Case Study: How a Community Advisory Board Is Improving Data, Transparency, and Accountability in Thurston County
Situation
The Thurston County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office (PAO) in Washington State has a long history of working with community partners. But when the office partnered with Measures for Justice to make its criminal justice data publicly available through Commons, it saw an opportunity to take community engagement a step further.
As part of the project, community leaders formed a Community Advisory Board (CAB) and worked directly with the PAO for months leading up to the launch of Commons.
The goal was not simply to make data public. It was to create an ongoing conversation between the office and the community about what information matters, how decisions are made, and how the justice system can improve.
As Public Engagement Officer Tara Hughes Tsehlana explains:
“Just hearing what their questions are and what their challenges are helps us be more creative, imaginative, and innovative when it comes to making shifts in our local criminal justice process.”
Problem
The PAO had information it could share with the community, but the CAB quickly revealed a gap between what the office was reporting and what the community actually wanted to understand.
Community members wanted to know not just what happened in the justice system, but why.
For example, the PAO had a robust set of diversion programs designed to help eligible defendants avoid traditional prosecution. The office could report how many cases were in diversion, but the CAB wanted to know something more fundamental:
How many people were offered diversion in the first place and who was offered it?
The office did not track that information.
The CAB also raised questions about how the PAO collected race and ethnicity data. The answers revealed another significant data-quality challenge: staff were often relying on police or criminal history reports to determine a person’s race, rather than collecting self-identified information.
The result was inconsistent data collection across law enforcement agencies and the potential for assumptions about a person’s identity to be recorded as fact.
The PAO needed a better way to understand, document, and explain the decisions that shape outcomes in its justice system.
Solution
Measures for Justice helped the Thurston County PAO bring community members directly into the process of developing its public data platform and policy goals through the Community Advisory Board.
Rather than treating community engagement as a one-time feedback exercise, the PAO used the CAB as an ongoing partner in identifying gaps, challenging assumptions, and improving its data practices.
Making Diversion Data More Complete
After the CAB asked about diversion offers, the PAO recognized that tracking completed diversions alone did not tell the full story.
The office began tracking the full diversion pathway:
- Offers
- Acceptances
- Rejections
- Completions
- Revocations
This provides a much clearer picture of how diversion decisions are made and what happens after an offer is extended.
Improving Race and Ethnicity Data
Questions from the CAB also prompted the PAO to examine how race and ethnicity information was being collected.
The review revealed inconsistencies in how local law enforcement agencies gathered and reported this information, including instances where race was inferred rather than self-identified.
In response, the PAO developed a revamped and standardized process for collecting race data based on self-identification.
The result was a more reliable foundation for understanding disparities and evaluating whether justice system processes are being applied equitably.
