Larimer County Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Board 5/24/23

3:26AM May 25, 2023

Speakers:

Keywords:

defendants

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case

jail

filing

folks

part

larimer county

data

hispanic

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population

attorneys

inmates

work

analysis

disparity

talk

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disproportionality

Hey Samantha, we're back can you yours?

I can hear you

Thank you. Good to see this business for 45 years learn some things today

to share with me because I

guess I'll use the agenda which was to have a presentation

Yes, we have two presentations left

by the jail

and then one by the district attorney

Mr. District Attorney Would you care to proceed

as code

share restriction and I think I'm gonna

share with screening

sandwiches

which account fast stops college so

I suspect it will ask where I think.

We ready, we're ready. All right. People back on there. Here's the trivet? Well, again, I'm attorney, I'm going to share some data that we have gathered sort of in the last year, as part of a project we did in the prosecutor performance indicators, and you'll probably hear me refer to it as ppi. Essentially, this was a research projects. We partnered with folks at the University of Denver, as well as Loyola University. And they have done some nationwide work on collecting data in District Attorney's offices. And we were part of the largest data transparency project in the country this past year, along with seven other judicial districts in Colorado. And so we have all eventually published on our websites, this is all public data. And there's a lot of it. And so I'm going to try to run through it pretty quickly, and highlight just some of what that is. But then I would, I would point everyone back to our website. If you go to just the Larimer da website and click on our statistics and tracking button, you can get all this information. It's possible and make the share screen bigger so that folks in the room can maybe see the sun better.

I just want to say thank you, and I'll see you guys next night.

Yeah, so this is your zoom? Yeah, yeah, it actually I think as most folks it's bigger, I think just kind of this one may not be

there a way to pull that across the screen. Like for you those

but this is a that's a bad thing. Stacey is watching it from her passion thing. And it's like

well, hopefully, you know, I again, we're gonna fly through this. But so this is just sort of orient folks. This is our case filings per year. This is aggregated quarterly. That top line is misdemeanors, the yellow line is felonies. Essentially, what this shows is we're filing around 11,000 cases a year, and that there has been a dip since COVID. So COVID cases went down, and they have not really rebounded, most of that is in the misdemeanor area. So it's a lot of traffic cases, especially are down on law enforcement priorities have been sort of reoriented in terms of how folks are policing and what they're doing. And that's reflected in some of our case data. So some of the case filings are down a little bit. through this, I will orient folks quickly and I'll click on 2022. here just to show the types of cases we're doing. Again, that's traffic all the way on the right. And if I toggle back to 2017, you can see that bar torsionally is pretty big and 2022, that's gone down a lot on the far left, that's person's crimes, that's crimes against people. So that's going to be assault is the biggest thing in that category is also going to be sexual assaults, harassments, murder, that sort of thing. So those are some of our bigger, I've learned that. I'm not sure, slightly showing the rotation to that as we get into some of the data, just to understand sort of what we're dealing with. I'll now go to felony referrals. So one of the important parts of this project is we have broke a lot of this data down by race and ethnicity. So the three categories of race and ethnicity that you will see on this are white, black and Hispanic. That's essentially all that our system is allowing us to track. Obviously, we know there are other ways that people identify themselves. But those are the major categories that we're able to track at this time. This is what we call a felony declination rate. And I'll go back to this in a minute in our disparity analysis. But declination rate is important because that's the first time we see a case is our opportunity to decide whether we're going to charge a case and what we're going to charge. So that's the first entry point into the district attorney's office, from the the upstream actors and societal implications. And 2022. It has 2023 data, I haven't scrolled down to that only because it's aggregated quarterly summary, that's just first quarter data. So that's pretty incomplete. It's not really very representative at this point in the year 2022 is a complete data set that shows the recommendation rate is pretty similar. This is amongst white and black defendants than the next bar showing white and Hispanic defendants. Again, that does show a small disproportionality. They're 2022. But rather similar across the years. And again, we're going to get back into that a little bit more admitted in our disparity analysis. And if folks have questions, please feel free to stop me. In case resolution, this is how we are resolving a case, for instance, through a plea agreement. This shows plea differences by race and ethnicity. And what it's specifically showing is playing to a lesser charge. So if someone is for instance, charged with a felony, and they're offered a misdemeanor, that's a plea to a lesser charge, that's something that we want theoretically to be about equal. It shows in 2022, the percentage of white defendants plead to a lesser charge was more in black defendants by a few percentage, point 22. So that is something that we're keeping an eye on between white and Hispanic defendants for 2022. It shows it was identical. So we're offering lower please identically between white and Hispanic defendants.

Moving on.

We can go into sentencing. And sentencing is going to show us incarceration rates, incarceration rates and 2022. We do see that a higher percentage of black defendants were incarcerated than white defendants. This is again, something we're gonna get back to our disparity analysis, because there's a couple of factors at play here. One is what is coming into our system of how many cases with black defendants Hispanic offensive white defendants are being referred to us. Another is that for the black defendants, especially the dataset is very small. So we're not seeing a large number of black defendants in the Weber County justice system because our population just is not, does not have a high amount of black people living in Larimer County. The data for Hispanic defendants is a little bit more accurate because of course, they make up a bigger percentage of our population. They show shows that there was a higher incarceration rate in for Hispanic defendants in 2022. Again, that's something we're going to come back to the disparity analysis because of the inputs into our system. So I will skip to that. That is another button up here is see on the top left medical kind of disparity analysis. So this is all there we go. This is all public data. There's two things to sort of know about that. One is that this was all new data to us as well. So we made this public in September. We also just got it September of last year. This wasn't data that he's had and we're just keep it secret. This is an all new collection projects. It's This was new to all the gays offices that we're looking at in September is really just a starting point. So, you know, collecting this data does not solve any problems that disproportionality or disparities, but it gives us the input to start to identify where there may be problems. And what we have under our scope of control NDAs office turns mitigating some of those problems. The second part is that it is public so the public can see all this data on the public and see how it's changing or not changing. We're also publishing data stories on this page to try to highlight, you know, where we are making inroads and making differences in some of this data.

