MARTINEZ — The Contra Costa District Attorney’s office is getting ready to publicly release data that local lawyers, activists, and journalists have been seeking for years: a breakdown of charging decisions and outcomes of criminal cases by race, gender, and other demographic information.
The data is being compiled as part of the District Attorney’s partnership with the New York-based Vera Institute of Justice, a data-driven nonprofit that pursues progressive policies and training in the justice system. The data will cover a five-year period starting in 2014 and include “case dispositions, charges and enhancements, demographics, pleas, bail, sentencing,” along with defendants’ race, gender, and other identifying information, a District Attorney’s spokesman said.
“Data from any law enforcement agency tells a story. We need this data analysis to improve our communication with the public and our law enforcement partners,” District Attorney Diana Becton said in a written statement as part of a news release. “We must think critically about how best to improve our operations and work with our law enforcement partners to ensure our prosecutions are just.”
It is data that local activists have been requesting for years, especially since the 2016 formation of the county’s Racial Justice Task Force, a body made up of prosecutors, public defenders, law enforcement officials and community leaders. In 2018, the task force released released a study that found from 2013 to 2017, black men and women were more than three times as likely to be arrested than any other racial group, and black children were more than seven times more likely to be arrested.
The Vera Institute partnered with the Contra Costa District Attorney’s office last year, as part of a program that now includes seven prosecutorial offices nationwide. The program is designed to identify and reduce any racial disparities in the particular county’s justice system, and includes workshops on implicit bias.
When the program started, it wasn’t welcomed with open arms by everyone in the office.
Venus Johnson, the second in command of the district attorney’s office, told a Stanford professor last March that she and Becton were met with “extreme resistance” within the office at the start of the Vera partnership, according to an article on the university’s business school website.
The Vera Institute is a multimillion-dollar nonprofit that advocates for data-driven policy reforms in the justice system. Its mission statement is to “tackle the most pressing injustices of our day; the causes and consequences of mass incarceration, racial disparities and the loss of public trust in law enforcement, to the unmet needs of the vulnerable, the marginalized and those harmed by crime and violence,” Vera’s website says.
