A chalkboard in the front of the courtroom has a handwritten message on it. "One step in the right direction: Being HERE."
There are plenty of reasons this isn't your typical courtroom. There's no judge's bench or jury box. There are more than a dozen service providers next door and a physician down the hall. It's also inside an event room at downtown Spokane's Central Library. But every Monday at 10 am, the space is transformed into an extension of the courthouse.
This is Community Court, one of the five therapeutic courts under the larger umbrella of Spokane Municipal Court. It was founded in 2013 by a group of public defenders and city prosecutors, as well as Judge Mary C. Logan and Dr. Darin Neven. They're focused on getting offenders in treatment instead of jail and providing individualized care instead of cookie cutter sentences.
Spokane's Community Court has been nationally recognized by the Center for Justice Innovation as a "mentor" community court — an example to other similar courts due to its unique setting and artful balance of care and accountability. It looked different during COVID-era restrictions, but restarted in October 2022.
Community Court handles nonviolent or "quality of life" offenses like public camping, trespassing, pedestrian interference, theft, vandalism, illicit substance possession, or sit and lie violations in the downtown core. These lower-level crimes have generated some of the loudest outcry from downtown residents and business owners, who have asked police for more arrests.
In January, there were 117 pedestrian interference citations — tickets given to people standing or sitting on the sidewalk for interfering with normal walking patterns — and 85 arrests for unlawful camping. That's up from last January, when there were 27 pedestrian interference citations and three camping arrests.
With more tickets and arrests, it's up to the court system to decide what to do next.
"We need community understanding," says Francis Adewale, one of Community Court's founding public defenders and the president-elect for the Washington State Bar Association. "This is not an easy fix."
Community Court serves about 100 people every week, says Sarah Thompson, the city's therapeutic court coordinator.
Many of the people sent to Community Court are homeless, so one of the court's main goals is to get people ready for housing. But that won't have a huge effect, she says, until people have somewhere to go.
"There is not adequate housing that this population needs," Adewale agrees.
Community Court is funded by the state's Administrative Office of the Courts. It doesn't receive any money from the city, apart from help paying for a few extra security guards.
Even though Community Court's goals overlap with those of the community safety sales tax that city voters passed in November, those new tax dollars won't go to this court.
(The approximately $2 million designated to the Municipal Court over the next two years from the new 0.1% sales tax will fund 11 positions with Community Justice Services, an innovative pretrial and case management service that you can read more about at Inlander.com.)
Here's what it's like navigating Spokane's Community Court as it tries to combat crime and homelessness to improve everyone's quality of life.
FIRST STEPS
At 10 am, the doors open.
Participants check in with a security guard just inside the downtown library's north entrance. They can put their belongings behind the guard's table and get a claim ticket to retrieve them once the morning is over.
Then, they head into event room A to meet with social workers and complete a risk/needs assessment.
It's called the criminal court assessment tool, or CCAT. It measures factors associated with recidivism, including criminal history, antisocial temperament, peer networks, education, family problems and substance abuse.
"Therapeutic courts [mean] treating each individual as a person, not as a case, and meeting them where they're at," Thompson says. "You want to address all those needs to help the person become better."
FINDING COMMON GROUND
"Hey, what's up, brother?" Adewale says to a new client as he invites him up to the white folding table where all three public defenders are standing.
Adewale, Rick Wallis and Jen Pence rarely sit. The public defenders are constantly moving between event rooms A and B in the library to collaborate with the CCAT administrators. The assessment tool is crucial to the public defenders, who take all those factors into account when suggesting a course of action to the city prosecutor and eventually Judge Logan.
"We want to get to the root cause of 'Why?'" Adewale says — why did someone commit a crime? Why might they do it again? What kind of treatment would be most likely to keep them from doing it again?
While Adewale, Wallis and Pence talk with participants, city prosecutor David Kling is reviewing all documented charges. As prosecutor, he's responsible for representing the city's commitment to public safety and accountability. When they're ready, the defender and prosecutor try to agree on a reasonable set of consequences to suggest to the judge.
JUDGMENT
Most people are heads and shoulders taller than Logan. But the judge's presence, authority and compassion make a big impression when she enters even a makeshift courtroom.
Standing before her, attorneys present their suggestions for how each case should move forward. The judge isn't required to adhere to them. Although she relies on the attorneys and usually agrees with their suggestions, she often asks the participant if there's anything they'd like to add about their situation before she makes a final decision.
When she does make a judgment, it's called a "stipulated order of continuance" — that is, a set of rules that the person must adhere to for a certain length of time. If the participant complies perfectly, they will have their case dismissed once the determined time is up.