Is this data available statewide? I mean, it is a statewide purchase.

Well, it's quasi statewide. So we are partners with seven other judicial districts. So there are seven other districts in this a lot of the big metro districts Denver is involved. Jeff goes involved. arap was involved, so you can get a pretty good picture. We're, we were part of the pilot phase, we volunteered for that. Now they're in phase two. So there's a few more DS officers coming on, still not statewide. But that's our goal. But of course, every da can make their own decision about whether to participate or not. So this isn't our disparity analysis. Um, this is a very long report, if you look at the sort of, you know, little toggle cursor line over here at the, you know, this is about a 40 page report. So I'm obviously not going to go through all this tonight. But I'm going to show folks some of the beginning, because one of the important parts is what is coming into our system. So this disparity analysis essentially tries to look proportionately at what we would expect, once folks are in the Dean's office. So if someone if a black defendant comes in his office spanic defendant comes to this office to lay defendant comes to his office, and they all have the same charge the same criminal history, what are the odds that they're going to be treated similarly, because we want to treat folks coming into our office the same and prevent disparities from occurring within the walls of the DHS office. So the first thing that shows is spinning population is about 7% in Larimer County, and it's about 20% of the referrals to our office. So there's about a, almost three times the rate of our population is being brought to us. There's a couple of ways that we can look at addressing the first nexus in our office is that filing decision. So are we filing the right cases are refiling strong cases, in our recent violent cases in the interest of justice, and so we're trying to make better filing decisions. And I'm gonna get into that a little bit more in our action steps with black defendants chose similar data. So that's about 1% of our labor, county population. And about 4.7% of the cases that are coming to us involve black defendants. So the upstream is is very much weighted already disproportionately when it's coming to our doors. So knowing that what is going on at the knees office, this is a graph that this research project is use the visual. The bigger here, stupid.

SSH key takeaway, this is

showing, essentially what the criminal justice has under the scope of control and what we do. So we know that there are disproportionality is coming to our door. That is a fact. So what can we do at Diddy's office to deal those disproportionality is to mitigate those try to work on treating everyone equally once they come to our office. The analysis focused on four areas, one was declination of felony referrals. Again, that means law enforcement is bringing us a charge and we're declining to file that charge. The second was dispositions. That means how we resolve the case, is that plea to probation, jail sentence, prison sentence, etc. The third discharge reduction are people seeing reduced level of charges. And the fourth is imposition of incarceration. So who is actually receiving a carceral sentence like jail or prison? First, who is getting probation or diversion or deferred judgment or other types of sentences

or even question, please? Why would Why do you normally decline a felony refer?

It's a great question. So there can be a whole host of reasons. But if we don't think we can prove a case, then we shouldn't be filing that case. But we also may not file a case in the interest of justice the case they come to us as we might technically we'll work through that but there are other factors. For instance, maybe that person was also the victim of a crime. And we would not as far

I just have good follow up on this I know nationally, not necessarily, plea bargaining is often seen as elation to scare people and get them to please.

So I understand that perception I would very strongly push back against that this reason. Statewide in Colorado, something like 98% of cases are resolved through stipulated agreements, plea agreements, in only about one and a half or 2% of cases go to trial, and that's about the same Larimer County, there's a whole host of reasons for that, you know, resources wise, for instance, imagine if 80% more cases are going to, to trial system, simply freaked out. But there is a just reason for it as well. And that's the more important reason. And that is that we are offering folks opportunities, some of these programs, I'm about to talk about our diversion program, which means someone completes in terms and we dismiss the case out right, our deferral program, which means someone does plead, they complete everything that case can be dismissed after the fact, in all those cases, folks make that record sealed to means they're not going through life with convictions that may prevent them from getting employment, from getting student loans from getting housing. And again, they're completing the terms, they're completing our non carceral terms. Those are things like paying restitution to victims, to community service taking classes. So we're providing folks with huge opportunities through those plea agreement processes. Whereas if all I could say was well plead guilty to the charge or go to trial, then folks are not getting the benefit of that bargain. So yes, there's absolutely a benefit to today's Office, that we're able to save resources, but there's a huge benefit to the defendant to justice by being able to offer plea agreements, cases. And the defendant, of course, always has the right to say no, say, you know, I either I think I'm not guilty, or be I just felt like your offer. And so I'm going to take my chances at trial. So ultimately, they hold the cars and like they just say yes or no to that. far majority of people in our system are represented by attorneys who have very strong public defender system in Colorado, that state funded on very low level stuff, you know, traffic stuff, and so forth. We see people deal with it with themselves. You know, I'm I go in our entry level courtroom, which we call one A, which is where a lot of the minor stuff comes in all the time. We say make sure folks know they have a chance to get an attorney, the majority of folks that have very little little stuff saying I don't want an attorney, I want to hear what you have to offer. And I want to get the hell out of here. So it's not a manipulative practice, when used appropriately. are there instances nationally historically, that plea agreements if they use a minute, political way, of course, some of those examples are absolutely real and are very serious, but the process as a whole, if used appropriately, and you have your deputies trained appropriately, is not a detriment to defendants in any way. Now, I lost my train of thought where I was, but that was no, that was a great question that was placed.

