By Aarti Shahani, KQED News Fix
The San Francisco district attorney’s office is just around the corner from some of the world’s most cutting-edge data collectors and data miners. Yet, according to D.A. George Gascon, his office is stuck in the 1970s. To leap forward a few decades, Gascon has hired his first chief information officer.
Now he’s got to warm his prosecutors to the idea that cold hard data can help deliver justice.
Gascon wants to give his office a makeover (and not just with furniture), using Big Data. He says the data revolution that’s transformed whole industries has been totally lost on the criminal justice system. For instance, in response to a charge that Vietnamese and Korean defendants are often misclassified as Chinese, he said, “Yeah, I think it’s even worse. In many cases, they only are classifying white, black and other.” Regarding another allegation, that his office is letting domestic violence perpetrators off the hook, he said, “Is this accurate? I cannot come back to the office and push a button and get a report that is going to tell me this.”
He plans to change that with an initiative he calls DA Stat.
Read the complete story at KQED News Fix.
For more S.F.Public Press coverage of the S.F. district attorney’s office as well as record-keeping issues in the S.F. Police Department, read San Francisco Trails Bay Area in Domestic Violence Prosecutions and Domestic Violence Recordkeeping Still Flawed, but Police Say Fix Is Near.