelines, both of which affect providers’ ability to achieve service milestones. More damaging, though, is the financial hardship these delays create, hardships that challenge not only the related services, but also staff morale and the organizations’ overall fiscal viabilities. As such, greater attention to prompt contracting practices is essential to providers' performance and in line with recommendations from numerous other observers.⁴²⁹ MOCJ should work to provide contractors with more timely and reliable contract processing and payment experiences.

Action Items

2.1 Develop a Roadmap for Enhanced Funding. Develop a funding roadmap, to begin during the 2017-2018 fiscal year, that increases MOCJ’s citywide allocation of prevention- oriented mediation and related services to $4.5 to $5.0 million annually. This funding should specifically emphasize NYPD and DOE-involved collaborations, significantly increase the provision of conflict skills trainings, address providers’ key infrastructure needs, and otherwise reflect the recommendations and action items presented here and in the following programmatic recommendations.

2.2 Confirm Key Infrastructure Needs. Work with service providers to identify any infrastructure needs not already identified here.

2.3 Prompt Contracting & Contingencies. Collaboratively explore with service providers options that minimize the fiscal hardships from delayed contract registrations, including possible provisional payments, earlier RFP releases, and an established schedule of contract status updates for those experiencing a delay, among others.

2.4 Customizable Contracts. Continue the practice of establishing contracting models and specific service rates using individual provider-identified estimates and intervention-relevant progress metrics rather than a one-rate-fits-all approach.⁴³⁰

2.5 Future Evaluation Investments. Invest in further service evaluations to quantify providers’ specific preventative impacts and inform future resource development and deployment efforts.⁴³¹

3. Lend Institutional Support

MOCJ should leverage its influence to formalize referral, training, and other helpful relationships between service providers and City agencies.

Rationale

Service providers have had uneven success in establishing relationships with City agencies that are key to achieving their preventative potential. Their difficulties stem from a combination of limited staff resources, limited institutional influence, limited recourse to address partners’ abandoned or poorly administered agreements, and embedded institutional norms resistant to restorative reorientation.⁴³²

Absent or inefficient referral relationships minimize service providers’ effectiveness, unnecessarily place forfeited service recipients at further potential for harm or criminogenic risk, and detract from broader prevention campaigns. Indeed, the current trickle-flow rate of cases referred by City agencies barely wets providers’ referral pipelines.⁴³³

Given the importance of contributions by providers to the City’s prevention efforts, MOCJ’s active advocacy in establishing meaningful access to and partnerships with key City agencies is central to ensuring service providers achieve their preventative potential. Most centrally, this includes greater access to MOCJ’s own senior staff to help ensure policy-priority alignment and to affirm the depth and strength of the evolving MOCJ/provider partnerships. Leveraging MOCJ’s influence in other institutional contexts, as recommended in the following action items, would also help strengthen providers’ performance and enhance their overall organizational stability.

Action Items

3.1 MOCJ’s Senior Staff Connections. Design opportunities for senior MOCJ staff to observe and interact with service providers and their programming.

3.2 MOCJ’s ADR-Related Portfolio. Work to ensure an internally coordinated approach to MOCJ’s suite of mediation, dispute resolution, and related programming such that unproductive redundancies and the uncoordinated delivery of aligned services are minimized. This could be achieved through the establishment of a Director of ADR services position within MOCJ, an active working group, or other coordinating response.

3.3 NYCHA Development-Level Contacts. Work with NYCHA leadership to normalize relations between development-level management and service providers, including an acceptance of service providers’ active, onsite presence, as well as the institutionalization of case referral processes.

3.4 Inclusion in Prosecutorial Negotiations. Work with Prosecutors’ Offices to encourage greater utilization of local service providers’ interventions in misdemeanor adjournments in contemplation of dismissal (ACDs), probation-probable misdemeanor offenses, and other negotiated dispositions.

3.5 Rejected Summons Alternatives. Work with leadership from the Citywide Summons Operation to include information on the availability of service providers’ conflict coaching and other conflict-assistive services, alongside rejection/dismissal notices for summonses that fail to survive defect or facial sufficiency reviews.

3.6 Visible City Endorsement. Work with service providers to design a “MOCJ Supported Service” or similar designation that providers could display on their outreach materials to help elevate public awareness and utilization of facilitated interventions prior to requiring criminal referral.

3.7 MTA Public Service Announcement. Work with service providers to design and fund an MTA public service announcement to raise awareness of the availability and desirability of early lifecycle utilization of conflict-assistive services, targeting data- identified locations with high rates of conflict- attributable criminal activity.

3.8 MOCJ-Surfaced Partnership Opportunities. Actively encourage partnerships between service providers and other MOCJ-supported initiatives where providers’ conflict-related criminogenic risk reductions could help augment others’ efforts.

3.9 Support Provider/Partner Co-Locations. Work with City and court agencies to secure stable, sufficient operating spaces that allow service providers to co-locate in close proximity to key referral partners and/or client- frequented locales. In instances where displacement from such co-location threatens providers’ operational continuity or preventative capacity, actively advocate against such displacement.

