What’s in a crime dashboard?
Introduction
Crime is very important to Americans, playing a significant role in our public discourse on the state of the country and influencing how we vote. While there have been a number of eras of significant change in criminal justice policy, the most recent wave began in the 2010s and focused on both police and prosecutor “progressive” change. A focus of this change was to get away from the sensationalism of crime and to provide transparency about the true state of crime via data. This led to the publication of the first datasets and dashboards from local prosecutor offices in Chicago and San Francisco.
The landscape of prosecutor dashboards has evolved significantly since their initial deployment. Early adopters, like Chicago and San Francisco, started with basic case tracking and outcome metrics. These initial efforts demonstrated both the feasibility and value of public prosecution data, while also revealing technical and organizational challenges in maintaining such systems.
Other offices, like the Milwaukee County District Attorney and the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, developed more sophisticated platforms that incorporated additional metrics around racial equity, prosecutorial discretion, and community impact. These second-wave implementers often benefited from advancing technology and growing public expectations for transparency.
More recently, we’ve seen the emergence of statewide efforts to standardize prosecutor data reporting. States like Connecticut and Colorado have begun requiring consistent metrics across jurisdictions, enabling comparative analysis and establishing baseline expectations for transparency. These initiatives represent a maturation of the field, moving from individual office innovation to systematic adoption of data transparency practices. Furthermore, national bodies like the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, now regularly discuss data and dashboards. Now, with almost 10 years of development behind us, I’m reflecting on the current state of prosecutor public dashboards.
Purpose
When I was developing San Francisco’s initial public dashboards with Maria McKee and Kim Sandoval, we were also meeting with developers working in other offices to discuss why we were creating these dashboards. The prevailing reasons were:
- Transparency: These dashboards fulfill the public’s right to understand how their elected prosecutors are serving their communities. By providing transparent data about case processing, charging decisions, and outcomes, dashboards are intended to help voters evaluate their district attorneys’ performance and priorities. This transparency also enables legislators to better oversee prosecutor offices and ensure they align with legislative intent and public safety goals.
- Performance Measurement: Until recently, prosecutor offices were often a forgotten public entity working in a legal field resistant to measurement. Dashboards can serve as a foundation for meaningful dialogue about how we evaluate this critical government function. By making specific metrics visible and tracking them over time, dashboards are leading to discussions among stakeholders about which indicators truly matter for public safety and justice system performance. This process of defining and refining metrics helps build consensus around what success looks like in prosecution.
- Identifying And Driving Change: Dashboards can be a catalyst for evidence-based policy change. When policymakers and the public can see clear trends in case outcomes, racial disparities, or conviction rates, they can make more informed decisions about criminal justice reform. Rather than relying on anecdotes or high-profile cases, stakeholders can evaluate systemic patterns and their relationship to specific policies or practices.
- Learning About The Unknown: Additionally, prosecutor dashboards create opportunities for research. Academics, policy institutes, and government agencies can analyze rich datasets to understand the impacts of different prosecutorial approaches, identify best practices, and evaluate reforms. This research potential is particularly valuable given the historical opacity of prosecutorial decision-making and its outsized impact on criminal justice outcomes.
Purveyors
While there is no consensus as to what metrics should be used to evaluate prosecutors, three organizations in particular are shaping these standards as well as helping offices with deploying dashboards — the Prosecutorial Performance Indicators (PPI) project, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) supported Justice Counts, and Measures for Justice (MFJ).
- PPI emerged as a comprehensive framework for measuring prosecutor office effectiveness. This collaborative initiative established a standardized set of metrics across three core dimensions: (1) capacity and efficiency, (2) community safety and well-being, and (3) fairness and justice. PPI’s indicators range from case processing time and conviction rates to measures of racial disparities in charging decisions and victim engagement. The framework also examines community trust, prosecutorial ethics, and office diversity, providing a holistic view of prosecutorial performance that goes beyond traditional case outcome metrics.The PPI team has been working on this subject matter for years and have been thoughtful leaders in this space.
- Justice Counts represents another significant advancement in criminal justice data standardization. This initiative spans the entire criminal justice system, including prosecution, courts, law enforcement, and corrections. For prosecutors specifically, Justice Counts tracks essential metrics around caseload, case outcomes, demographics, staffing, and fiscal data. The framework emphasizes practical, implementable measures that balance the need for comprehensive data with the realistic constraints faced by agencies. By creating common definitions and reporting standards across jurisdictions, Justice Counts facilitates meaningful comparison and analysis of prosecutorial practices across different contexts. Justice Counts is also attempting to build an easy-to-use platform for offices to be able to deploy their own dashboards without necessarily consulting with outside technical experts or internally hiring the role, which is an admirable idea.
