The Power of a Community Advisory Board

Tara Hughes Tsehlana is the Public Engagement Officer at the Thurston County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office (PAO) in Washington State. The office has a long history of working with community partners, but working directly with community leaders on data transparency and policy goals is new. 

The office partnered with Measures for Justice with the goal of getting their criminal justice data on Commons, which is a great place to track how the office is doing across a series of performance measures and to showcase a policy goal developed with community leaders. 

As part of the project, community leaders organize in a Community Advisory Board (CAB) and work with the PAO for months before the launch of their Commons. 

Tara tells us that the impact the CAB has already had on the office has been tremendous. “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. It also helps us give them an account of why we make the choices we do. This two-way conversation is critical.”

Tara explains how “accountability” has been weaponized over the years when what it really means is being able to simply share what you do and why. Data is the perfect language for that conversation. 

What’s been illuminating for the PAO so far has been the information gap between what the office shares and what the community is actually interested in.

Community Changemakers

The CAB wanted to hear more about the PAO’s diversion programs, which are a means of helping defendants avoid traditional prosecution and reduce or dismiss the criminal charge by completing a program that includes a treatment component and either in-court or community-based monitoring. The PAO has a robust offering of diversion programs and spoke with the CAB members about them.

The CAB was interested not only in how many people were in the program but also how many people were offered the program. As Tara says, “I thought that was so insightful, because to display the number of cases in diversion programs doesn’t tell the full story, especially when it comes to the work our office does. It’s not entirely our choice. We don’t just say, ‘Okay, we’re going to divert this case, and it gets diverted.’ Our role is to make an offer that’s based on an assessment of various factors, and the ultimate decision about whether to accept the offer and participate is made by the defendant.” 

The problem was that the office didn’t track how many diversions they offered and to whom. So they were not able to offer an account of the choices they made that impact the community. 

Thanks to the CAB’s interest, however, the PAO now tracks that data: offers, acceptances, rejections, completions, and revocations.

At one meeting, the CAB began asking questions about how the office collected data on the race and ethnicity of defendants. The answer was surprising–both to the CAB and the PAO. As Tara puts it: “After that meeting, we started digging around to truly understand what source our staff was using to collect race data and enter it into our system. We learned that for the most part, they were either using the police report or criminal history report. I started reaching out to local law enforcement agencies, and it turns out that there is great inconsistency in how police in our area and law enforcement in general are collecting race data.”

In part, this was because there was a good deal of misunderstanding about whether police could ask people directly for their race information. 

The result was that police were inferring race and recording their impressions as fact.

Now, based on the CAB’s questioning, the office has a “revamped and standardized process” for how to get race data that is reliable, based on self-identification.

Tara notes that one of “the beauties and the advantage of working with communities closely is being able to have a two-way conversation that helps clarify things.” For both the community and the PAO. And if the result is a more reliable, accurate, and comprehensive reporting of how cases are being handled, that is a win for everyone.