District attorney looks back at first 5 months in office
When Chris de Barrena-Sarobe returned to the Chester County District Attorney’s Office, he found it much the same as when he left to become a federal prosecutor in 2015. Physically that is.
Institutionally, however, what went on inside the D.A.’s complex on the fourth floor of the Chester County Justice Center had changed in a number of ways that de Barrena-Sarobe, a career prosecutor who began his profession in this same world in 2009, has now spent the better part of five months adjusting, and adjusting to.
Not only has the process of prosecuting a case — talking with law enforcement officers, reviewing files, collecting data, and readying a case to be brought before a judge or jury — evolved in the past nine years, but the landscape of the nation and the county’s criminal justice system is much different than what he left before becoming the county top elected prosecutor in 2023.
Since then, he has reorganized the top administrative staff, begun the process of filling vacancies for trial attorneys, oversaw the change to a new set of guidelines for sentencing defendants, instituted a new case management system, and gotten to know the many, many organizations that work in the community.
“I am trying to take one goal at a time, and work day-by-day right now,” he said in a wide-ranging interview inside his office overlooking West Market Street. “But the question to keep in mind is what the ultimate goal is. I want this office a year from now to be an example of what a modern, mid-sized D.A.’s office looks like in this state. And for it to be an example of an office that can handle a volume of cases professionally, while also executing at a high level.”
The D.A.’s Office is the county agency responsible for prosecuting crimes that occur within its 579 square miles. The county is the wealthiest in the state, has a variety of diverse communities, is among the fastest growing counties in the state, and as such has an increasing number of criminal offenses from the simple, like drunk driving, to complex, such as the recent arrest of a couple who stole thousands of pieces of mail from residents along the county’s northern tier and subverted their financial identities.
De Barrena-Sarobe was elected in November, only the second Democrat to hold the position, but in early December his predecessor, Deb Ryan, hired him as her first assistant to allow him to get a “jump start” on getting to know the people and systems in the office.
“The office is very different,” he said. “The job is very different from when I left. But I am not one who wants to come in and makes changes for the sake of making changes, and I wanted to get to know everyone who works here. I wanted to see it in action and get a feel for it in order to make tweaks to the system that I think will be really good for the office and good for the public.”
The simplest, but most daunting, difference was information, he said. There is a lot more of it.
“There is just so much more information, which is a good thing and a bad thing,” de Barrena-Sarobe said.
There are video-recorded interviews, footage from street cameras, hours of body camera tapes, and results from DNA tests and forensic interviews of victims.
“It’s a great thing because it helps us make the right decision in every case,” he said. “But it’s a bad thing in that it just takes more time out of a (prosecutor’s) day, and it prevents them from working on the sheer volume of cases that maybe they could have done in the past.
“Ten years ago you could have an aggravated assault case and you would have a 20- or 40-page police report and maybe you would have a recorded statement or two if you were really lucky,” he said. “Now, we record everything, as we should, all the statements. Now, we have body cam footage in all these cases to go through, to check, to understand what is going on. To watch. And so every serious case takes so much more time to get that nuanced view of