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“I’ll be tough, effective and proactive using a community prosecution approach. An example of that: Use community search warrants to close drug houses within months instead of years and get an 85 percent success rate, as in Portland.”

That’s what city prosecutor candidate Darwin Ching said in a posted on the KHON 2 website.

We can’t judge whether Ching will be tough, effective or proactive. But we can evaluate whether community search warrants have been an effective tool and whether they’ve achieved the success rate in Portland he claims.

Civil Beat turned to the , a national think tank to support prosecutors, which has written extensively on the subject.

According to a report, on the association’s website, community search warrants are “warrants that relied on neighbors’ observations of suspicious activity (such as people coming in and out of a house at all hours of the day and night) supported by two or three hours of observation by police.”

The report goes on to say that warrants like these are often collected in “a day or two,” whereas in the past the process had been more difficult, “requiring police to conduct undercover buys over months and sometimes years.”

Lastly, the report verifies Ching’s comment, saying that in the city of Portland, community search warrants “have resulted in the closing of drug houses about 85 percent of the time.”

As for a program like this working in Hawaii? Or even being legal under Hawaii law?

Ching says the Honolulu prosecutor’s office is already doing it, albeit far less extensively than what he has in mind if elected.

“They do have two community prosecution deputies,” Ching said, referring to the Honolulu prosecutor’s office. “And the problem I’m seeing is that we need to focus the whole office in this approach rather than two out of a hundred something.”

The Honolulu prosecutor’s office has been doing community prosecution, which does include community search warrants, since 1997, a spokesman said. (Peter Carlisle took office in 1996 and resigned this year to run for mayor.) A document provided by the office’s Jim Fulton says that prosecutors in Honolulu have, “Collaborated with residents, police and citizen patrol groups to get rid of drug houses and drug dealing island-wide, including Waikiki, Kapahulu and Kakaako.”

So, based on the criteria of the fact check, Ching’s statement seems backed up by credible evidence. But, when he told Civil Beat that he wanted to “focus the whole office” on community prosecutions, we did a little more digging into Multnomah County, Oregon, where community prosecutions began and Ching got his inspiration for the approach.

According to Multnomah District Attorney Michael D. Schrunk, community prosecutions in his county “have had a substantial impact on drug house operations.”

But he also said that his office only keeps eight attorneys assigned to community prosecutions – 10 percent of his entire work force. And community prosecutions were Schrunk’s brainchild.

So while it seems like an effective way to fight drugs, should Honolulu have every prosecutor use this approach?

We’ll let you decide if that is a good idea in September.