ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) – The Bernalillo County district attorney is turning to data and community engagement to help reform the criminal justice system. District Attorney Raul Torrez’s office is one of 15 DA offices from around the nation partnering with the non-profit Measures for Justice to pilot its Commons dashboard.
The website collects clear data about the cases passing through the DA’s office and patterns and trends broken down by defendant and victim demographics. The dashboard will be open to the public.
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District attorneys will then have a team of community leaders to look through the data and decide policy goals. “We hope that the process itself helps build trust between the community and prosecutor’s office and also it gives them a language that is nonpartisan to have a conversation about the impact that policies may be having,” said Gipsy Escobar with Measures for Justice.
“For a very long time, I’ve had a discussion along with other reform leaders across the country and how we tackle the problem about implicit bias, how we tackle the problem of different impacts for different racial and minority groups and their involvement in the criminal justice system,” said Torrez. ” And so when we had the opportunity to be a place to share that information and learn from that information, we jumped at the chance.”
The online dashboard should be available next year.
