Hearing: The Need for Transparent and Accessible Crime Data
By Supervisor Joel Engardio
As vice-chair of the public safety committee at City Hall, I led a hearing on how the data dashboards provided by the district attorney and police department serve the public’s need for transparent and accessible crime data.
I asked the Budget and Legislative Analyst to review the district attorney’s dashboard and compare it to what is offered by other cities in California and around the country. Read the report here.
The goal of the hearing 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.
Watch the hearing here:
Presenters:
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez
President of the Society of Professional Journalists for northern California
Fred Brousseau
Director of policy analysis for the budget and legislative analyst’s office
Edward McCaffrey
Chief of policy for the district attorney’s officeCatherine McGuire
Director of the strategic management bureau for the police department
Opening Statement by Supervisor Joel Engardio
Everything we want to fix in San Francisco starts with safe streets.
But we can’t fight crime with a spaghetti bowl of data. Solutions depend on good data — transparent and accessible crime data residents can trust.
That’s why I called this hearing to see how we share crime data compared to other cities.
Today we will consider how our district attorney and police department can better inform the public. At a future hearing, we will look at the courts.
The history of data access in our city is dismal.
I moved to San Francisco in 1998 to take a job as a journalist. The first dot-com boom was happening. The first wave of tech had come to San Francisco from Silicon Valley.
My very first assignment 25 years ago was to write about a conundrum: How could San Francisco — the tech capital of the world — have such lousy technology in city government?
Very little was online and everything was still on paper. If you wanted information about something happening in court, you had to page through giant ledgers stored in the clerk’s office.
In 1998, the area around South Park in SOMA was the center of the tech universe. It was called the Multimedia Gulch. When my report about the difficulty of accessing data at City Hall was published, the headline was: “Multimedia Zilch.”
Today, a similar article could be written. The headline wouldn’t say “zilch” because there has been progress. But the headline might say “much frustration with ongoing limitations.”
About the time I arrived in San Francisco, City Hall decided to create an integrated database called the Justice Tracking Information System. Known as JUSTIS, it was for data sharing between public safety agencies. Back then, every agency had a different computer system that couldn’t talk to each other. JUSTIS was going to manage the data sharing needs of the police, sheriff, district attorney, public defender, probation department, and courts.
But 25 years and tens of millions of dollars later, the system is still not complete.
This matters because a lack of data communication can have serious consequences. The delayed JUSTIS system made headlines in 2003 after a woman was murdered by her ex-boyfriend. Domestic violence activists said the murder might have been prevented with better data sharing.
How? The ex-boyfriend had served jail time for attacking the woman in the past. After getting out of jail, he assaulted her again – twice. But the jail history was not on record when the woman called for help and tried to get him arrested again. When he came back a third time, the woman was killed.
More recently, former Sheriff Vicky Hennessy noted a police operation in 2019 that arrested 63 suspected drug dealers over six days. Yet 80 percent of the dealers were free within a week. Some were already on probation, arrested, and released multiple times. Without a fully operational JUSTIS database, Sheriff Hennessy said it was difficult to know when defendants were re-arrested while waiting for a court appearance. She had to rely on time-consuming manual methods prone to error.
There are two types of data streams that need to flow well: data that government agencies share with each other, and data that is shared with the public. JUSTIS is an example of data shared within the government and it deserves its own hearing.
Today’s hearing focuses on public facing data. We will start with the distinct attorney’s office and the police department. We will do a follow-up hearing to focus on the sheriff’s department and the courts.
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.
I requested that the Budget and Legislative Analyst at City Hall review the District Attorney’s public-facing data dashboard and compare it to dashboards operated by other DA offices in California and throughout 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.
We will hear from the Budget and Legislative Analyst’s office today. They will tell us the results of their report.
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 is 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?
Two years ago, 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.”
She said Boudin’s office was “ignoring the fact that they have a duty to disclose what is disclosable, which includes procedural and case details that are otherwise in the public record.”
We have a different district attorney today and I hope the office of Brooke Jenkins will put more crime data in the open. At least as much as her counterpart in Chicago’s Cook County.
The public datasets in Chicago contain anonymized information about every felony case processed by the prosecutor going back 14 years. They are divided into four stages of interaction — Intake, Initiation, Sentencing, and Disposition.
Any journalist, researcher, crime victim, or member of the community in Chicago can easily analyze what the prosecutor is doing. The online experience is super easy. You don’t need 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.