And I I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this one. I'm not sure. Where do you get this from? A good

question. Yes. So every law enforcement agency in Larimer County brings their cases to us is of course, very small municipal courts in some districts that will handle some minor stuff like speeding or parking tickets are campaign calculations. And some stuff if it's, you know, crosses state lines, maybe the US Attorney's Office to take some things like that, but the you know, 99% of the crime occurring in Larimer County comes to our office. So that's from everyone from Colorado State Patrol of Larimer County Sheriff's to Fort Collins pleased to Johnstown intended police in smaller agencies like that. With misdemeanor cases, those get filed automatically. We don't review those. But then we do have the opportunity to say on the back end, we can still dismiss it. We can amend the charges for felonies. Those do come to us first and we get to make that decision. Is this going to be filed? This is not going to be filed? Which goes back to sort of some of those additional questions of you know how those decisions are being made. So again, the strength of the case is important. The one important thing to add to that is law enforcement burden to make an arrest is what we call probable cause. Which essentially means more likely than not, there's evidence to legitimately think that this person committed this crime. Our burden as prosecutors is to prove a case beyond the reasonable doubt by trial unanimously to inherently a huge difference. And within that difference, there are cases that must be dismissed. That doesn't mean law enforcement did anything wrong they might have. They might have done a great Job investigated the fullest extent and a professional investigation, an unbiased investigation, got the you know, quote unquote right person for the right crime. But there's simply not enough evidence to ever prove that case beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury. And if it falls in that middle area, it's incumbent upon us to dismiss the case, because we don't want to drag a defendant or a victim for that matter, through a long process. When we know we can prove that case that would be unethical for us to do.

You have many cases, or any cases where there are constitutional violations by law enforcement. Short, so

like Fourth Amendment issues is usually what that is sometimes Fifth Amendment issues, if someone's been questioned improperly, if someone's been searched improperly. Sometimes that's something we can catch at screening, filing of a case, often those are a little bit more complex. And we'll see defendants file motions, but we're constantly litigating fourth and fifth amendment motions issues. But it doesn't mean law enforcement did anything wrong, because we're litigating them. Usually we see that things are done 100% correctly, but defendants have the right to litigate those as they should. But that is one thing that Yes, could theoretically be caught at a filing decision. One of the things you'll see in a minute, one of our action steps is to hopefully try to get more information at that filing decision. Because the more information we have, the better decision we'll be able to make. You know, if we just have one report, we might say, oh, seems like a strong case. Well, if we get the next five reports, we see a lot of questions here getting doesn't mean law enforcement didn't eat that wrong. But that means at trial, we're looking at a trial who defense attorneys by what defenses are they going to raise? What is their defense going to be? What questions can they ask? And a lot of times, even if it seems clear, based on, you know, the straightforward case, I'll share this person committed this crime. Once the defense attorney starts poking holes, you say, well, that's probably reasonable doubt, again, doesn't mean it's the wrong person, or anyone who's charged appropriately, when Reasonable Doubt property exists. And again, that means that's a case of violence.

When you put this data together, putting referrals, did it get broken down by what agency referred in terms of the demographics,

not for race, and ethnicity. So we have an internal dashboard, where we can break down things a little bit more, but it starts getting pretty unreliable, because again, we only have so many, for instance, black defendants in our system to begin with. And even you'll see some of that data is a very small sample size than if we tried to look at, for instance, black defendants brought to us from the Johnstown Police Department. I mean, that might be one person a year. And so looking at whether that was filed or not, or what sentence that person received, is just not really a reliable way to look at any data. So the race and ethnicity data we've just been looking at as an aggregate county wide

reason I asked because I think the city of Fort Collins did an analysis like that for their department. And so I just didn't know if that was what informed this study in the other agencies did it or not, but it doesn't sound

like no, so sort of two parts that we are reliant on on a lot of the data law enforcement gets us. So it's not just the cases, but some of the data like our race and ethnicity data comes from law enforcement collection. And so it's not perfect, or law enforcement agencies will tell you that it's not perfect. You know, some of the struggles that I know they face out on the street, or they don't want to ask someone, hey, black, white, or Hispanic get an answer and then say, okay, you're under arrest for a DUI, that would not look very good. And that's not a position law enforcement wants to be in. So so that collection is very difficult for them. They're required by state to collect quite a bit of data now and are doing that. But it's not perfect. And I think everyone understands that. One of the things we're trying to do as well as collect better victim data, we want to know, are we charging crimes against where there's black victims, white victims, Hispanic victims at the same rates? Are we giving sentences taking those cases seriously, for instance, if there are a Hispanic victim versus a white victim. So that's one of our next steps, our victim data is is very incomplete at this point. And that's, that's mainly true statewide. And that's one of the things that this project brought to light is that would be an important thing to start trying to correct.

So

I'll go to our key takeaways. This is on the sheet. The first is that if you look at disproportionality analysis, it shows that across the board, there are very, very few and very, very small disparities within the DHS office. You And there are certainly some disproportionality he's meeting those inputs that I just showed you. There are a lot more Hispanic and black defendants being brought to us with cases getting there's a wide variety of societal factors that can play into that. But once they come to our office, those disparities are very, very low. The second takeaway there, though, is, there are some, and so now we're starting to look at what some of those are trying to figure out what actions we can take to mitigate those in the office. That first one there, which is the second bullet point is about deferral race, again, that deferred judgment means we're giving someone someone's pleading guilty up front, they're doing something usually like probation, probably for a short period of time, 612 months, they're doing some things like community service, drug and alcohol treatment, maybe domestic violence treatment, if they complete that successfully, that case is getting dismissed. Programs like our diversion and deferral programs, we see as big potential to be equity drivers within our office, because they are giving folks these huge opportunities. And that goes back to my discussion about the benefits, please, to get these cases dismissal, and to learn something to try to mitigate whatever behavior brought them into the criminal justice system, and to come out a better person who is not going to reoffend and therefore should be able to go on with their lives without the burdens of convictions, incarceration, and other things that the criminal justice system can bring. So getting that deferral rate, in better balance is important, again, that that discrepancy was small, but two and a half or 3%. So it's not, it's not a huge problem, but it means we'd like it to be even smaller, that's our goal is to reduce as much as possible. So that's one of the things we're beginning to look at that third bullet point there is dismissal rate. And it shows there is a different dismissal rate between White Black and Hispanic defendants, that one's a little bit trickier to say what we want that to look like. And the reason is because of that disproportionate number of cases being brought to us. So for instance, if four or five times the amount of black defendants are brought to us, well, not filing more of those cases or dismissing more of those cases isn't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it might be doing a service in the name of equity, if we are dismissing more of those cases. So that's a very tricky metric, higher lower is not necessarily bad, we need to be looking at the whole picture, which is why this is a 40 page report. And then finally, I'll go to some of our actionability steps. The first one is is training at our office. And so we want to make sure that everyone in their office from victim advocates to Deputy Bas, to our investigators to our staff, understand, understand bias, understand these disproportionality that we're talking about right now understand our role in the system. And we've done that Mary's going to talk a little bit more when she talks about our office here in a second, when some of those trainings look like not, but we did a couple of different trainings last year that were all staff, all attorneys. And those are very valuable to sort of foster these discussions and make sure that some of these issues were on the forefront of our radars as we went about our work. The second actionability step there is is again, what I talked about that deferral program. So we're trying to expand our use of deferred judgments. We're trying to provide more training and what those are what people should be looking for. One thing that is being discussed that the community currently is is how we use criminal histories. And whether that is a driver of inequity in today's offices, because if someone for instance, in a district, maybe that was not as forward thinking as we are in Larimer County, if black defendants or Hispanic defendants were receiving more convictions, for instance, in and I'm not trying to pick on them, but Arapaho, and then they come up here and we say, well, we're not going to offer them the opportunity of diversion for the first sentence because look, they have a criminal history. Well, that criminal history may have already been driven by inequities elsewhere. And so we're looking at ways to sort of eliminate some of those factors

