Hi Kevin -I understand from James that you're interested in a lengthier explanation of the methodology for the report. I'm a big fan of your work and know how seriously you take assignments like this so I've taken a stab at that below and am happy to answer any other follow-up questions you may have. -- I do not have any back-end access to criminal justice data systems to run large search queries so I was limited to only using the relatively unwieldy public-facing tools. These required labor-intensive manual searches. -- From 2015-17 I was one of the city's representatives on King County's Familiar Faces Initiative. https://www.kingcounty.gov/elected/executive/health-human-servicestransformation/familiar-faces.aspx That effort looked at all persons with 4 or more bookings in a rolling 12-month period during 2013-14. It identified almost 1,300 such individuals County-wide, with about 750 having a Seattle nexus. The study cross-references against other data systems and found that almost all of them had behavioral health challenges and most of them were homeless (an admitted undercount as they only cross-ref'd to HMIS). -- That effort did not look at the experience of the individuals in the criminal justice system (how many overall bookings, where, what type, what happened to them in court, etc.). It was my experience while public safety advisor to the Mayor from 2014-17 that many of the incidents that were the source of strain for Seattle's densest and busiest neighborhoods were committed by individuals with lengthy criminal histories who often qualified as Familiar Faces. It was also my experience that this fact was often buried in the crime data sets provided by SPD because there is a significant white noise of other one-off events. For example, every night in Seattle there are a couple of bar fights and random drunken disturbances or assaults. These are usually committed by people with little or no prior criminal history. While problematic for sure, they are not a major source of strain for Seattle neighborhoods (except with a few problem establishments). But from a data perspective, those one-off assaults and disturbances look the same as the mid-day random assault of a mother and child by someone with serious mental health challenges and 60 prior criminal cases. -- Long way of saying that my goal was to recreate a sample of the Familiar Faces population and deep dive into what actually happens to them in the criminal justice system. -- My starting point was to run near-daily checks of King County Jail bookings from mid-November through about mid-January. The search tool allows you to look at who was booked in the past 24 hours. https://ingress.kingcounty.gov/Public/JILS/default.aspx The search results lists charges on the right-hand side. I screened out individuals who were booked into the Regional Justice Center (south County) and individuals whose principal charge was DUI or DV (domestic violence) related. I reviewed almost all of the rest (skipping some other charges that were not related to the problems I was trying to understand. From this morning, here's what that would look like: -- When I clicked on the individual name, it shows how many bookings the person has had in the last 12month rolling period. (Data prior to that period is not immediately available to the public). For individuals with four or more bookings, I then opened up each individual booking to see whether there was a Seattle nexus (e.g., it listed Seattle Municipal Court as the court). This information is not listed in every case so I had to look for trends (e.g., if the person had two prior SMC cases and the third didn't list the court, I assumed it was in Seattle). -- Through this method I developed a list of approximately 125 individuals with 4 or more bookings in the past 12-month rolling period (note: because the data is rolling, some individuals had 4+ bookings when I reviewed them but now it would show they have fewer because early 2018 bookings are dropped). -- From that list of ~125, I checked: (1) how many criminal cases (excluding civil infractions, IN) did they have in Seattle Municipal Court -- https://web6.seattle.gov/courts/ECFPortal/Default.aspx And (2) how many criminal cases the person had in Washington State. https://dw.courts.wa.gov/ -- From the original list of ~125, I eliminated individuals who I found out had more of their recent criminal history outside of Seattle (e.g., 2 recent bookings in Seattle but closer examination showed that more of their 2017-18 record was from Everett. -- I also eliminated a handful of folks whose names were so generic that I could not be fully confident in the name search function for the WA State criminal records. (e.g., Robert B. Johnson name search could be turning up records for several people). -- Finally, I included 13 people where I was aware of ongoing criminal activity and they had a particularly high impact on public safety. For example, Travis B. is someone I have been aware of since 2014 because of his enormous impact on Cap Hill and Downtown and the ongoing hazard he poses to officers. He is still active downtown as of this week but officers have stopped arresting him in part because he always resists arrest and because he is able to evade booking into jail by claiming he swallows heroin. While he had 4 bookings in the past 12 months, none of those bookings were in Nov-January time period. Heather D. I included because SPD noted on the SPD blog that a woman was arrested in Chinatown who had admitted to 22 commercial burglaries in a 2-month period. She only had 1 booking in the 12-month rolling period but she had a significant criminal history before that and an extraordinary impact on the C/ID and Pioneer Square. -- So that was the methodology to get to ~100 individuals. Once I had that list I took a look at the demographics of the population and was glad to see that it basically matched the demographics for the larger jail population in terms of male/female, black/white, age, etc. Interestingly, the Familiar Faces study from 2015 showed a population the same M/F ratios but had a larger black population (approx. 