Logan calls a man cited for possession of illicit substances over to the end of her "bench." She's just made a decision about his case. The first thing he has to do is attend Community Court every week for 12 months, the typical length of time for that charge.
"We really do expect you to come every Monday. There's a whole accountability piece," she tells him.
Every Community Court participant has to come every week, or give an acceptable reason to be excused that week. Other common stipulations include not committing the same crime again or racking up any other citations. Anyone out of compliance or not attending Community Court as ordered usually gets their case moved up to Municipal Court, where jail is a more common sentence.
In this man's case, the judge makes other stipulations based on his CCAT. She notices that he needs employment. She points behind her and mentions New Leaf Cafe, a coffee shop in the library that does job training and employs homeless or recently homeless people.
Sometimes, Logan might assign community service. When she does, there are orange reflective vests in the back of the courtroom that participants can put on to immediately go out and serve with Downtown Spokane Partnership's Clean Team. But on this Monday in early February, the morning temperature is in the single digits, and it's too cold to send people outside.
'KEEP IT UP'
The courtroom isn't just for judgments. Sam Farrell gets a chocolate bar and a round of applause from the room as Logan congratulates him on his exemplary compliance with her stipulations and his new apartment at the Catalyst on Sunset Hill."How does that feel?" the judge asks Farrell.
The strangest transition for him, he says, is the constant supply and access to hot water. Farrell was cited for illegal camping when he was living in what he calls a "small tent city" near the Fish Lake Trail.
Sometimes he'd have to walk miles to use a real bathroom or wash his hands. Sometimes he'd carry 5 gallons of water back to his community just to help his friends out. Having a bathroom attached to where he sleeps is jarring, he says, and as grateful as he is, it also smacks of losing the friends he used to take care of.
"I appreciate the hard effort you had to put in to get here," Logan says after listening to Farrell for at least five minutes. "You're working really hard. Keep it up." She fist bumps him before he sits back down.
Zarin Price also gets public affirmation and a goodie bag. After his satisfactory compliance with stipulations, his case is now closed without prejudice, which means it could be brought forward again if necessary.
Price was cited for trespassing after he hopped a fence to get to an outdoor outlet to charge his phone. He feels like the court gave him a blank slate, which is something he doesn't take for granted.
"I've suffered deeply, but I'm on the mend," Price says. "It's a heart level issue. People make poor decisions because there's something going on in the heart. There's only one person that can resolve that."
'VITAMIN C'
Some needs require a medical doctor. That's where Neven comes in. Neven is a physician, founding member of Community Court and president of Consistent Care, an organization that uses complex case management techniques to decrease emergency room usage.
"Treatment has to be assertive," Neven says, meaning treatment has to be taken to the people who need it and be made available immediately.
Neven is available for medical assessments of Community Court participants, plus some immediate treatments. He can inject long-lasting anti-psychotic drugs. He can get people booked into addiction treatment the same day they're willing to go. It's important to get people into treatment immediately, since many can't plan for tomorrow, he says.
Treatment, just like community court, is completely voluntary. About two-thirds of people actually want help from him, he says.
"Our scarcest natural resource is cooperation," he says. "We call it Vitamin C."
NEXT STEPS
Participants typically end Community Court where they started it — in event room A, surrounded by service providers who want to help them, figuring out what else they might need to succeed.
In one corner, a representative from Pioneer Human Services is calling a shelter asking about bed availability. On the walls, there are advertisements for the ID fest coming to the library soon to help people get identification. As people head out for the afternoon, everyone gets a sack lunch provided by the congregation at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic cathedral.
"This is what community looks like," director Thompson says.
Adewale measures success not by cases dropped or reduced recidivism rates, but by how many people the court can keep out of jail for six months. The court is very successful at that, he says.
"People want us to be the program that cleans the streets," he says. "The only measure of success that the business community wants is 'there's no homeless downtown.' [In America,] we invest in reaction to crisis. We don't purposely invest in prevention programs that can guide people away from crisis. That's the challenge."
Farrell is headed back to his new home at Catholic Charities' Catalyst. But while he is downtown, he'll hand out portable power banks to people he knows on the street, since he now has an easy place to charge his own phone.
His apartment is supposed to be transitional housing, he says. But he knows people who have been staying there for 16 months because there's nowhere for them to transition to.
"The challenges the city is facing cannot be solved by the city alone," Adewale says. He thinks the state needs to do more to encourage more affordable housing options.
But for now, Community Court is working with what they have — each other.
"I think this is probably the best chance to do what everybody wants — public safety, accountability, and getting people connected with services," Kling says. "But it's not something that happens overnight." ♦