might be attracted from different counties, different districts, how do I track what have done the track, that the conviction in another district may have been unfair?

There's no way to track it. One thing that people are doing is just removing criminal history from their analysis. So for instance, you know, I know that Jefferson County right now is looking at their diversion program for certain categories of crime and saying, we're not going to look at criminal history. If you've committed X crime, you know, a little little thing, let's say a misdemeanor theft, we're going to offer you a diversion period. So I'm looking at that, whether that will be Increase the equity in some of those programs. Tracking reasons for dismissal. This is a big one for me. You know, when we look at things like, why is the case being dismissed right now, in the aggregate, there's absolutely no way to know that. And again, we prosecute about 12,000 cases a year to try to figure things like that out, is very difficult. So we use the same data system statewide with these offices. And so we're trying to build in some dismissal codes. So that folks know why it's a for instance of a case going back to like, what we're looking at it a felony filing, the case dismissed because they got the wrong person. That's sort of a big deal. If the case is dismissed, because you know what, they had the right person the right charges, but you know, the evidence just doesn't really add up or a witness died or witness left the states. That's a very different reason for dismissing a case. So trying to track some of those might point us to where some of the pressure points are, or some of the inequities maybe, that's hopefully something we get built into the system this year. But but we're working on that than the last one I mentioned a little bit, is trying to get more information on making that decision, at the first point, it comes into the dean's office or to us, because even the felony charge or misdemeanor charge for that matter.

Find My iPhone alert, it's in my hand, some of

you that the power of a charge is significant. And so again, we really do not want to be filing charges that we later dismiss. Now, again, we don't necessarily know all the reasons, because that's not tracked yet. Again, sometimes it's going to be dismissed for very legitimate reasons, like the witness has left the state and we can't get him back. Well, there's nothing anyone can do about that. But if it if it was filed, because the evidence is too weak, well, that's hopefully something that we don't file ever to begin with. And the way to prevent that is to try to get more information upfront, for instance, on constitutional issues, or strength of evidence, or etc. So, you know, we're working to try to get more of that information up front as well. That is the quick and dirty of this. But I would encourage you again, you can see how far the cursor has gotten down on this page. And then we just drop into some of the actual analysis. And I'm just going to show you the first one as an example. So this is predicted probability of felony declination. Again, that means us saying no, we're not going to file it when law enforcement brings the case. And again, this shows equalizing all those factors against the equalizing for population equalizing for criminal history, it is almost identical, the odds that we're going to decline in a case with a white defendant or declining case of Hispanic defendants, there was a particular one for black defendants. So that continues all the way down to the sheet with all sorts of categories.

I'm just curious if there's gender. There is

very concrete on the side of this proportionality analysis. But if you go back to

our dashboard,

and you go to metrics and you go to defendant characteristics, it does show

each scroll by

so cases filed by gender. You know, this is pretty typical in the criminal justice system everywhere. Male defendants pick up the bulk of the criminal justice system. And that's not unique at all Larimer County, but we did not. The research project didn't do a specific disparity analysis based on that. I will turn it over to Mary to talk about some of our internal efforts.

So I guess your question first,

you're talking about training for a system designed to also look at bias known and unknown. Training. Yes,

yeah. Yeah. We had a couple trainings. In this last year. One was Catholic health issues and attorney had done training for a lot of days. And her training was kind of two part. He was looking at systematic bias and unconscious bias, holding reviewing cases. She's an attorney. So she kind of understood that but then she also talked about within the employment arena and giving general referrals for people who are going out for judge and that we have a tendency to like or think about people who look and act more like us in a different way than people who are different. So she talked about that not only as attorneys moving into a system and having like mentoring, but thinking critically about who you're associating with, are you being inclusive or have been intentional about, you know, being friendly with people who aren't like you? We also had mentioned in their anti racist training, W yc. In your WCA boulder. That was a two part training and part we watched the documentary 13. And we talk more about systematic biases and people that come into the criminal justice system. And what are the other factors that we're not thinking about? Maybe we're just looking to charge as an individual for us. So I had a couple of handouts. Those who love numbers might notice the totals are different. That's because the one that says the workforce analysis, that's a really detailed breakdown of race and gender by position, that snapshot that is from April 207, the one that is indicating yours is was taken today. And that also includes people who have not started working for a set, which is why it's a high number. So overall, I'm in if this is, let me know what part of this you have to work out of the scope of what I have, please jump in with any questions. And looking at the demographics of our office overall, it is 84 or 85% are white 2% are Asian, we actually just had another female attorney join us who was Asians, that would be 3%. Now 8.6% of our staff are Hispanic to chose not to identify one identified as two or more racism when identified as black. Also of note, we do have an additional female advocate restricting US versus family, she's also buying the law, which is something we're adding now to our postings that we are encouraging people to apply, we're seeing a huge need for that, especially in diversion and also with our victims,

we're looking at the level that that person has within the organization.