40%). But that was also a King County-wide study. -- With the 100 list more or less set I then did a deep dive into the available case files in Seattle Municipal Court and some of the felony files from King County Superior Court. SMC case files are readily accessible. KCSC files have a pay-wall, as do KC District Court. Generally, 80-90% of the cases I looked at were misdemeanors in SMC. -- I typically reviewed the police report, conditions of release, judgment, and any bench warrants or special orders. I ended up reviewing over 1k police reports and cases and saved many of those. -- From recent police reports for any single person (usually 2016-18) I would try to identify patterns related to neighborhoods and types of criminal activity). I then recorded those in notes on my spreadsheet. I would also try to identify from the police reports and court records whether the person had indicators of a substance use disorder or homelessness. (Note: I was a little embarrassed to find that 100% of my subjects had indicators for SUD and homelessness and actively tried to identify individuals without those indicators but could not do so). All of this is consistent with the Familiar Faces study and with the anecdotal experience of public defenders, prosecutors, and judges, but still the numbers were fairly shocking to me. As discussed in the report, I identified an individual as having indicators of homelessness or SUD if that was expressly identified in court documents or police reports, but I don't have any first-hand knowledge of the actual situation for most of these individuals. -- I'm attaching a sample of police reports and other records so you can get a sense for what they look like and the information generally included. -- Obviously, the methodology I used here was not intended to be random and was subject to some biases. That said, I believe the sample is actually much more representative of what actually happens on the streets and the people having the biggest impact than I would get if I had the tools to run a data query. In my experience, there are just too many variables to run successful queries that really tell the story of what's going on and I've never seen SPD be able to do it despite the fact that they've got a great data team. -- Importantly, and somewhat to my surprise, all of the key leaders of the criminal justice system have basically acknowledged that the story the report tells is more-or-less accurate. Presiding SMC Judge Ed McKenna: 'the current system is embarrassing.' Pete Holmes: 'nothing we don't already know.' Lisa Daugaard: 'legitimate' and 'spot-on.' Dan Satterberg: 'and that's why we're trying LEAD.' -- For a journalist such as yourself who is data minded and interested in how City government functions, I would encourage you to do PDRs for further data. My strong sense is that they would tell an even more damning story. What is the FTA rate for persons with 4 or more SMC cases? What is the FTC rate? How many bench warrants outstanding for that population? Etc. For example, a few years back I asked the County person in charge of their Community Corrections and Alternative Programs (day-reporting) what their day 1 failure rate was for people who were ordered to CCAP as an alternative to incarceration (typically required to report 8 hours per day, 5 days per week until trial). The answer was 60% failed to show on day 1, 90%+ failed to complete. In each case a bench warrant was issued. These are felony-level offenders. The head of the program said that most of the participants should have never been sent to CCAP in the first place and yet that is the initial response of Superior Court for basically all non-violent felony drug and property offenders. -- Because you cover City Council, it's interesting to note that Council has not had any hearings on the operation of the criminal justice system in the past 4 or 5 years, to my knowledge. A few Qs during budget time, but that's it. -- Finally, the report heavily relies on examples of the larger trends that I read in reviewing all of these cases. Because there were so many variables in each case, and so many 1000s of cases, I was not able to code in a way to make the report more data-focused. Just telling the story of a single defendant over the course of 2.5 years (e.g. Kelly Robert J. in the report) took roughly 10 hours of looking at almost 100 documents (police reports, complaints, bench warrants, probation reports, judgments, FTAs, FTCs, etc.). With only manual access, it would have taken me a year to code all the records I read. But the SMC and City Attorney have that data at their finger tips and can do it the easy way. That said, I do have most of the cases that I reviewed in my files and feel very confident that the examples provided are very representative of larger trends and problems in the system. And I feel that's been somewhat validated by the response of the principals in charge of the system. For the purpose of shedding initial light on these problems and starting a public conversation to be continued through more in depth analysis, I think the report was fair. Scott