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 Bernie Fitzgerald
Chief Probation Officer
Dorchester District Court
 Basically, I think the way we operated was ‘fortress probation’. We sat inside our building and the police fed the child into the system. They brought the arrests in, we took the people after they had been arrested, processed them, the judges formed a disposition and placed them on probation. So the jobs were entirely separate. We didn't talk to one another; basically it was two separate jobs. Police did their job, we did our job.
People gave up their turf. And that was unprecedented. Turf issues were always a big, big deal. I think everybody now realizes that we're all responsible for one another. There is a sense of community where there wasn't one before.
[The probationers] were coming in to report to us, to tell us that they were doing well and that they were going to school, or they were becoming gainfully employed, that they were complying with their curfews and their conditions of probation. That, in fact, wasn't true, but we were sitting behind a desk, we didn't know it wasn't true because we were not out on the street.
Now, by the same token, the police were in the courthouse every day, and the same police officers, the Gang Unit, who began to respond to these crimes of violence, they became a more familiar force. It was a force of younger officers who were very much involved with their work, who had begun to gather a database on these youthful gang members. We began to see them on a regular basis. And with familiarity we began to exchange information with them. They began to say, "Well, who's this guy's probation officer? Well, what are the conditions that he's supposed to be abiding by?"
And a probation officer might say, "Well, he has a 9:00 PM. curfew."
And they might say, "Well, we see him out in the street at 2, 3, 4 in the morning, popping crack cocaine, and that can't be in compliance with the conditions of probation."
"Well, it's good to know that, because we don't know that. When he reports to us, he tells us he's doing well."
And it became very clear to us that you couldn't do your job, either of us, by sitting inside the building.
The probation officers who asked for permission to ride with the police, who came to me, were all veterans, but not old veterans, they were young veterans. They had been here 4, 5, 6 years. They had a real familiarity with the population with whom they were dealing. They had been out during the day, they had a sense of the neighborhoods, they had a sense of who was hanging around with whom. They exchanged a lot of information in the corridors of the courthouse with the police officers from the Gang Unit. So there was a little bit of a relationship built up between the probation officers and the police officers. When they both came forward with the idea (beginning home visits to probationers), it just sounded like the right thing to do. Nothing else we were doing was working at the time. So nothing ventured, nothing gained. We had to give it a shot.
It had very little to do with us as supervisors. It had to do with [the people] on the bottom who saw a need. The only thing we added to it was the ability to say yes, and I guess I said "yes". I mean, it wasn't a command decision. I made a decision based on a local problem and based on the staff that I had, and the partnerships that they had begun forming with the Gang Unit at the time. I got out of the way. I trusted those guys to do the work.
It was something that hadn't been done before with either Probation or with the Police Department. They said, "What if we went out and rode along with the police? What if we went out and just got a better picture, a snapshot of actually what is going on with our probationers after the hours of the court, after 4:30. Can we do that?"
And I said, "Well, if it's OK with the police, it's OK with me." I said, "You're going to get a lot of criticism for it, and people are going to start taking potshots at you for it, because they're going to say you're a wannabe policeman. But I think it's a good idea, why don't you do it." (Beginning of Operation Night Light).
I don't think we'll ever go back to the way we did business. We're now almost compelled to be out in the community doing the supervision where it belongs -- in the community. And to use the community as much as possible to do that supervision with us. We're trying to get to the point where we have neighborhood supervision for neighborhood offenders. Ultimately, that's who they're responsible to. Defendants who get arrested are responsible to the community against whom they offended. It's not just police and Probation. It's police and Probation and ministers and social workers and the shopkeeper and the guy that owns the corner store, it's everybody keeping an eye on him and it's also everybody offering him the services that he or she needs to stay out of trouble, and to ensure that they stay out of trouble.
When you're in this business, you see people at their absolute worst EVERY SINGLE DAY. What can happen over the years, knowing that, is you can get very cynical, and you can get very cold. You can get very hard. You can become very rigid. And what this program does, is that it revitalizes that sensitive part. It's what gives us hope.
The Fatherhood Program has offered an opportunity for us to see people who still have hope, and can still have hope, despite obstacles that WE probably couldn't get around. Just from the things that we learn from them in terms of how they speak about their family and how they speak about their own experiences has helped us to remain a little bit sensitive and not to become jaded and not to become cynical.
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Bernie Fitzgerald