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Ralph C. Martin
Suffolk County District Attorney

There's a broader context to a crime beyond the individual victim and defendant. That when a crime occurs, it often affects people on that street, it often affects people in that 4-square-block area, sometimes it affects an entire neighborhood, and on occasion the entire city. So if you recognize that broader context, the question is: How do you help restore order while you're prosecuting the crime and how do you prevent it from happening again?

Another way the influence is important is through the work we do at the schools, where we try to identify the hard-core offenders and prosecute them when necessary, but more and more of our time is spent actually identifying kids who are truants, who have substance abuse problems, and we've actually mainstreamed kids that would have originally been written off as failures. We got them back into school, we got them into alternative education programs when there was family dysfunction that was evident. We–and when I say "we" I mean collectively, the DA's office, the Police Dept., the DSS–have been able to save these kids because we're talking about kids before their problems get too far gone. No one requires us to do this, but we do it because it really is the right thing to do, when you think about it; it's very efficient, when you think about it.

Ultimately, part of the prescription for our success was that the community was willing to give us time to show success. They didn't demand overnight success. They didn't demand the turnabout in a week or a month or even six months. So many of the strategies that we've used have really shown success after a year or more, and once you have success, then it's easier to get other people to buy into it.

There are a lot of people in our office who are very vigorous prosecutors in the courtroom but they may also lead a roundtable at a high school or a middle school where we identify kids that need to be prosecuted and kids that need help. Or they may prosecute cases in the courtroom but teach ethics in the middle school, or a fifth grade class. Or they may do some other community-based activity that we think is consistent with our mission, which is not only locking up the bad guys, but it's also restoring order. And what you find is that people get energized by diversity, by diversity of responsibility. And they don't necessarily feel like they're being asked to wield an unfair burden or a disproportionate share. They become energized by the results they see. Just like if you get energized when you win a good verdict in front of a jury, you're also energized when you encounter the public in a way that's different from your traditional way of encountering the public, which is dealing with victims and witnesses who often have no other place to turn to. But in the case of working in the schools, you're encountering kids who make you remember in very resounding ways why we do what we do.

Most kids-–when I say 'kids' I mean teenagers and young adults–are not hard-core criminals. They're opportunistic and they're followers and if given a viable choice most kids will decide to do something more productive. And a lot of kids don't have the choice, or perceive that they don't have the choice. So when we talk about at-risk kids, we're not talking about kids who are gun-toting and drug traffickers. We're talking about kids who perhaps don't have a stable home environment, or have had learning disabilities, or have had substance abuse problems, and they need remedial help and support and education and training. From my perspective, that's a good investment to make in a kid who's 16, 17, 18, 19, 20.

Over time things started to happen that we never would have predicted. For instance, businesses stopped closing in the area. And then not only did they stop closing, more businesses appeared. I think the statistics show that there's probably a 25-30% increase in the number of businesses. Home prices have not only stabilized, they've gone up. So other things, the synergies that we talk about, other things have occurred that no one actually planned or predicted.