So this breaks down by position, but I was also interested in that. And also I'm very grateful I didn't know the county provides this information. So I'm just doing a little check marks. To know what to do like this, I can take snapshots quarterly and do comparisons party plan. So in looking at our leadership and looking at the top leaders in terms of administration and chiefs, we have six males and four females and everyone is right. If you look at our attorneys overall, we have 19 Men 20 women, four do not identify as white. So about 10% of our attorneys are not white. In terms of our leaders, overall, all of our managers, we have 10 women, nine men, and one of those is Hispanic female. So not great when you go up to the leadership positions, that's the meaning to work on and identify how you diversify those positions. Any other questions with regard to gender. In terms of our age, there was also a breakdown and it's in five year increments full, we're all about 65% of our staff are under the age of 40. And about 35% are over the age of 40. The person that ran this for me started laughing, she's been with the office about 10 years, she's like five years ago, this would look very different. And I've been in HR administration for about 14 years. And they've talked about it since I started about baby boomers are coming out like there's going to be a huge shift. And I think we are seeing that now that a lot of people are retiring or leaving the workforce. And so we are getting a lot of young people. I will also say anecdotally, it seems like in government, you get people who come in work five years, because it's private. And then there's a handful of people that want to stay for the pension and have their career fair. In terms of our recruitment efforts to diversify, one of the things you think about is, you know, on a space advertising@indeed.com and local universities, you're being fair, but then you can take a step back and think about it if the universities are local and are majority white, are you really being critical about how you're recruiting folks? So some of the things we've done to try to diversify who we're recruiting is we've reached out specifically to the bar contacts that the bar actually has the diversity bar contact list, so we've been sending them our postings now. So that includes the Asian Pacific American Bar Association, Hispanic Bar Association's utility bar, women's our National Association of Black women attorneys, South Asian bar and the SAM Carey Bar Association, whichever color bar association, so we're trying to be more proactive in that also, Gordon and a couple of other attorneys went to a DC recruitment event, again, trying to if you're going to a more diverse pool, you're going to get more diverse applicants. We've also started a process where when we get to 20 applicants I remove all identifying information, so anything that would indicate ethnicity to race, gender age is removed. So when ministration folks look at it, they don't know what they're looking at. So those are just some steps we're trying to take. In addition to that, we're doing some equity salary checks for position. So we dressed in salary study for our attorneys last August. But with that, we also looked at age and gender to make sure it makes sense where people are falling, and recently we just submitted are working with HR, there are some physicians in our office, you'll notice we are significantly female in our office. And that's because we have a lot of clerical and social work heavy positions. So our victim advocates and our diversion folks are majority female, their requirements are to have a college degree there a lot of them have their masters they are paid lower than some positions that do not require those and are more traditionally filed or filled by males. So we are adjusting their salaries to balance those things out. So it takes time, but you have to have a critical analysis and look at does this make sense and who are feeling each job? So those are things we continue to work on

the term social work, do you require BSW or

BSW but many of them get their master's and part of that's just something that they're passionate about? I don't the Masters is only required for supervisory position. Um, some other things that we are working on last year, we worked with the Black Student Union and CSC for internship project, unfortunately, was delayed, in part because CSU wasn't approving a credit on your side. But the goal was to have some students come in and help us do some analysis, help with the PPI dashboard, help them sit in on meetings, go to court and let us know things that we might not see. It's kind of an accountability check things that because we don't see it as your unconscious bias. We wanted someone to come in and help us with that. That's still something we're working on. We talked about the DTI training and talked about our proceeds now have the bilingual language. And also when we get folks who are bilingual, we do pay them more, in part because there's a higher expectation they're having to work out. And folks.

That's kind of my

other part that I just think is really important. As we're talking about this some of our diversion programs, which is an area we're really growing in things that we didn't think about until we either was brought to our attention. Or we saw we now have a live real time interpreter available with all of our programs, while the parents, especially with juveniles, are not necessarily fluent in English. So having that so they understand what's being explained to their child during those programs. And then we're also looking at whether we can provide childcare, or just eliminate those other barriers for folks. So something

new need to ask the two people on the Zoom if they have any questions. For Mary.

I don't have any questions at this time. Thank you.

Big Questions. And information. Thank

you very much. Very good that if you submitted

a question, maybe it's obscure? Is there any

of the obscure ones

that you maybe talked about, when you're evaluating applicants for jobs? You take out any reference to ethnicity, gender, whatever? Is there any way of doing that? Finally decisions, so that you're just looking at?

Yeah, that's the conversation we've had to sort of technically difficult to get that over. One of the barriers, this is a good or a bad thing is five years ago, that actually probably would have been a lot easier, because we're just getting reports. And you can do essentially what Mary does in our applications, which is, you know, redact the names, redact the race, whatever, whatever your grace applications, but I'm pleased to report to, then that might be simple. Now we get in once again, one of those things that I think is really important to get at that final decision is the body worn cameras. And that I've seen the body worn cameras, especially in a more complicated case. It's hard to make a good filing decision. And so sometimes certainly, we're able to do it without the body worn cameras, but if you're talking about Well, there was an assault there might be a self defense claim and it's on body worn camera. Camera, and so then you've washed it and obviously racist there, right? You can't take it away. So so that's sort of where the rubber meets the road and making that really difficult for us to do in this age of buying more cameras starting actually just in a couple of weeks by your cameras will be mandatory. Are you across all law enforcement agencies in Colorado? I think everyone in Larimer County has one now. The Jackson County Sheriff's because I'm also the Jackson County. They are getting there is in a couple of weeks, the last one to come on. But somebody on cameras everywhere. Now, it's such important evidence. And even sometimes if you know, body worn camera and capture, while we're looking at surveillance video, and we're looking at people's cell phone videos, and we're looking at photographs of injuries to figure out well, how serious is this injury? Should we file this as a misdemeanor or felony? So those visual elements are so crucial to to smart filing decisions now. And again, going back to what we can prove. Juries expects visual evidence. So if I say well, this is well written police report really describes as well. And I think this is a great case. All the videos not great to that still might be I can't prove it. Because of because the jury expectations in 2023. So we have not figured out a great way to do that. I know that there's these offices in the country that do redact reports. But I think that's because they're not getting the same amount of virus camera that we do.

