Alameda County District Attorney's Report Shows Prosecution Rates Remain Steady

Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price released charging data on Tuesday.

According to the 2023 Annual Report, the DA’s office filed criminal charges related to 62.9% of incident reports brought to it by county law enforcement agencies. Between 2019-2022, the charging rate under former District Attorney Nancy O’Malley ranged from approximately 61-67%.

Of the nearly 12,000 reports assessed by Price’s office, 34% did not lead to charges. At a Tuesday press conference, Tara Anderson, assistant chief of administration and operations, said the top reasons to decline charges was that there was not enough evidence to prosecute, the prosecution was better suited for another jurisdiction or the case was resolved through pre-filing diversion programs.

The office said 2,555 cases were sent to the county’s 14 diversion courts. The largest portion went to the county’s behavioral health court. According to Anderson, the cases are separate from the total number filed because some people who entered the diversion courts in 2023 were initially charged in previous years.

This complication is a small window into the complexities of the office’s case management system, which Anderson said has led to delays in making the data public. The office did not respond to prior requests from reporters for detailed data on charging practices. The information vacuum contributed to some support of the effort to recall Price, fueling speculation that her office was filing charges less frequently than her predecessor.

Price said the case management system she inherited doesn’t allow for the kind of data extraction journalists have requested. The DA’s office adopted a new system in 2019.

“So the kinds of questions that you all have asked, that we would like to know, [the data] doesn’t exist at this time,” Price said.

When the office went remote because of the pandemic in March 2020, Price said lawyers were just getting used to the new system.

“There was not enough experience for them to even understand how to best utilize it, even as a case management system, and there was no way to use it as a tracking mechanism,” she said.

Over the last year, Price said the office has been working to build a system that allows it to extract data about charging and case outcomes, as well as defendant and victim demographics.

Anderson is tasked with overseeing the office’s efforts to improve its data transparency. The work is happening with the assistance of outside organizations. In the last year, the office formalized data-sharing agreements with the California Policy Lab and the county’s behavioral health services to improve case tracking and data extraction. The office has also hired its first data analyst.

“We are opening the black box of prosecution to provide a view into this consequential work,” said Anderson, who added the office is collaborating with researchers at four universities across the country to develop indicators to track prosecutor performance in more nuanced ways than simply counting convictions.

Price said she aims to launch an online dashboard in January so the public can view real-time information about how the office is handling the cases brought to it by police. She said the office plans to hold meetings later this year to gather public input on the design.

The Santa Clara County District Attorney launched a dashboard last month. It’s one of the few in the state.

“There are only three counties that have public data dashboards,” Price said. “We are rushing to become one of them.”