Whatcom County pretrial staff review caseload trends, funding and data-system plans

Alan, a pretrial staff member, told the Whatcom County Pretrial Services Work Group that January caseloads were similar to recent months and summarized the unit’s activity, including 102 pretrial screenings (PSAs) and 16 people placed on pretrial services last month.

The discussion focused on three near-term decisions: how to spend available Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) funding for client supplies and staff training, how to validate the local risk-assessment tool, and how to respond to the vendor’s plan to stop supporting the CE Pretrial case-management product the county currently uses.

“This is the same as what I always report down on PSAs completed, 102 PSAs,” Alan said. He reported operational details: 16 people received pretrial services (two on PR and the rest on bail release), 232 check-ins (combined in-office, text and phone), 36 six-ride bus passes distributed since the new year (compared with 105 single-ride passes the prior period), 11 clients were alleged to have committed new crimes (misdemeanor or felony combined), and seven clients had warrants or failures to appear that required removal from pretrial. Staff said zero of the alleged new crimes were on the jurisdiction’s violent-offender list.

The nut graf: the work group said these operational items matter because they affect release recommendations, supervision resources and the data the county will share with state partners to assess outcomes.

Staff described proposals for using AOC funds to buy hygiene items and basic supplies to hand out in the office, and to pay for training for pretrial officers. “Yvonne and the team at [AOC/DOC] has been amazing at trying to get us all on the same page,” a staff member said, noting statewide coordination and a planned webinar for pretrial agencies at the end of the month.

Stephanie, a pretrial staff member, said she is meeting with Dr. Hamilton next week to discuss steps “towards validation of the risk assessment,” and that timing is uncertain for when validated results could be used in connection with available funding. Staff emphasized that the vendor running CE Pretrial is transitioning clients to a new product and will no longer support changes to the current system; that is complicating plans to update how the county collects and reports data. “They’re not willing to make any upgrades to the current one,” Stephanie said.

Alan said staff had provided a dataset (name, case number and charges, among other basic fields) to a team at the AOC so the state team could link local cases across filings and gather more detailed histories that the county would have difficulty assembling alone. He said the AOC would look for histories of other pretrial cases, warrants and failure-to-appear records to enrich local tracking.

Work group member Carol asked for attention to cases involving intimate-partner violence and sexual assault, and urged the group to develop a way to flag those cases for separate review. “I don’t think we have really reached a point where we’re able to look at some of the cases that concern me the most, which would be, involving intimate partner violence, domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking,” Carol said. Alan said he would ask AOC whether the state team is diving into those specific categories or producing only general statistics.

No formal motions or votes were recorded during the session. Staff said they will reassess spending plans with AOC and expected a decision point about how to use available funding by the end of the month. The work group held a brief public-comment opportunity; no members of the public rose to speak.

Next steps reported to the group: a planned meeting between Stephanie and Dr. Hamilton on risk-assessment validation, follow-up with Yvonne’s team at the AOC to clarify what case-level data the state will return, and continued review of whether to migrate to the vendor’s upgraded case-management system when the vendor forces the transition.