We ready to move on. Marie?

Come on. That's right.

I know. My husband

Joe says are you presuming

that Stacey is back today? All right. All right. So states cheaper from the jail. I don't have a commission study, you're looking at it. So this will be three monthly slides about what's going on

at the sheriff's office.

So I

write my little charts. Again, I'm sorry. I can't move it either. So I've got the raw numbers up here in the corner. This is representing the carceral population. So anyone in the jail. And this is a snapshot from yesterday. But let me read the numbers that are blocked by the little Powderhorn room. So White, we had 298 inmates, black 31 Asian American and Pacific Islander, we had one. We had a someone who didn't identify or didn't claim a race or ethnicity and 102 Latin x so I using that term as a modern term, and companies see Hispanic. So that's the carceral population. And then, this is the employees at the sheriff's offices. This includes all of the sheriff's office, including patrol, and the jail, just because the data wasn't necessarily there for just identifying who works at the jail. But we have 381 White employees 10 Black employees, and that's the number 12 for Asian American Pacific Islander 21 Who didn't offer race, and then 48 from Latin X

levels.

I don't have for the purposes of today, but I can tell you, everybody. Everybody that works at the jail at my rank or above is white. So everybody on command staff, the sheriff, and the commanders are all identifies as white.

Do this example the design?

I don't know what sort of design would decide it that way. But it is what it is. I can't speak about design or what have you. It just, it just is in if you consider who joins a law enforcement organization. Most of the folks in command have many years of experience. It hasn't been necessarily a modern approach to couraged D dei issues. You've only been on the committee a year, we're getting there. I'm pushing, you know, wherever, wherever we can, but there's no there's no females at the command level above the tenant. Right now we have three, just for the jail side, three female attendants. As of two weeks ago, they are Hinton tanzic. And me. And then we have three males bellandur Bergland. And Datsun fast one to control. Okay, there we go.

Yeah. Would a biracial person show up in the unknown category? represented somewhere else?

I only had like, one. And I believe I put them in a note. They just felt lonely by themselves. So I did, I had one person who, who identified that way. And again, this study is commissioned by me. It's not early racing. But here we go. Alright, so here's what I did. I took the percentages of the whole of the race, because obviously, the numbers would be slightly off. So I did the comparison and percentages of employees versus the carceral. population. So it probably comes to no surprise, but there are more white employees, then there are white inmates and fewer Black or African American employees than there are black inmates. And yet, we have more Asian American Pacific Islander employees, we do inmate sores, one in that category, one inmate, and then unknown also had one inmate or staff or in the unknown category, and then Latinx, we have fewer employees than we do inmates in our custody.

Procedure. Compare this to the general population?

Yeah, I did. I had that number, as as well. And I think I didn't, I didn't like it. It was too clunky. And I wasn't sure if I had accurate records. But I did make that attempt. I do know that we have more, for example, were African American criminal justice involved individuals than we would have like it's a point 3% African American here. And this is representing by was wrongfully at 7.2. So it's

more than just to maybe try to help on our page, defendant characteristics page, we have the county population based on the 2020 census. So it says Black is 1%. Weight is 79%. Hispanic is 7%. multiracial is 10%.

If that's helpful folks.

Move populations closer to 16 or 17.

I know part of that because we we struggled with how to present this data a lot talking about what categories to put people and it's impossible to sort of get it right. And one of the things we struggled with was exactly some of the conversation we had is do people identify as Hispanic to identify as multiracial. Some Hispanic people might identify as Caucasian because of whatever their ethnicity is. And so that was that was difficult. And our proportion, proportionality analysis goes into that a little bit. So I assume sort of a dependency account, which is not a very satisfying answer, but

the sheriff's office also I had to mine the data. So we have white, Hispanic and white, non Hispanic. So it doesn't even necessarily break. It's a portion of the whole so it had to be bleed separately.

You have it that's the conclusion of what even let me conclude with a blank screen.

If these percentages reflect the alternative sentencing programs. This is just

jail just to jail. And just so the alternative sentencing, we're cousins. So we have a sheriff. And then Emily, that both report essentially to the commissioners or as as such, you might describe it differently. But if I'm trying

to use your would not describe reporting to the commissioners.

Who's reporting? Yeah, commissioners.

But when I'm trying to, I'm trying to get there, right. I always say Emily's the Sheriff of alternative programs. And I know that's not a title that shoot by yourself do either. But then the sheriff's office has just just the jail. But if we don't, we recognize the symbiotic relationship that we have it because essentially, alternative sentencing rents are inmates to put in their program. I say that too. Because if we didn't have this program, we'd end up with, Oh, heck we'd be I don't know. 1000? Yeah, yeah, we'd be 1000 inmates regularly, and to have the programs really work. But then I feel like the jail offers this opportunity for those that aren't ready to work through a program aren't ready to follow the rules, they have to have some something to go to to say, okay, I get it now. Sort of rock bottom, if you will, over in the jail or some some way to filter out people that aren't going to be ready that aren't quite ready to do the work. They need to go to jail. Find this opportunity. Another day. I still say that work very varies by intern as well. So I would call it I call jail. It's a stock opportunity. It didn't plan it. You didn't You didn't arrange for it. You didn't schedule it. But today is your opportunity if you want to change your life to stop what you were doing the guy in jail. And we'll give you that opportunity to get you out in in the right way. I know I thought it was really clever I copyrights. I didn't but I say it all the time. And I really believe in that. It's it's an opportunity

through any of the statistics look at the home housing status.

