D.A. Gascón’s website seeks to improve accountability
San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón launched a website Wednesday that provides data on prosecutions, caseloads and trial outcomes — a first-of-its-kind effort by a local prosecuting agency in California.
The new website, DA Stat, follows a growing trend among reform-minded law enforcement agencies around the country to increase accountability by releasing raw data and statistics.
“I think it’s important to have a certain level of transparency about our work,” Gascón said in an interview last week. “It was obvious to me that here we have a multimillion-dollar public law firm using government and taxpayer resources without people really understanding where the money was being invested.”
The new site has three digital dashboards where users can explore data on arrests presented by law enforcement, incoming cases and trials.
Numbers are updated monthly and the office hopes to eventually add more statistics like data
on race, gender and age as they relate to cases. Gascón called the site a “work in progress” and said he hopes his successor builds on it when he leaves office at the end of the year.
Agencies across California in recent years have built complex online data portals, such as the state attorney general’s OpenJustice initiative, which provides statewide crime statistics going back decades. The San Francisco district attorney’s office, by comparison, will provide relatively limited statistics dating to 2011, when Gascón was appointed by Mayor Gavin Newsom.
Unlike other law enforcement data sites, the district attorney’s office focused internally to provide statistics on how many cases prosecutors file, what kinds of crimes they’re prioritizing and how attorneys perform in trials.
“The data can be interpreted in many different ways,” Gascón said. “If you want to make an argument that we’re not locking up enough drug addicts then you will use that data and say, ‘Here, I told you so.’ ”
The data show the district attorney’s office has made the prosecution of drug crimes less of a priority in the past eight years. In 2011, 20% of the office’s cases were drug crimes. By 2016, that rate dropped to 11.4%, while drug crimes this year make up just over 13% of cases.
Gascón has long sought to relax penalties for drug crimes and was a sponsor of Proposition 47 in 2014, which reduced some crimes involving drugs from felonies to misdemeanors.
“This is part of putting out some numbers to engage the public in an honest debate,” Gascón said. “Some people might believe we should continue to lock up people with substance dependence. I felt that should be looked at through a public health lens.”
The process of getting data online has been a five-year project. When Gascón became district attorney, no comprehensive way to track statistics existed in the office. Some prosecutors kept personal spreadsheets or tracked their case outcomes on butcher paper, Gascón said.
“When I came to the DA’s office, what really shocked me in the early days was the lack of the scope of what the work was,” he said.
Gascón — a former assistant chief at the Los Angeles Police Department and San Francisco’s former police chief — said he was a student in using data for public safety and knew the district attorney’s office needed a similar approach.
In the coming years, he said, the office’s new internal record management system will be able to feed data into the online portal, expanding the scope and detail of information available online.