This article was originally featured by the Florida Bar.
In Miami, the Miami-Dade County (MDC) State Attorney’s Office (SAO) and the 34 local police departments have a close working relationship. Together, we have helped reduce the crime rate by almost 70% in the last 30 years. We have achieved these great results by treating offenders as individuals and addressing them according to the severity of their misconduct and criminogenic needs, a method we refer to as Smart Justice.
As a part of our strategy, we developed and implemented a civil citations program in 2007 that allows officers to cite juveniles who commit low-level misdemeanors in lieu of arresting them. MDC police departments have successfully cited instead of arresting over twenty-one thousand (21,000) youth since the program’s inception. In this article, we discuss the program’s use and how it has helped us drive down the crime rate while saving significant resources.