The Shelby County District Attorney’s Office is developing a public-facing data dashboard that it plans to launch in spring 2024.

Metrics will include the time it takes for cases to resolve, racial disparities in the criminal justice system and recidivism rates, among others still under review.

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Vishant Shah, the DA office’s chief data officer, said the data will help with case management and provide accountability and transparency. He also believes it could improve decision-making.

“In the criminal justice system, elected officials are making decisions, and sometimes they don’t have the data they need to make those decisions,” Shah said.

Still underway are the data engineering and quality and integrity aspects needed for the dashboard, he said. Design and testing can begin once the metrics are finalized.

Shah said the staff is looking at metrics recommended by national organizations, including the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys’ Prosecutorial Performance Indicators (PPI) and Measures for Justice’s Justice Counts.

Shelby County District Attorney General Steve Mulroy’s office has been working on data reform with help from Justice Innovation Lab, an nonprofit focused on “data-informed, human-centered solutions for a more equitable, effective, and fair justice system,” according to its website.

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Mulroy’s office announced on March 7 its partnership with JIL, the same day the Memphis City Council approved a joint resolution calling for the DA’s office and the Shelby County Juvenile Court to implement data dashboards. The Shelby County Commission later approved the resolution.

Mulroy said most of his office’s data comes from its case management system, which pulls from the Shelby County General Sessions Clerk’s Office, the Shelby County Criminal Court Clerk’s Office and local law enforcement agencies. 

It intends to initially use only data from its CMS for the dashboard. Data-sharing initiatives, or “interoperability” with other agencies, are in the preliminary stages.

Those agencies include the Memphis Police Department, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, the county court clerks’ offices, Shelby County Government and Juvenile Court. 

Mulroy said other agencies could join the initiative. Talks are ongoing, he said. 

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Mulroy said data-sharing was one of the “five consensus priorities” that came out of a public-safety summit his office hosted Aug. 31. 

“The data systems and different agencies need to be able to talk to each other,” Mulroy said. “They need to share, be able to pull data and come up with consistent, agreed-upon uniform ways of measuring things so we’re comparing apples to apples.”

There may be agreement on the priority, but the process is up for debate.

State Sen. Brent Taylor, R-Memphis, is “very skeptical” of the DA’s office’s partnership with JIL. 

In a Dec. 12 letter to Stephen Crump, executive director of the Tennessee District Attorneys Conference, Taylor questioned Mulroy’s use of “restorative justice” organizations like JIL, Vera Institute of Justice and Just City.

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Taylor said it appears to be committed to “decreasing prosecutions and incarceration rates” and its “stated goal” to “redefine justice” is actually the job of the Tennessee General Assembly.

“The Judicial [sic] Innovation Lab’s solution is to encourage increased leniency in the criminal justice system in a misguided effort to fix purported social inequalities,” Taylor said. 

‘Smarter earlier intervention ... is vital’

In a preliminary analysis of the DA’s office’s data-keeping system and practices, JIL determined there are “huge problems” in how criminal justice data in Shelby County is collected and kept. 

Like many other case management systems throughout the country, the DA’s system was not built to analyze the criminal justice system to “make better decisions,” said Jared Fishman, JIL’s executive director.

He called the data-sharing initiative a “shared language,” and said it would promote interagency collaboration on the way to “smart and fair decisions” for public safety. 

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“And right now, the systems as they’re set up, make that incredibly difficult,” Fishman said. “People in Memphis should know how many people (are) arrested every year. You should be able to find that answer. But right now, I’m not sure that you can.”

Fishman said JIL’s analysis found that cases in Shelby County take a “remarkably long time” to move through the system. There were also vast racial disparities, particularly in regard to traffic and drug offenses. 

The DA’s office hopes to put its data-collecting initiatives to action. It wants to speed up case processing and get victims connected to services more quickly.

JIL completed four days of training, from Nov. 27 through Nov. 30, with the assistant district attorneys who staff the office. 

ADAs participated in “Shark Tank”-style exercises, where groups proposed innovations. The game’s winner was a proposal to expand the use of GPS monitoring for people charged with violent offenses.

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Currently, the criminal court system does not use GPS monitoring, Mulroy said. The Shelby County Juvenile Court’s use of the monitors has led to questions about whether they’re being monitored sufficiently.

In July 2022, Miguel Andrade, a teen accused in the death of Rev. Autura Eason-Williams, wore an ankle monitor in the area as the fatal carjacking act occurred. 

“People in Memphis should know how many people (are) arrested every year. You should be able to find that answer. But right now, I’m not sure that you can.”

Jared Fishman
Justice Innovation Lab executive director

Mulroy said electronic monitoring could potentially solve that issue with automatic alerts if someone steps out of bounds.

During the initial stages of its work with JIL, the DA’s office found that domestic violence cases have the highest dismissal rates due to the “high rate of victims deciding not to cooperate.” 

Fishman said domestic violence victims often opt out of the system “because they don’t like what’s on offer.”

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“So often, these are complicated family relationships, and people want to have stability,” he said.

Housing is one of the biggest problems facing domestic violence victims, so it should be one of the first things offered, he said, instead of prosecution possibilities.

“I think, in any system, having smarter earlier intervention to link up the appropriate government services is vital,” Fishman said.

During the training, one of the ADA teams proposed staffing the domestic violence court with social workers and helping victims with housing and childcare.

Another proposed staffing each Shelby County Criminal Court division with mental health professionals who could connect defendants with services and job opportunities.

Mulroy supports the implementation of these ideas, and others presented during training, but said he would need to meet with senior staff to pursue them. GPS monitoring would require Shelby County Commission-approved funding.

As chief data officer, Shah’s goal is to ensure quality and integrity.

“The people are the most important thing,” he said. “Whether it’s a prosecutor, it’s a victim, it’s a defendant. I mean, all of this, at the top here, was about people and then encouraging change around that.”