Yes. Not, not presently. But we have this dashboard. So if you look up Larimer County Jail dashboard. It will say who's homeless? Who is sheltered? Or then we're transient, homeless and homeless transient. And there's one more I think, shelters, homeless transient homeless tent. I got it now. And it's it's about a third of our population a full third. So homeless is like you live here in Larimer County. Transient is you came from another location passing through and you wouldn't necessarily stay here. And then sheltered means you don't have your own space. But you might be couchsurfing. You could be at the Murphy center or Catholic Charities, your initial shelter situation, but you're not. You don't have a apartment or home or a permanent place to be

people in supportive housing. And they considered housed. Yes.

You mentioned that if you didn't have the alternatives, you'd have 1000. What do you normally have? what's your what's your usual?

We? Right now we're at 400. Today was like 432 inmates. And it changes by it could change by about 30 per day, depending. And we're in a rural law, quite frankly, I think are some of our pre COVID numbers hit up to 650. And, but right now, after COVID i We've never reached back up to those numbers. I think perhaps when we were at our fullest this pot in the past 12 months, we might have hit 530 inmates.

Is that a reflection of changes of the DA Sophos and alternative programming?

Yeah, and I think right after code like when COVID occurred, there were a lot of courts.

Were not seeing

cases and justice just really slowed. And so there's a series of catch up months, we're trying to get people in or people that would have otherwise served a sentence. Now the judge is saying, okay, COVID is resolving itself. We all have vaccinations, you can go to jail now, because you've been particularly you deserve jail. Two years ago, now you're really going to get it because now we feel good about setting up a 14 hour day give us more. I am sure they don't say that. But I I literally, just please forgive my, my candor, coin vernacular. But they're getting caught up. But then, you know, they did get kind of caught up, sorta, we're kind of back to normal. But I think everybody said, Why, why do we need to use jail in the same way? We're trying to reduce numbers anyway, let's be more creative. There's a full trend on getting people out of incarceration settings, we realize, I mean, I think the whole justice system has a level of awareness that it doesn't do any. I mean, I tried to make it do a lot of good. I'm working the best I can in there. But it doesn't do a lot of good. It interrupts people's lives, interrupts their job, employment, their their housing, the relationships, all of the things. But some people need that some people need to say, hey, here's your moment. But I think in general, we're looking at so many alternatives.

It just says to me that a 30% drop in incarceration rates reflects more changes than just the pandemic, which

part of it is the philosophy in our office is, you know, really trying to show nothing very consciously about what is this jail sentence

that affects the same two year period?

Right. Yeah. Similar. I mean, I'm on the the jail population site that Stacy mentioned right now. And you can see those numbers. You know, and I think there's sort of another split. Within there is some of that jail population is what we call the pretrial population. So those that have yet to be sentenced that are being held on a bond, some of our population as a sentence population, those serving a jail sentence from a judge. And I think what we've seen is that the pretrial population has been sort of relatively similar. But the sentence population has gone down even more significantly, that sort of those top line numbers show because we are, you know, we created an adult diversion program, year and a half ago. And we've you know, we're still getting people that different programs at the same rates that as we've expanded that diversion, in this case, numbers have gone down a little bit, too, if you've kept all those up. Because, again, we're trying to think what is going to get this person to not return to the criminal justice system, right, because we are keeping the community safe, and we're preventing new crime. And if we're getting folks that to return dreading the crime, because recidivism is, of course, one of the big drivers of crime. And so a lot of that is going to be non incarceration. Alternatives. One of the things that, you know, we're looking at is, for instance, drug use, and so very, very rarely were we ever required in jail as part of a sentence on a drug use or drug possession case, separate from drug distribution, for instance. But drug use cases, drug possession cases are, you know, a pretty big chunk of cases. You know, drugs, narcotics are everywhere, fentanyl is everywhere. But those folks, rarely are they going to benefit from jail, they're going to benefit from drug treatment. And so we're trying to incentivize that, in every extent possible, for instance, in that type of case.

So I'm just scrolling through the website. So here's our transient population. This monthly jail population, so it's headed at 623. I know we've been higher than that, but it was probably before we have the dashboard. It was a hot July. I remember well, email. Pre sentence since told total bookings for the year. So this is year to date. And then our average length of stay is 90 days. Free for those that stay longer than week because they can't find out the average length of stay is 40 days, those that end up getting sense So, but yet, when you think of the average, some people will stay longer, but then you might have a bunch of DUIs and stay less than 24 hours. So that's how it lots of this number ends up averaging out to 90 days. List of money spent on the inmate services. We've we have medically assisted treatment. At the jail. We're one of the top programs in the country for having all FDA approved, medication assisted treatment, although in July becomes law that you've got to do it. We've been doing it for four years. So keeping that going,

or the nonparticipants? Is anybody in that group eligible for mat? Okay, so those people who are going for

that's just a really basic like Who's In Who's, who's out, but it has nothing to do with eligibility that would include somebody who's not on opiate spraying that sort of as Yes, it's kind of everybody else. Yeah, people who refuse now. We have 100% screening, so everybody gets screened. And then those out, it's, it's about 100 inmates out of 450. So this might even be a little bit

out of 100% participation of people. Right issues that actual

now. Sometimes people will not be honest about whether they have a drug issue. So I don't have a good statistic on how many are probably needed, then refuse a lot of screen them

when they come in their initial screening. Medically,

they do get cream, but they do not all get a tox screen. And then some of the medications are not like there isn't a good alternative ma T for certain medications, but street drugs, right. So everybody gets asked those that want to participate, do those that don't detox. But we still offer case management, therapeutic interventions, if they change their mind, we get them set up.

