City Hall Hearing: What the Public Needs to Know About Crime and Court Data
By Supervisor Joel Engardio
As vice-chair of the public safety committee at City Hall, I’ve led two hearings to understand the capabilities and constraints around a law enforcement department publishing its data online. My intention was to explore ways to optimize online access to information that most people want to know or should know.
Public safety remains a top concern for San Franciscans. We need to bolster the public’s trust in our law enforcement departments and our criminal justice system. One way to do that is through data transparency.
The first hearing focused on the district attorney and police department and how their data dashboards serve the public’s need for accessible crime data.
The second hearing asked the Superior Court and the Sheriff’s Department to report on their public dashboards and other data access capabilities.
Superior Court
Before holding the hearings, I met with Presiding Judge Massullo of the San Francisco Superior Court and Brandon Riley, the court’s executive officer. I raised the issue about lack of transparency in criminal cases.
For civil cases, a person could go online, run a civil case query by searching by name or case number, and pull up the entire case file. For criminal cases, this wasn’t an option — a person needed to go to the Hall of Justice at 850 Bryant in person, obtain a physical file, and pay to photocopy the records.
I stressed to Judge Massullo and Mr. Riley the importance of doing everything possible to remove barriers to online access to criminal case information.
Why does this matter? Public facing data is important because journalists, researchers, public safety advocates, social justice advocates, crime victims, and concerned residents all have the right to know what is going on with our criminal justice system.
As a former journalist, I know that good journalism is very effective at shining a light on the strengths and weaknesses of government. But the brightness of a journalist’s flash light depends on access to data.
There are laws that require the disclosure of existing documents to journalists. But those laws don’t require departments to regularly disclose and update data analyzing important metrics that tell the public how City Hall is doing.
It’s also important we let ordinary residents have access to this data so they don’t need a journalist to do it for them. Ordinary residents should be able to go online and — with a few user-friendly clicks — find out for themselves how well the government is functioning.
When it comes to an important issue like crime, it is vital that we make as much of the data public as possible. Is crime up or down? Which crimes? Are police making arrests? What does the police report say? Is the District Attorney charging crimes? What is the end result of all those cases?
A story in the media is only as accurate as the data the journalist has access to. Voters read news stories. Elected officials listen to voter sentiment when deciding policies. But voter sentiment is only as accurate as what people think they know. Transparent and accessible data is the only way for the public to truly know a situation. And a truly informed public can ask elected officials to enact the most effective policies.
Last spring, the superior court’s executive officer and its chief data officer contacted my office. They told me that the court finally constructed a portal to access case index and registry of action for criminal cases filed in San Francisco. This puts San Francisco on par with other California counties. The court is still prohibited by law from disclosing specific case details that would constitute summary criminal offender record information.
Last November, the court announced a new data dashboard on the city’s criminal cases. This is a huge step in the right direction.
Watch Superior Court Hearing:
SFGovTV link (starts 1:31)
This hearing also includes a report from the sheriff’s department on how it makes various categories of information available on its website, including jail data and trends.
District Attorney
I asked the Budget and Legislative Analyst at City Hall to review the District Attorney’s public-facing data dashboard and compare it to dashboards operated by other cities in California and around the country. I wanted to see which jurisdictions have the most robust information available to the public in a user-friendly format. If it was possible elsewhere, we should be able to do it here. Read the report.
The goal was to learn how San Francisco’s law enforcement data dashboards can provide more robust, user-friendly, and anonymized online information on crime. The public dashboards need to detail what happens in every stage of a crime response: incident, arrest, initiation of prosecution, sentencing, and disposition.
Public data dashboards began under former District Attorney George Gascon. They were a good start but stagnated during the tenure of District Attorney Chesa Boudin. My hope was that District Attorney Brooke Jenkins can take it to the next level.
Frustration with the DA’s data dashboard peaked in 2021. It counted the number of charges filed, but it never reported the final result of the charges: were they dropped, reduced, or taken to trial for a win or loss?
Local journalist Annie Gaus of the San Francisco Standard asked for the disposition memos that reveal the final outcomes of criminal cases. DA Boudin’s office denied the request, saying there were no relevant public records to her query — and if any did exist, those documents were “privileged.”
Gaus vented her frustration on social media. She said: “I can’t emphasize enough what a load of [explicative] this response is. At a certain point, you gotta wonder why they’re so adamant about keeping this info from the public.”
Any journalist, researcher, crime victim, or member of the community should be able to easily analyze what a prosecutor is doing. The online experience should be super easy without the need for any technical expertise.
San Francisco deserves this kind of data dashboard for every agency involved in criminal justice from the police department to the courts.
Justice reform is necessary. For it to happen, residents must feel safe. Residents must feel confident that public officials are doing their job to keep everyone safe. And that requires transparent and accessible crime data residents can trust.
Watch District Attorney/Police Department Hearing:
SFGovTV link (starts 4:21)
This hearing also includes a report from the police department on how it publishes crime statistics on its website.