Saving Lives in Yolo County, CA

Diane Ortiz is a Deputy District Attorney in Yolo County, California, which includes Davis and West Sacramento. She’s an unusual sight. As she puts it: “There aren’t very many Latina prosecutors statewide, because culturally, we’re on the opposite side of where we should be.”

This, at least, is the attitude of some in her community: “There was a family member of mine who once  said, You work for the oppressors, and I’m more like, Well, wait a minute, Latinas and Latinos are also victims of crime, and I want to protect them. They’re hardworking; they get their tools stolen from the back of their truck; there’s domestic violence. And so as a prosecutor, I want to be able to meet with a victim and say, I get it. I understand you, I speak your language, I look like you. I’m here for you, right?”

So it wasn’t all that surprising when the District Attorney turned to Ortiz to help figure out the why behind some upsetting data. 

But let’s rewind for a second. In 2021, we launched our data platform, Commons, with the Yolo County D.A.’s office. Since then, they’ve made Commons data the centerpiece of their decision making and made several policy changes as a result, including race blind charging and widening their criteria for diversions.

One morning, a relatively new attorney on the team noticed data that captured disparate DUI arrest rates between white and Latino defendants: in some months, nearly twice as many Hispanics were being arrested for DUIs than white people. 

The data was startling and disappointing. 

Driving while intoxicated can obviously have terrible consequences. DUI arrests are also serious. You can lose your license and lose your means of getting to work. You can also end up paying thousands in legal fees. 

The data was brought to Ortiz’s attention.

As she put it, “We couldn’t unsee what we  saw, so now it’s our responsibility as DAs to look into things. We don’t want to prosecute people for DUIs. We want those numbers to drop. So how do we get these numbers to drop?”

The goal for the office was to figure out why so many more Latinos than white people were being arrested for DUIs and to ensure everyone was staying safe. 

Oritz spearheaded an effort to investigate the cause, which included outreach both to the police and leaders in the Hispanic community. The investigation is ongoing–often many factors contribute to a data trend–but Ortiz understood that education needed to be at the heart of the effort–to explain the consequences of a DUI, what the legal limit is, and what measures can be taken to avoid driving under the influence. 

Since her outreach began, the numbers have changed. 

As you can see below, as of August 2023, nearly twice as many Latinos were being arrested for DUI than white defendants. The disparity got considerably worse in September. 

Enter Ortiz and her work and what we see in the months after are DUI arrests for both Hispanic and white defendants beginning to trend lower and the gap between them beginning to close. 

This is what happens when public data that can be easily understood meets an engaged community–in this case a motivated DA who wants to help keep people out of the system.

As Ortiz says, “But for Commons, I don’t know how we would have known any of this was happening.”