Consultant outlines data needs, limits and next steps for Whatcom County justice system performance dashboard

Julia (consultant) presented the performance and evaluation measurement plan to the Whatcom County IPRTF on June 16, describing which outcome indicators are immediately calculable, which require new agreements or tools, and what the county must do to build a cross‑system dashboard.

"You can't, measure what you can't define, and you can't track what you can't measure," Julia told the task force while summarizing the evaluation framework and the four key outcome goals: reduce the number of people in jail, shorten length of stay, increase connections to care, and lower recidivism.

Julia said two of those four goals can be calculated now from existing jail management system data (Spillman JMS): reducing the number of people in jail and shortening time spent in jail. The remaining two goals — connections to care and recidivism — require cross‑system agreement on definitions and either unique identifiers or new data tools to link records across law enforcement, courts, public defense, probation and clinical systems.

She outlined a status matrix for indicators: green items are data that exist, are accessible to Whatcom County Health & Community Services (WCHCS) and can be calculated on an aggregate level; other items require a data sharing agreement (DSA), the creation of a standardized risk or assessment tool, cross‑system identifiers, or entirely new survey instruments. Julia said many public health outcome indicators are already tracked and visualized through Whatcom County's public health data resources, but several justice‑system indicators are not yet available in an integrated form.

Task force members asked how the IPRTF should move from the report to operationalizing a dashboard. Dean White (health department) said the county and partners have created a data work group and proposed a charter to champion the report's next steps; he noted data‑sharing agreements and technical resources will be required and said "it will take resources, and it will take agreements among organizations." Melora added that the county has been modernizing its data systems but cautioned, "these things move slowly, and we have to have all the partners on the same page. We have to have the investment and the staff to do the work."

Bertie (task force member) requested that the final report explicitly address how the project could disaggregate outcomes by race/ethnicity and by presence of serious mental illness; Julia said that race/ethnicity disaggregation is feasible but that there is currently no standardized cross‑system definition or assessment for "serious mental illness," so that element will require additional consensus and tools before it can be consistently reported.

The task force did not adopt new policy at the meeting. County staff and members said they will use the report to guide the newly proposed data work group, pursue data sharing agreements, and prioritize which indicators to publish first (starting with the metrics calculable from Spillman JMS), recognizing the technical and governance work needed to support broader cross‑system reporting.