Community Collaboration

Office of the State Attorney of the Fourth Judicial Circuit (Jacksonville, FL)

Population: 1,265,632 | Number of Full-Time Prosecutors: 110 | Contact Information

The Fourth Judicial Circuit State Attorney’s Office (SAO) is using a multifaceted approach to combat increased gang violence. Under an Innovative Prosecution Solutions grant, the SAO is strengthening its Targeted Prosecution Unit to promote evidence-based prosecution and develop a strategic plan to address gang violence through prevention, intervention, and correction.

Veteran prosecutors work closely with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office’s Gang Unit to build investigations of high-risk arrestees and defendants, develop more centralized criminal intelligence about group-based criminal enterprises, and create an arrest alert system to ensure that prosecutors are notified in a timely manner about high-risk offenders. The SAO also planned for robust community engagement by deploying community prosecutors to crime impacted neighborhoods to strengthen relationships between law enforcement and community members. Partnering with researchers at Florida International University (FIU), the SAO is also developing performance indicators that can be used to improve crime prevention and prosecution strategies, improve internal and external communication, train attorneys to utilize data in evidence-based prosecutorial decision making, and convert its case management system into an analytic tool for precision prosecution and community engagement efforts