By ERIK HANSEN
A recent call to 911 alerted South Precinct officers to a domestic violence incident erupting in an apartment complex near Rainier Beach High School. After a brief look into the players behind the disturbance, officers discovered the primary suspect was under the supervision of the Washington State Department of Corrections (DOC). As a result, Officer Steve Kaffer and community corrections specialist (commonly referred to as a parole officer) Rocky Bronkhorst arrived on the scene as a team.
With Kaffer observing, Bronkhorst questioned the suspect and confirmed that he was "active DOC." With the domestic violence call in mind, Bronkhorst gave Kaffer the go ahead to investigate the suspect and see whether or not he was in violation of the terms of his parole. Sweeping through the apartment, Kaffer discovered automatic weapons, a cache of drugs, and a couple of other convicted felons doing dope. The suspect and his buddies were arrested.
This police action would not have been possible before September 21, 2004. On this date the SPD's South Precinct acted on a memorandum from Mayor Greg Nickel's office and launched a dynamic phase of cooperation with the DOC. Within city hall and Seattle's five police precincts the SPD and DOC partnerships, exemplified by Kaffer and Bronkhorst, are known as Neighborhood Corrections Initiative Teams (NCI).
The pairing allows officers the ability to more effectively supervise DOC clients residing in the city, all convicted felons according to Bronkhorst. NCI teams are proactive and are often able to intervene in a client's behavior before crimes occur.
"In my 33 years [on the force] I don't think I've seen a more productive use of officers," South Precinct Captain Tom Byers asserted. "Their main target is the DOC offenders that are out there in the community, but they're also proactively patrolling the hotspots. This team can target the ones that are plaguing the community in ways that patrol officers can't always do. They're getting the ones that are really causing all the havoc out there."
Flipping through the week's police report log at the South Precinct gives Byers' words credence. Most weeks the South End's officers file arrest reports detailing police actions going down at some of the most crime ridden areas in the South End. They're known by their cross streets. Rainier Avenue South and South Othello Street, Rainier Avenue South and South Cloverdale Street, and Rainier Avenue South and South Henderson Street are currently at the top of the thug-thick hotspot list Byers and his Southeast Seattle officers keep.
Many of the reports for these hotspots reveal, through their redacted and mildly censored pages, former felons under DOC supervision getting popped by the police for mild to serious violations of their probationary agreements. When it comes to these South End locations, this seems to be as common as bald eagle sightings in Seward Park.
"The state has spent a lot of money on a lot of training and equipment. This has become a nationally acclaimed program, Bronkhorst asserted. "Different corrections agencies throughout the states are looking at this unbelievable partnership that's developed between corrections and the city of Seattle."
A bottom-to-top idea
While the NCI partnerships may seem incredible in their current form, they had an innocuous and organic beginning in Seattle's West Precinct nearly 10 years ago. Back then a small, patrol-officer level experiment in Pioneer Square hatched a harmonious relationship between the SPD and the DOC. According to Bronkhorst, several DOC officers became involved with a community-business policing action in the historic, and notoriously troublesome, downtown Seattle district. In a move to improve their efficiency rates when enacting the policing-action, Bronkhorst noted that SPD officer Vic Moyers teamed up with DOC officers Scott Sappiro and Frank Martinez.
"We started interacting, and that's how it happened: an organic move," said Bronkhorst, who has worked in Seattle's DOC for the past 10 years.
The South Precinct's second in command, Lieutenant James Koutsky, likens the grassroots cultivation of the current partnership between the SPD and the DOC with the rise of bicycle patrols.
"The bike patrol unit was started out by some officers who really liked this idea back in the 1980s," Koutsky said. "There wasn't a lot of departmental support, and now you have a department that fully funds bike units throughout the city of Seattle."
While this move may have been organic and localized to a small area, it reflected a philosophy shift rippling trough the DOC. At the time, the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) governed DOC workers, who were mainly performing a lot of social work in the field. Bronkhorst asserted this approach changed drastically in the in the mid-1990's with a reorganization that placed the DOC under the umbrella of the state's prison and community correction's system.
"There's been a change of philosophy that's made [our work] much more interactive with the officers," asserted Bronkhorst. "It's really a win-win for law enforcement and corrections folks, but it's a big win for the community."
Now, Bronkhorst claims the DOC operates under the power of two different modus operandi: the traditional social-worker-in-the-community approach, and the more aggressive law enforcement team approach. However, like a pendulum arcing through the air, both Bronkhorst and Kaffer feel the DOC is continuing to move away from the social-work driven interaction with its clients.
"Because of this program, I think the swing is going to continue because it is so effective," Kaffer stated.
A program in action
Street-level action within the NCI teams begins with DOC officers assigned to specific SPD units. The resulting team member familiarity ensures the NCI unit's productivity when out on patrol will remain high after a call comes in to a DOC officer concerning a specific client who they suspect is up to no good.
When such a call comes in, the DOC officers meet up with their SPD team members and go find their probationer to see what they're doing. With the officer observing the DOC officer's contact with the client, an immediate arrest is possible in case probationary infractions are discovered.
"These people are convicted felony offenders. They've done some time," reminded Kaffer. "The unfortunate thing about our penal system is that prisons are not set up to rehabilitate people."
Both Kaffer and Bronkhorst concede that recidivism is extremely high for past offenders settling back into their communities. However, the officers assert, with their newly-forged state of cooperation past offenders can be watched more closely and given immediate consequences if their actions break the conditions of their parole.
Kaffer states there are times, especially when the offense is related to illegal drugs, that DOC offenders caught in the traditional manner (actively selling dope) can be in and out of jail within a day, in some cases. However, with an NCI team on the job, officers have the potential of nipping a criminal problem in the proverbial bud. With Bronkhorst estimating the numbers of active DOC people in the South End alone to hover at around 500 people,
For example, if a probationer misses a meeting with his DOC officer at 9 a.m., the NCI team hears about it immediately, goes looking for the offender, often finds him or her within the afternoon, and directly questions and confronts them about their behavior. If it's dubious in anyway, they're often immediately warned, given a curfew, or escorted back to jail.
"What's really great about this system is that these DOC offenders that are on active probation and active parole now have accountability," Bronkhorst asserted. "Before, their accountability was such that it took three or four months of messing up before a warrant is placed on them. Then, it may take six, eight, 10, 12, or 24 months before they're ever picked up."
Finding such folks can still be a challenge, even with Bronkhorst's 15 years of cumulative experience at the DOC and Kaffer's 19 years with the SPD. Because of this, the NCI teams not only respond to calls and patrol hotspots, but they also target the homes of warrant suspects, between three and seven a day according to Kaffer.
"It used to be, at Rainier and Othello, the police would show up and you'd here guys yelling, 'po-po, po-po!'" Kaffer observed. "Now, if they see us in the [unmarked white] van, they start screaming 'DOC.' It's a different fear now."[[In-content Ad]]
