Whatcom committee debates priorities for criminal justice data, dashboards and short-term measures

Bertie, speaking for the committee staff, opened a wide-ranging Feb. 11 discussion on what data the Whatcom County Legal and Justice Systems Committee should request, measure and publish to support the county’s incarceration reduction efforts.

"It's usually easier to answer the question about what data do we need if we decide what are the questions that we want answered by the data," Bertie told attendees, and then summarized prior committee requests from 2018 and 2020 that emphasized consistent data definitions, baseline measures and the ability to track individuals across systems.

Committee members and system partners identified specific, measurable topics the group should prioritize: recidivism rates, average length of stay in jail (noting large shares of pretrial detention), diversion rates and completion outcomes, use and outcomes of therapeutic courts (mental health, drug/recovery and veteran courts), prison sentence length and reentry outcomes, and warrant-issuance practices that affect initial arrest and pretrial incarceration.

Several participants stressed the importance of clarifying definitions before extracting data. Maya noted that "diversion" can mean multiple things — pre-filing diversion, therapeutic court participation with long-term involvement, or sentencing alternatives such as the mental health sentencing alternative — and recommended disaggregating these categories. Wendy Jones and Sheriff Tanksley said detention and Western State hospital admission histories are available and can be provided by the sheriff's office; Jones emphasized that a large portion of local jail days are pretrial, which affects available correctional interventions.

Speakers also raised technical and institutional hurdles. Multiple attendees said it is critical to involve county IT or a centralized data steward to cross-reference records across courts, jail, probation and behavioral-health providers. Bertie said the county has contracted Village Reach, a consulting team with a data analyst working on the project, to advise on system integration and reporting. Participants warned that different agencies use varying conventions for race/ethnicity data and that indexing methods used by some prior analyses (for example, including all detained individuals regardless of jurisdiction) can skew results for Native American populations.

The committee discussed immediate, short-term actions: compiling aging reports (time from filing to case completion), comparing warrant-quash outcomes and the effect of entering trial-setting orders at first appearance to reduce re-arrests, and measuring recidivism specifically while a person is on pretrial release to evaluate pretrial decision-making. Eric Peterson offered to share a recent report that includes prison-sentence data for cross-checking against county records.

Bertie said staff will collate the ideas into a draft list, circulate it to committee members and coordinate with the index committee and Village Reach to determine what can be produced quickly versus what will require longer-term IT work. No formal motions or votes were recorded. The committee scheduled follow-up work to identify feasible short-term data pulls and to prepare a public-facing dashboard and internal performance measures as separate but related products.