How Community Advisory Boards are Shaping the Future of Criminal Justice
Have you ever wondered how our Community Advisory Boards (CABs) help shape the future of criminal justice?
CABs are a vital force behind our mission, ensuring that Commons – a community-driven data tool that helps shape criminal justice policy – is built through true collaboration with our agency partners. This partnership fosters transparency, strengthens accountability, and builds trust between the community and its public servants.
CABs are a subset of a larger network, The Commons Collective, a group of committed individuals working together to bring Commons to their communities. Through their efforts, they help establish a policy goal that is publicly tracked in Commons, ensuring that progress is both measurable and community-driven.
To better understand how a CAB functions within this larger Collective and the role they play in the Commons process, let’s first dive into how one gets created.
How are CAB members selected?
This process begins with our partner criminal justice agencies (prosecutor’s offices and police departments) who are committed to data transparency and meaningful community engagement. Their first step in forming a CAB is selecting Commons Advisors to ensure the CAB represents a broad range of community voices.
Commons Advisors are respected community members with a strong track record of engagement and advocacy. Each Commons Collective includes three to seven Advisors, who play a crucial role in identifying and selecting community members with diverse backgrounds and lived experiences to inform the work. Once we have the Commons Advisors on board, CAB creation officially begins.
Who serves on a CAB?
A CAB brings together a diverse group of individuals who reflect the community they serve. Members include justice-impacted or involved individuals, educators, community leaders, business owners, victim advocates, and others who are committed to increasing transparency through Commons. CABs are intentionally representative across race, ethnicity, age, gender, religion, socio-economic status, and ability, ensuring that multiple perspectives shape the work. Each CAB consists of seven to fifteen members, with each serving a minimum one-year term.
What is the CAB’s role?
CAB members serve as the voice of the community, working closely with the prosecutor’s office, police department, and other members of the Commons Collective to bring Commons to life. They play a crucial role throughout the process by:
- Helping determine what data matters most to the public and how it should be tracked in Commons.
- Providing input on the data shown within Commons and feedback on accessibility, ease of navigation, and interpretation.
- Collaborating with agency partners to develop a policy goal that directly benefits their community.
- Recommending additional data points that agencies should collect and publish for greater transparency.
- Reviewing progress at key milestones, assessing progress, and providing feedback for improvements.
- Acting as a community advocate for data transparency and accountability.
Why do we need a CAB?
Criminal justice agencies can certainly make their data public, but how do they know if they’re sharing the right information or the data that truly matters to the public? Without a CAB, these decisions are often made in a vacuum, leaving agencies to guess what the community wants and needs.
CABs eliminate the guesswork. They ensure that transparency initiatives are guided by the people most affected. CABs amplify the voices of the community and assist agencies in identifying the public’s priorities as they share data intended for transparency, accountability, and positive change.
A CAB’s impact is often felt almost immediately. During CAB retreats and policy goal-setting sessions, CAB’s provide invaluable feedback to guide the Commons process. Check out this incredible story from Thurston County, Washington and the powerful role their CAB played in changing how the prosecutor’s office looked at their data, long before any of it was ever made public. Simply put, Commons wouldn’t be what it is without a CAB.
We’re proud to be helping communities, including the institutions that serve them, reshape how the criminal justice system works using high-quality data. If you’re looking for support in your community, or interested in a Commons of your own, we’d love to help.