- Measures for Justice Commons offers a unique approach to criminal justice data transparency by providing both technological infrastructure and standardized metrics. Their Commons platform enables prosecutor offices to collect, analyze, and share their data through semi-customizable dashboards while maintaining control over their information. The platform incorporates comprehensive measurement frameworks that track case processing, pretrial decisions, plea bargaining, sentencing outcomes, and demographic distributions throughout the criminal justice process. Their platform is similar to Justice Counts in this respect, providing the technical underpinnings for deployment.
Review
Justice Innovation Lab maintains a list of publicly available dashboards for prosecutor offices. While there is consistent style across PPI dashboards (h/t Brandon Dupont), others vary considerably. Below is a review of three current sites.
- Colorado (PPI): The quintessential PPI look. PPI has been doing this a long time and benefits from scale and a standardization in practice that makes their sites easy to navigate and consistent. The metrics PPI chooses to display are based on years of working with prosecutor offices to determine what matters and the exact nature of the calculations.
- Bronx, NY: A recent addition to the public dashboarding world, the Bronx site is a great example of customizing to a jurisdiction’s unique legal world. While PPI, MFJ, and Justice Counts are all working to standardize, there is uniqueness to each jurisdiction such that a filing means different things in different places. The Bronx site is a clean, easy to navigate site that represents how a jurisdiction can convey information about a jurisdiction through internal development of a site.
- Yolo County, CA (MFJ): MFJ is pouring resources into Commons and it shows. The sites are pretty — yes, there are quibbles to have with certain design choices, but overall these are sleek, custom-built visuals. Furthermore, MFJ has thought about the tie between policy and data dashboard such that certain visuals are built to reflect measurement toward a policy goal.
The Future
Prosecutor dashboards were a part of a growing criminal justice reform movement from the 2010s that culminated in the tragic killing of George Floyd. In order to demonstrate accountability, many more offices worked to provide data publicly and demonstrate their work to address racial disparities. This had the knock-on effect of encouraging discussion on reform efforts, their efficacy, and overall improving data quality in prosecutor offices and the criminal justice system, in general. But the promise of transparency to prevent or dispel sensationalist narratives about rampant crime has not necessarily worked. Since about 2022 and a short-lived crime wave, there is a prevailing narrative (aside — if you’re looking for a regular blog with criminal justice updates, subscribe to Just Impact) that crime is rampant and that has effectively pushed back against data-backed reform efforts such as DC’s attempts to reform sentencing. So what’s next for public data and dashboards for prosecutors?
- To maintain dashboards and obviously to add more offices is going to require money. Offices need data experts on staff or money for outside technical consultants. If there is value in accurate data about our criminal justice system and prosecutors in particular, then money will need to come from the agencies themselves, outside funders, or the federal government. But this does not look overly optimistic.
- Agencies have rarely had money for such projects — most data projects at least started with a grant or funding from a philanthropy or the federal government. Most have been able to parlay initial success into a budget line item, but it’s not easy and without significant pressure from outside groups on accountability, it seems an unlikely source.
- Outside philanthropic groups funded the last 10 years of this effort and seem to be tiring. Funding for dashboard work from outside philanthropies now generally starts with questions of how agencies will sustain it themselves and the disappointment with dashboards to transform public discussion.
- Federal funding is drying up and looks especially bleak under the new administration. Under the Biden administration, the DOJ funded efforts to improve technology, data, and research across the criminal justice system. That funding seems likely to dry up as part of general slashes to government spending.
- Offices with data programs and dashboards are going to continue evolving and improving in their ability to measure their impact and demonstrate how their offices address community concerns. These offices recognize the value of data to guide decisions, deploy resources, and respond to public concerns. The next step for most of these offices is to start to use data within the organization to measure impact and identify opportunities for change. Most would benefit from publishing raw data and forming partnerships with outside organizations and universities to help with research.
By: Rory Pulvino, Justice Innovation Lab Chief Implementation Officer. Admin for a Prosecutor Analytics discussion group.
For more information about Justice Innovation Lab, visit www.JusticeInnovationLab.org.