CLINTON, Md. — Angela Alsobrooks hears first-person accounts from crime victims as she shuttles among community meetings, picnics and neighborhood gatherings.
There was the mother who said she was too frightened to drive at night after a BB gunshot shattered her car window as her child was strapped inside. And the woman who was scared of sleeping in her own home following an unnerving break-in attempt.
Alsobrooks says the anecdotes help underscore one of her chief priorities: community prosecution.
In her first eight months as state's attorney for Prince George's County, Alsobrooks has divided the more than two dozen prosecutors her the office's major crimes division into the county's six police districts. The prosecutors will handle cases specific to their geographic areas so that they can get more familiar with the police officers who patrol the area and the residents who live there.
She has also given more attention to a specialized community prosecution unit that looks at quality-of-life concerns, such as shuttering illegally operating nightclubs and crack houses, helping crime victims with social services and discouraging truancy.
"It allows us to build trust with the community," Alsobrooks said. "We encounter many of our community members in court as witnesses, as jurors, and I think it really helps us enhance the quality of our prosecutions when we develop relationships with them."
The goals are to forge bonds that deter county residents, particularly teenagers, from crime. She also wants neighborhood change that extends beyond arrests and convictions, and to encourage a perception of prosecutors as social workers, friends and even people who can help improve county services.
"You see me in court, you're going to at least listen to what I've got to say. For me, the urban outreach is phenomenal," said C.T. Wilson, chief of the community prosecution unit, who regularly spends weekend nights keeping tabs on problematic nightclubs.
He said the model turns on its head the skepticism of police and prosecutors. "We're not all bad guys. In fact we're defending you."
The community outreach could is needed in Prince George's County, which has been riddled with violent crime in 2011. There were 11 homicides in the first 13 days of the year. And last week, a 15-year-old boy was charged in the beating death of a 92-year-old neighbor in Forestville.
The effort is not easy, and there are occasional setbacks. County prosecutors who had successfully lobbied for a law that targeted violent nightclubs were working to implement the measure this month when a 20-year-old woman was fatally shot. Alsobrooks said the shooting hit her office hard; one prosecutor even left work early for the day.
Alsobrooks has been touring the county's police districts. Recently, she and a group of prosecutors took a van tour of District V, the largest and most rural of the county's patrol areas. She rode through neighborhoods dotted with boarded-up homes vulnerable to squatters, a strip club and troubled high schools. The experience benefited both police and the prosecutors, who can develop a familiarity with the problems, said Major Jason Bogue, the district's acting commander.
"We have to work hand-in-hand. Obviously for the most part, most of the time, the police department starts a criminal case for the state," Bogue said.
Elsie Jacobs, president of the Suitland Action Team, said Alsobrooks makes her presence felt at community meetings. She said the office, for instance, agreed to send letters to parents of children who have multiple unexcused absences from school. It was an important symbolic gesture, she said.
"We know nobody's going to be prosecuted and nothing like that," she said. "But we've got to have some kind of something to get people's attention about their children being in school."
Community prosecution had started before Alsobrooks took office, but Wilson said before he was essentially working on his own. The number of prosecutors devoted to community prosecution has grown under Alsobrooks, as has the overall commitment.
"When she speaks, her voice carries. When I speak, it's a request: 'Hey guys, can we, if you could?'" Wilson said. "When she speaks, it's not really a request."