Law Enforcement Organization Relationships with Prosecutors

Abstract

Although police departments and prosecutor’s offices must closely collaborate, their organizational roles and networks, and the distinctive perspectives of their personnel, will inevitably and regularly lead to forceful dialogue and disruptive friction. Such friction can occasionally undermine thoughtful deliberation about public safety, the rule of law, and community values. Viewed more broadly, however, these interactions promote just such deliberation, which will become even healthier when the dialogue breaks out of the closed world of criminal justice bureaucracies and includes the public to which these bureaucracies are ultimately responsible. This chapter explores such organizational interactions and their value.

Racial-Ethnic Disparities in Police and Prosecutorial Drug Charging: Analyzing Organizational Overlap in Charging Patterns at Arrest, Filing, and Conviction

“…Changes to sentencing policies, including three strikes, mandatory minimums, and sentencing guidelines, have shifted discretion in punishment towards prosecutorial charging (Spohn 2009). With police having the power to arrest and present discretionary charges (Phillips and Varano 2008), and prosecutors acting as “gatekeepers for all criminal charges,” these two front-end court actors have organizationally distinct yet mutually reinforcing powers and roles (Richman 2021:293). The drug war also increased punitiveness in criminal justice on the front end of the system, including proactive policing, assembly-line justice plea-bargaining, and other “hard bargaining” prosecutorial tactics (Lynch 2012; Lynch and Omori 2018).…”

“…In Miami Dade County, understanding charging across early stages (i.e., arrest and filing) is particularly important because police and prosecutors have a pre-filing conference during the filing stage of a court case. Such pre-file conferences may be particularly important in shaping the trajectory of drug cases, where police-prosecutor collaborations are typically stronger due to the increased reliance on police as witnesses (Bibas 2004; Miller 2013; Richman 2021). Additionally, research on cumulative disadvantage suggests that racial disparities early in the court system compound over many discretionary points (Kutateladze et al 2014; Spohn 2008; Sutton 2013), and that there are substantial downstream impacts of early court processing decisions (Owens, Kerrison, and Santos Da Silveira 2017; Ulmer, Painter-Davis, and Tinik 2016).…”

“…Despite the more recent attention given to charging practices by prosecutors (Barno and Lynch 2021; Davis 2019; Wright, Levine, and Gold 2021), few studies have focused on the role of the police in initial charging at arrest (Phillips and Varano 2008; Richman 2021). Police determine the initial charges on the arrest report (Braun, Rosenthal, and Therrian 2018; Phillips and Varano 2008), which are then reviewed by prosecutors in case screening and formal charge filing (Johnson and Larroulet 2019; Richman 2021; Worrall, Ross, and McCord 2006). In this way, police also have considerable discretion in their decision-making processes, acting as key decision-makers of front-end charging decisions by establishing charge severity levels that impact downstream case outcomes (Phillips and Varano 2008).…”

“…Prosecutors act as gatekeepers for criminal charges brought to them by police, and have the decision to modify these charges and to accept or decline the case, working in consultation with the police (Richman 2021). Because of the disproportionate arrest and conviction rates for people of color, particularly for drug crimes (Alexander 2012; Beckett et al 2005; Beckett, Nyrop, and Pfingst 2006; Nellis 2021), prosecutors can use their discretion to ameliorate or perpetuate these front-end racial disparities – described by Davis (2019) as “progressive prosecutors.” Prosecutors can, therefore, use their discretionary power to “correct” for racially disproportionate arrest charges by acting as progressive prosecutors, or act in a “race-neutral” fashion by simply “inheriting” prior racial disparities when making charging decisions (Barno and Lynch 2021; Davis 1998, 2007, 2019; Richman 2021).…”

“…Charging practices in drug cases may be of particular importance to understanding racial and ethnic inequalities not only because drug crimes tend to be proactively policed in neighborhoods of color (Beckett et al 2006; Lynch 2012), but police also have wide discretion in charging in these cases (Braun et al 2018). Depending on the case characteristics and jurisdictional norms, police can play a key role in the prosecution of drug crimes relative to other offenses since police often serve as key witnesses and produce evidence in such cases (Hodson 2018; Richman 2021), including in Miami. In Miami, police may be further incentivized to cooperate with prosecutors because they are paid overtime to testify in court for felony cases (Epstein, Leen, and Getter 2014).…”