Since its founding, the Center For Policing Equity (CPE) has traditionally partnered with law enforcement agencies and local governments to analyze police administrative data and provide tailored and actionable recommendations. When the Contra Costa Public Defenders Office (CCPD) in California reached out with a request for CPE to review court data, rather than the more standard police data, our curiosity was piqued. We realized that this new partnership could provide a unique opportunity to work with a different data ecosystem, develop innovative tools with which to further inform public safety redesign, and truly center the community in our analysis and recommendations.
CCPD’s Court Data Spurs CPE Innovation in Data Collection Practices and Public Safety Redesign
At the heart of CCPD’s request was the need to better understand the life factors impacting their clients at the time of their contact with law enforcement. CCPD wanted to know what common experiences their clients were facing in order to better engage system actors upstream and support community members in resolving their issues with minimal involvement from the justice system.
This effort was unique for CPE. The new public defender data and court data provided by CCPD differed from what CPE analyzes typically as it was data collected on the back end after initial law enforcement contact. This was a completely unknown data environment for CPE scientists, who wondered if this new data could provide a different lens with which to inform public safety redesign. CPE partnered with Measures for Justice (MFJ), a nonpartisan nonprofit with experience using this type of data and record management system. Their expertise and technical assistance, for which CPE is grateful, were invaluable to this effort.
Traditional police administrative data is labor-intensive to analyze as the systems used for input and storing are not designed for the data analysis CPE performs. CPE and MFJ scientists quickly found the new court data to be just as difficult, if not more labor-intensive, to sift through. They discovered that the data was duplicated when first entered into the public defender and court record management systems and was not collected in a consistent manner, making it challenging to create generalizable claims with the outputs of any analysis. CPE and MFJ also found significant gaps in what was collected. These data collection and storage issues led CPE, with MFJ's help, to produce a “data gap analysis,” which provides CCPD with a blueprint for how to improve their data collection practices and entire data infrastructure.
A New Approach to CPE Research Uplifts the Perspectives of CCPD Clients and the Contra Costa Community
CPE’s initial research design phase typically calls for a multi-method approach that uses both quantitative and qualitative data. However, the analyzable court data was inaccessible, so CPE chose to focus on a qualitative approach. While it was not our standard process, CPE scientists were able to center their work on the lived experiences and perspectives of CCPD’s clients through 41 one-on-one interviews, producing a compelling report that guides CPE’s recommendations in a way that using only data and numbers would have been unable to do so. The stories featured in the report are about real people. They could be family, friends or neighbors, and they were vulnerable enough to share their experiences with CPE; for that we are forever grateful.
Using this rich qualitative data, CPE was able to make policy recommendations that will improve the outcomes of CCPD’s clients. In the process, CPE also discovered that CCPD adheres to a holistic approach to public defense, meaning they employ social workers to assist their clients with basic needs like housing, access to healthcare, transportation to court, among other tasks. This holistic approach is the community responder model CPE advocates for in action. Rather than having law enforcement respond to a call regarding an unhoused person, for example, services like the one CCPD provides are more attuned to community needs and help avoid unnecessary police interaction.
The Passage of the California Racial Justice Act Presents New Opportunities for Data Innovation in Public Defense
While CPE’s work with MFJ on the data gap analysis and with CCPD on client interviews was underway, the passage of the California Racial Justice Act (RJA) in 2020 presented new opportunities for data innovation in public defense. More specifically, the RJA is aimed at leveraging data to address the bias in our justice system. Instead of requiring proof that individuals acted with direct prejudice, the RJA allows for the identification of broader patterns — like a consistently harsher charging or sentencing for similar behavior for a particular racial group — and then requires courts to assess whether there is sufficient race-neutral cause for this disparity. By surfacing these hidden trends, the RJA requires a more transparent and honest accounting, leading to more equal treatment for everyone.
Historically, our criminal legal systems have relied on record-keeping systems that serve day-to-day needs. These databases help track cases, court dates and deadlines. Yet they contain a wealth of information about charges, outcomes, and sentencing trends. With the right tools, these legacy systems become a window into whether certain groups have consistently faced tougher treatment. Public defenders like CCPD have been leading the charge, doing the time-consuming and grueling work of combing through these records, seeking to zealously defend their clients. After the passage of the RJA, CCPD requested CPE’s assistance in using newly available prosecutorial data to demonstrate systemic racial bias, which would in turn help CCPD litigate RJA cases more successfully.
CPE Scientists Develop RJA Toolkit to Help CCPD Leverage New Data to Demonstrate Systemic Racial Bias
CPE brought its experience in disentangling racial disparities in complex policing processes to this task. Modern data tools like AI techniques and scalable data infrastructure make it easier to understand racial bias patterns across thousands of cases. This modernized approach can reveal potential disparities at a scale that was previously impossible. CPE is working to provide CCPD access to these insights through an easy-to-use data toolkit, which contains an interactive dashboard (the RJA Data Tool) and a searchable database of academic literature (the RJA Research Index), so that CCPD and other attorneys have better evidence to leverage against unjust outcomes and advocate for change.
Through this first-of-its-kind project with CCPD and MFJ, CPE was able to explore data downstream from initial contact with law enforcement while focusing on and uplifting the perspectives of those most affected by racial bias in the criminal legal system. The passage of the RJA provided an opportunity to further innovate and transform archives of data into instruments of change. This project and partnership have opened another door for changing an inequitable criminal legal process into one that is more transparent, more responsive, and more just.
Related Resources from the Center for Policing Equity:
- Improving Outcomes for Contra Costa Public Defender Clients: Report
- Improving Outcomes for Contra Costa Public Defender Clients: Brief
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