3.10 Advocate for Interpreter Access. Work with City and court agencies to facilitate reliable access to language interpretation services for providers, as the lack of such services currently frustrates and has on occasion outright foreclosed on the opportunity for providers to meaningfully engage select at- risk and marginalized populations.

4. Refine Case & Client Targeting

MOCJ should adjust its scope of service recipients to include not only those already involved with the criminal justice system, but also those at risk of, directly or collaterally affected by, and otherwise influencing such involvement, and – as they relates to Catchment services – younger and development-proximal individuals.

Rationale

Motivated by a confluence of discord between MOCJ’s stated objectives, service providers’ practicing interpretations, and findings from the latest research, there exists an important opportunity concenter the three. Generally, the current targeting of service providers’ supported interventions should be clarified in ways that both expand their scope and sharpen their focus. Doing so can help further strengthen their prevention relevance and better address Catchment-specific needs, as outlined in the specific rationales and action items below.

Prevention Relevance

As a general rule, interventions of the greatest consequence are those that prevent a person from becoming criminally involved from the outset, rather than recidivism-oriented interventions that seek desistance or impact mitigation from previous or ongoing criminal activity.⁴³⁴ As such, service providers should be supported for their work that either suppresses recidivism or addresses known conflict-relevant criminogenic risk factors.

Inclusions in an expanded definition of supportable prevention-relevant interventions should acknowledge services to the following categories of individuals: (1) criminally- involved individuals, (2) criminogenically vulnerable individuals, and (3) criminogenically influential individuals. Specifically, conflict interventions should target:

Criminally-Involved Individuals:

1. Individuals with any recent or intervention-relevant police contact;
2. Individuals with prior criminal convictions; and
3. Individuals who self-report or otherwise reveal criminal involvement.

Criminogenically Vulnerable Individuals:

1. Victims of known or self-reported physical or emotional harm;
2. Individuals who have perpetrated known or self-reported emotional or physical harm;
3. Individuals who self-report below average communication, problem solving, or social skills;
4. Individuals who self-report above average antisocial, impulsive, or risk-taking behaviors;
5. Individuals who self-report a strong identity with deviant/antisocial beliefs or attitudes;
6. Individuals who self-report a lack of extra-familial prosocial models;
7. Close friends of criminally-involved peers;
8. Individuals exposed to violence or racial prejudice;
9. Youth who are identified or self-report as having low academic performance;
10. Youth who are identified or self-report as engaging in truancy;
11. Youth subjected to exclusionary or punitive school discipline;
12. Individuals who have exited formal education prematurely;
13. Individuals residing in low socioeconomic status, high crime, or otherwise distressed communities;
14. Youth and young adults (up to age 24) who reside in high-conflict households; and
15. Children to or siblings of criminally- involved parents/siblings.

Criminogenically Influential Individuals:

1. High-conflict parents or siblings who reside with youth; and
2. Parents who self-report below average communication skills, or child involvement/monitoring practices.

Self-reports or revelations of any of the above relevant categories can (1) occur at any time during the intervention, including initial intake, case processing, service delivery, or follow-up; (2) originate from any service participant, including the direct service recipient, included support individuals, or referral source; and (3) be either uniformly affirmed or unilaterally alleged. Service providers should work to ensure their case management procedures are able to consistently identify, record, and appropriately report any of these potential connections to prevention relevance.

Catchment Area Modifications

The Catchment Areas’ age-based focus on youth and young adults ages 16 to 24 is set restrictively too high to maximally leverage service providers’ early lifecycle impact, and is limiting providers’ ability to serve some who are otherwise positioned to benefit from the current interventions. In contrast, the lack of specificity as to Catchment Area service recipients’ residency requirements is producing troublingly inconsistent interpretations by service providers. For example, residency has been variously interpreted as (arranged in descending order of connectedness): (1) those with official residency in relevant NYCHA housing developments;⁴³⁵ (2) those who un/officially reside in or have close family members and/or friends who reside in relevant NYCHA housing developments; (3) those who un/officially reside in or have an intervention- relevant familial, social, and/or professional connection to relevant NYCHA housing developments or their immediate surrounding geographies; and (4) those who un/officially reside in or are otherwise co-located within Zip Codes shared with relevant NYCHA housing developments. These divergent interpretations are (1) challenging providers’ ability to achieve service milestones, particularly if only high connectedness definitions are ultimately required; (2) producing dissimilar service populations across Catchment Area initiatives; and (3) confounding future cross-Catchment impact assessments.

Action Items

4.1 Recognizing Vulnerable/Influential Clients. Augment the current criminal case coding system to recognize services provided to criminally involved and criminogenically vulnerable/influential individuals, as noted above.

4.2 Lowering the Targeted Client Age. Adjust the current service guidelines to both encourage and recognize the provision of prevention-relevant services to clients as young as 10 years of age.

4.3 Clarifying Client Residency Requirements. Clarify the client residency qualification for services provided through Catchment Area contracts to require a development-proximal relationship (i.e. #3 in the list of possible interpretations).