Overview
"Our office is committed to being transparent and sharing accurate data with the community we serve. It is a key component of building trust in the justice system. For that reason, we strongly value our partnership and the ongoing work with PPI. We believe that this work and the release of a data dashboard will help us take our office to the next level."
-Michael Dougherty, District Attorney, 20th Judicial District
Why did we develop this dashboard?
The dashboard seeks to support:
- Transparency. Ensuring that the DA’s Office is communicating what it is doing and the outcomes of its work.
- Efficiency. Ensuring that the DA’s Office is using resources wisely and being good stewards of public funding.
- Community Safety and Well-Being. Ensuring that the DA’s Office is addressing serious crime and protecting and serving victims.
- Justice and Fairness. Ensuring that the DA’s Office is identifying and prioritizing actions to reduce disparities at points of prosecutorial discretion and to ensure the fair treatment of victims and defendants.
- Data-driven Decision-making. Ensuring that the DA’s Office is learning what is going well and where there is room for improvement, ensuring decisions are grounded in systematically collected data.
How can you use this dashboard?
You can use this dashboard to understand the work that the DA's Office does. You can use it to look at trends in cases filed and resolved over time and patterns in how individuals are treated. The charts show key decision points and the data stories provide a deep dive into specific issues addressed by the DA’s Office.
The dashboard is organized in eight sections, many of which mirror the “flow” of a case . No one data point provides all the information you may need; therefore, it is important to look at different data points in relation to one another. In general, dashboards are good at helping identify what is happening – understanding the why behind trends and patterns requires deeper investigation.
This dashboard is in its first iteration and we expect to make changes and additions as we expand upon our data capacity and as we hear feedback from the community.
Data Limitations and Improvements
As indicated within various data points on the dashboard, the DA's Office moved to a new case management system in 2020. Due to this change, we are unable to pull same data prior to 2020 and there are concerns with the accuracy of some data displayed prior to 2020. However, data since 2020 should be accurately reflected and we are committed to data collection improvements as we move forward with our commitment to transparency and data-driven decision-making.
Acknowledgements
This project is a collaborative effort between the Twentieth Judicial District Attorney's Office, the Colorado Evaluation and Action Lab at the University of Denver, the Center for Criminal Justice Research at Loyola University Chicago, and the national Prosecutorial Performance Indicators Project. This dashboard was made possible by the Action case management system, stored and shared by the Colorado District Attorneys’ Council (CDAC). The project was funded with a grant from the Microsoft Justice Reform Initiative.