This has been really helpful. Lots of information, I need to draw it to a close and ask if we could follow up with email questions to as little as we have a little bit of it dei board business to take care of. We'll move on with the agenda if that's okay. Would you like me to keep this going? Yes, because we still have Karina, is there? Both? Are you guys, which is about making sure. The official

committee next month,

thank thank you very much for the conversation. It was great.

Yeah, this is my job. I get paid big bucks. For most

of what annually.

Zero secretaries. Yeah, we have to talk about what we're going to do next month. And we also want to talk about we need to light a fire in amongst the members who are not coming. And I'm not sure how to do that. So hello, you had a had a suggestion about this calling people or sending friendly email or something?

Yeah, I think I think leadership to the moment means you may think we shouldn't be in touch with the other members by phone by email, and that type of business because that's the Delaware public body, but to encourage them to come to church, we encourage them to come live. We can possibly do that. And to participate. So I you know, that's the one idea I've had I'm not sure what else we could try. We did have some discussion. As Laurie with our staff about having a little social time for the members of the board to get to know each other a little bit better and maybe that would encourage some people who have been having been coming to become a little

army. Do you have a phone number The board members Yes. Could you share that with

me? Yes, please.

Then we can divide them up excited who costume?

Korea Kareena, can we ask you to call somebody?

Of course yeah.

After I get those phone numbers, we'll make some assignments.

That sounds perfect. Thank you. Great.

So we will do that. And then we need to talk about what next month's program.

Or negative. Next month's program is the agenda that was posted for tonight. So, oh, I'll get that fixed and ready to go. But it's that the brief discussion with Emily Humphrey and her team, that's the follow up the night that we had our meeting after you guys did the tour. And people provided a lot of feedback. And I wrote all those notes and questions down and so that we want to get back with Emily and her team to review the input from the EDA board members themselves

through some of those notes and questions to Emily. I met

with her and her team and discuss them. And so what I'll do is move well, depending on what the leadership of the group wants to do, we were talking about, you know, when should we have that social? Should the social Viana meeting, date and time? Maybe that's something that you all could ask when you talk to people? Or should it be at a regular meeting time or as a separate time?

Well, I think it also should be after the new members, for sure. Order appointed by the commissioners.

That will happen in July, the new new members come on.

So yeah, I don't, I don't like to take away from the business that we do to to do one of our regular meetings. For the social purposes. I would like to see them as a separate time, if people can.

So maybe we could ask people about Danny, early in August, after the July meeting to get together for a team building. has been?

Great. Any thoughts? Yeah. So um, I guess, which is completely fine. But I just won't be able to do that, because I'm due August the 11th. Oh,

thank you. So I will be a little busy. Yes, you will. Well, we can schedule it for our strengths.

I mean, you guys can send me some food to the hospital.

I think you've suggested Fred. Having the July meeting, the new people been doing something. Maybe it'll be early to mid August. Sometime before our August business meeting. And Lauren, did I hear you say earlier

today that the application time has been extended? Yes. So maybe when we talk to people, we should encourage them to help us recruit new members

and be a great idea. And then read is it okay, if I take what we weren't going to do in June and then put that on the July agenda. So that would be the meeting with human services to learn more about their programs and their equity work as well as the community health improvement plan.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. The one thing I would ask her whether it be Emily, Human Services, I think we need to structure these so that they're maybe only 70 or 80 minutes in length. Give the members time to debrief and talk about it and give feedback.

Also, as we chatted earlier, do we need to do both of those in one month in one meeting given services and the Health Improvement Plan. Will that give us enough time to really learn about both?

I will check with Heather and see what she thinks on that. I think what she was concerned about doing is trying to explain the community health improvement plan without the board under Standing Health and Human Services, human services work itself. I'll double check though,

because I don't want to feel rushed, right?

Look at my notes to see what else

Oh, when we talk to people on the phone, let's let's really try to emphasize being here in person and making zoom the exception

Karina Yeah, I was gonna ask with that of being in person. Are we still alternating? Then to places? Well,

it's kind of been interrupted because of the meetings we've been having here. The alternative justice programs. We're gonna get back to that. Yes. Okay. Yeah, I

think when we can get back to that I can for sure be in person here in Loveland. It gets a little bit trickier when I have to drive to Fort Collins.

Sure. Maybe we can carpool once in a while. Yeah, I live in London as well.

Okay, perfect. Anything else?

Thanks for the great presentation.

Yeah, there's one other thing that I don't know if we can really do this with only three of us of the board president. But one of the things that I'd like to see us do is to make sure that Larimer County gets recognized as doing the work in Dei. We've discovered in our work with with our commitment to self and society, that there are a lot there's a lot going on in Dei, in Larimer County, in city of Fort Collins, Craps in some of these other cities that have heard about. But I would like to have the option

of getting Larimer County's name as a sponsor of some of the things that are going on up there. For example. CSU has been doing an annual event started in 2001 is a one day event, it's now up to a full week. It's called a symposium for Inclusive Excellence takes place in October campus. Some of us who are not university connected, that we're talking about similar types of projects. got in touch with the committee at CSU that runs now symposium and asked if we as a community entities could join. And they seem to have approved we were going to have a couple of our people go into their meetings. But from what I understand city of Fort Collins Human Relations Commission is going to be listed as one of the sponsors. Why not murmur County? And so my question at this point for the three of us is, is this something that we as a board would like to do, the way I would work is that we would bring it up and decide if that's something if there is a program that we want to be listed as a sponsor. And if we approve that, and Laurie will take that to the county commissioners, because they're the ones that have to approve the use of the name and the logo. Created What do you think?

I think that's an awesome idea. Thank you

also extended the opportunity for presenters to put in a presentation if there was presentation from any part of the county, they would be welcoming of that as well.

Put out a request for proposals and extended it and extended it. So if anybody from the county would be interested in that. If they go to the CSU website and put in a symposium frequency, that's fine, but explanations are required to make a presentation.

Excellent idea.

So having approved it in principle, is that something that we would like to get on board

waiver? Say hi, Karina. Hi.

Unanimous. Thank you.

Anything else? We're supposed to end at eight and 802.

So much