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Local Public Safety Coordinating Councils

Overview

Well-functioning criminal justice coordinating councils can be vitally important resources for local governments as they seek to fulfill their mandates to assure public safety and fair treatment of all, while coping with reduced budgets. The councils can provide a forum for identifying issues and, depending on their structure and role in county or city government, can be instrumental in setting priorities, allocating resources, and planning to address key systemic issues.

– Improving Criminal Justice System Planning and Operations: Challenges for Local Governments and Criminal Justice Coordinating Councils


In 1995, Senate Bill 1145 required every county to convene a Local Public Safety Coordinating Council (LPSCC). While LPSCCs across the state engage in a variety of activities to improve system-wide communication and collaboration, their primary purpose is to:
  • Coordinate local criminal justice policy and planning;
  • Make recommendations to the county board of commissioners regarding the use of state and county resources to supervise local offenders;
  • And since 2014, develop and approve their county’s Justice Reinvestment Grant program.
In order to engage in high-level policy planning and decision-making, LPSCC membership must include key local public safety system partners:
  • Police Chief
  • Sheriff
  • District Attorney
  • State Court Judge
  • Public Defender
  • Director of Community Corrections
  • County Commissioner
  • Juvenile Department Director
  • Health Director
  • Citizen
  • City Councilor or Mayor
  • Oregon State Police representative
  • And Oregon Youth Authority representative.

“Improved planning and coordination help individual justice agencies become more efficient, productive, and effective. Such improvements also help officials of general government such as the city mayor, board of supervisors, and county commissioners evaluate and make decisions about the justice system and its cost and performance. Many local governments also are finding that comprehensive system wide planning (interagency and cross-jurisdictional) helps to streamline the entire local system of justice, eliminating duplication, filling service gaps, and generally improving the quality of service while controlling costs.”

– Guidelines for Developing a Criminal Justice Coordinating Committee

Resources

“Research and experience have produced a “collective wisdom” about how to create, staff, evaluate, and rejuvenate Criminal Justice Coordinating Committees.”

– Guidelines for Developing a Criminal Justice Coordinating Committee


Guidelines for Staffing a Local Criminal Justice Coordinating Committee

Michael R. Jones | National Institute of Corrections

“The guide will help the elected and appointed officials of general government and the executives of local justice systems from jurisdictions of all sizes create or strengthen the staffing support of their local CJCC, which in turn strengthens the effectiveness of the CJCC itself. The guide is especially useful for CJCC members who want data, analyses, and information to inform their agency-level and systemic policy decisions and programs as they work toward a more evidence-based and cost-effective local justice system.”

Improving Criminal Justice System Planning and Operations: Challenges for Local Governments and Criminal Justice Coordinating Councils

M. Elaine Nugent-Borakove and Marea Beeman | The Justice Management Institute

“This paper draws on Cushman’s seminal work and on discussions with leaders of a dozen leading such criminal justice coordinating councils in outlining key challenges that local governments and their CJCCs face in the second decade of the twenty-first century.”

Guidelines for Developing a Criminal Justice Coordinating Committee

Robert C. Cushman | National Institute of Corrections

“This guide offers advice on how CJCCs can be initiated within local governments, describes the range of planning and coordinating activities that might be undertaken, describes alternative organizational forms for CJCCs, presents guidelines for operating a CJCC, and describes the benefits local governments can expect to derive from these activities.”

Measuring Performance of CJCCs

Marea Beeman and Aimee Wickman | The Justice Management Institute

“This Mini Guide offers guidance on how CJCCs can measure the extent to which members are communicating and collaborating. By creating and implementing these types of performance measures, CJCCs not only create transparency and demonstrate their value but can also provide additional insight to the relative success of projects being undertaken across the criminal justice system. This mini-guide seeks to provide a general understanding of measuring performance through these types of organizations, what is happening in local jurisdictions around performance measurement, and several specific examples of how to gain feedback from organization members.”

National Network of Criminal Justice Coordinating Councils

The National Network of Criminal Justice Coordinating Councils (NNCJCC) is a formal network of staff and leadership of local CJCCs that provides a forum for peer-to-peer learning among Network members and information sharing nationally to build capacity for CJCCs around the country.