New hires at DA office a sign of improving market

STOCKTON — Twentythree recently added employees raised their right hands and repeated oaths of office Wednesday afternoon, an indication that after years marked by layoffs and attrition, the San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office is nearing a return to full strength.

If you wanted to track the swift fall and slow rise of the economy, you could do worse than to check staffing numbers at the DA’s office over the past decade.

In 2007-08, the county-funded department had 270 fulltime employees. By 2011-12, though, staffing had plummeted to 185. But with the latest hires, District Attorney’s Office staffing is back to 239.

Among the new hires are seven advocates for the Victim/Witness department, which is cause for celebration, program director Gabriela Jaurequi said Wednesday. At one point, Victim/Witness was down to four advocates, but the workload never diminished.

“We didn’t turn anybody away,” said Jaurequi, whose department now has 11 advocates. “I don’t know how we did it. Looking back now, people were working over, people were coming in on weekends, there was no overtime (pay). It was very overwhelming.”

The DA’s Office filed nearly 6,000 felony cases countywide in 2015-16, 4,800 of those in Stockton. The city also was home to the preponderance of the county’s 22,500 misdemeanor filings.

More than 4,600 felonies were filed countywide in 201112, along with more than 20,000 misdemeanors. But by 2011-12, Victim/Witness had shrunk by 50 percent, the investigations department by nearly the same percentage and the number of deputy district attorneys had decreased by one-third.

Brian Scott, a lieutenant in investigations, happened to transfer into the department in 2011-12, and he immediately asked himself a question.

“What did I walk into?” Scott said he remembers thinking.

“It was a madhouse,” he added.

It was much the same for prosecutors.

“It was just a matter of spreading the work around among who was left,” Assistant District Attorney Scott Fichtner said.

District Attorney Tori Verber Salazar said she is hopeful her agency ultimately will return to the staffing level it enjoyed before the Great Recession. At one point, the DA’s Office had 99 attorneys.

The agency currently employs 84 attorneys, and Verber Salazar said she hopes to be at 90 by when the fiscal year ends June 30. Getting back to 99 is achievable, she said.