- (female announcer) Production funding for Behind the Headlines is made possible in part by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

- The data behind the criminal justice system, tonight, on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] I am Eric Barnes with The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for joining us.

I'm joined tonight by Bill Gibbons.

He's executive director of the Public Safety Institute at the U of M, among other titles.

Thank you for being here.

- Good to be here.

- Jonathan Bennett is a data scientist at the U of M, working on, among other things, data behind and in that reflects the criminal justice system.

Thanks for being here.

- Thank you very much.

- Along with Bill Dries, reporter with The Daily Memphian.

Let me start with this.

We're gonna go really wonky into the data and there's data online that we've written about and on the U of M sites and so on.

But I'll start with you, Bill.

I mentioned you're here in the capacity of Public Safety Institute, but also the head of the Memphis-Shelby County Crime Commission, former Shelby County DA, former head of Department of Homeland Security for State of Tennessee and other things.

When we talk about all this data, and before we get into it, and this is a very wonky show, so I wanna go deep into the data, but what is the impact of this?

What are the takeaways?

Some of this is driven by some work that Jonathan has done.

The state comptroller did a big report on the court system and caseloads and even the computer systems.

Talk about the real world impacts.

- Well, first of all, the comptroller did the study because the lieutenant governor was seeing some real concerns from Shelby County legislators and others about the state criminal justice system in Shelby County.

So that really precipitated the comptroller's study.

The big takeaways are really kind of twofold.

On the one hand, we have a huge caseload in our state criminal justice system in Shelby County.

When you add it all up, and it's hard to get an exact figure, which is part of the problem.

But when you add it all up, it probably comes to around a hundred thousand cases per year.

That's a huge number.

The other side of the coin is that there are some real challenges to handling that caseload efficiently and in a transparent way so that the key stakeholders and the public really understands what's going on, what's being handled effectively and what needs improvement.

- And it is interesting, and I think it's next week or the week after, we'll have Josh Spickler and another person from Just City, which is a criminal justice reform.

And they've done a lot of digging into the data.

I think Public Safety Institute's dug into the data and it comes to different answers.

And some people say, "Well, that's political or that's different points of view."

Some of it's the data's a mess, right?

I mean, the data is not consistent.

And that's part of what this big report from the state, let me switch to you, Jonathan.

The data is not clean.

It is not ideal for analysis and getting objective realities about what's going on with defendants and the accused and bail, all those sorts of things.

Is that fair?

- Well, I would say that, you know, I would say this is really not a Memphis problem.

This is something that we see in a lot.

It's common among criminal justice systems across the nation where we, and this is something that the comptroller pointed out in its report.

Essentially, it's difficult in the criminal justice system to get reliable data because of the number of agencies that are involved in the system.

So the words that the comptroller said from a national study is that "it's often sparse, scattered, and stale".

So sparse meaning just to get a lot of parameters about the system can be, it's just challenging because to track a case requires you to go, I mean, essentially the police arrest a defendant, the sheriff handles the jail.

It goes to two court systems in Shelby County.

So to piece this together, it is a challenge.

- Even in this comptroller report, they talked about how they couldn't track certain people across the General SessionS Criminal Courts to the Shelby County Criminal Courts because the unique ID was different.

It'd be like having two different social security numbers, and so you lose track.

And this was data from 2024, 2023.

Let me turn to you, Bill, and actually throw you a curve ball and ask you a question.

We, in journalism, we get real frustrated that we can't get real good data easily from the court system, police, and so on, on what's going on, especially as crime really spiked in COVID, how many people, the whole debates around rearrests, the debates on impact on bail, which Jonathan's done a bunch of work on.

In your many years of covering the criminal justice system and local government, is it gotten worse, better, the same with different shadings, or what?

- I think it's about the same.

I think that the problems that you outlined are a function of two things.

Number one is the participants in the system, they have a different goal than Jonathan does and people who look at the statistics.

They look at this one case at a time.

I think the other thing is, is that it it's very political.

You knew I was going there.

- Yeah.

- Because you have elected clerks, you have elected judges, and one part of the system is saying, "This is how we it here."

The other part of the system says, "This is how we do it here "and it's different and we don't really care what happens to the next part of the system it goes to."

- Bill.

- By the way, when I said about a hundred thousand cases per year, that's everything from driving on a revoked license or being a habitual motor vehicle offender all the way up to murder and everything in between.

So there's a lot there.

But I think the other Bill kind of hit on something.

First of all, there are some parts of the system that do a pretty good job of timely submitting fairly accurate data.

I'll give two examples.

Number one is the Memphis Police Department, but they have the Real-Time Crime Center devoted to generating data and doing it in a timely manner.

And you probably get daily information, Bill, as a reporter from the Memphis Police Department.

But they have the resources necessary to do that.

The other example is the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, which the Public Safety Institute and the Crime Commission really rely upon in terms of crime data, but they have a whole unit devoted to collecting that data and pushing it out.

When you get to the Clerk's Offices, for example, I don't think it's necessarily intentional on their part, but I think that they are probably a little concerned about whether they have the ability to generate data accurately and in a timely manner.

And it's frankly, to some degree, a matter of resources in those offices.

- Well I heard, I mean, when DA Mulroy was elected and Juvenile Court Judge Sugarmon, which would be two and a half years ago now if my math is right, both walked into and said, I heard from other people, it was a mess.

A lot of work, a lot of data that was on paper, a lot of outdated, really outdated computer systems, all that stuff doesn't help.

And all that stuff makes us in the media and then in the public frustrated that somehow people are withholding.

It is interesting, MPD has been better about, you know, that you can go online, you can download all that data.

They're not great about certain data.

I will say that, that we have to work really hard to get and is extremely frustrating that they have and do not come forward with.

But that's a whole other show.

All right, let's dig into some of the findings.

Let's do that.

Jonathan, for you, some of the things you wanna highlight.

And again, let's say, you know, you all talked to the comptroller in their big report on the court system.

You've also done work on bail and impact of changes in bail, the amounts.

So hit your highlights.

- Yeah, so where I've done a lot of my work is in the pretrial detention system.

And so the reason that we partnered with Shelby County Government on this was because, when it passed the Shelby County Commission and the General Sessions Court implemented bail reform in 2022, one of the requirements that the Commission implemented as part of its enabling resolution is that we track certain parameters.

Which, by the way, is a way that we often get a lot of data nationwide from other court systems.

It's often associated with reform initiatives.

And so, you know, the county has collected data on individual cases, but it found it to be challenging to sort of put the data together across these different agencies.

And I have to say, having looked at this data, there is a lot of data, but it is a pretty difficult data science thing to do.

I mean, I've spent numerous weekends over the past year piecing together large files.

I think it was 126 files, a gigabyte of data.

But essentially, what we did is we started with bail and looked essentially at downstream impacts.

And so some of the highlights of the results is, so we looked at initial bail settings by judicial commissioners.

Those seem to have increased in 2024.

And the timing does seem associated with some of the bail policies that were implemented as prioritizing public safety in the state legislature.

One big question that I know is on a lot of people's minds is: Do these bail policies impact public safety?

I have not really seen an effect that's distinguishable from statistical chance.

And yeah, we got a lot of issues as well as fairness as well.

It's on our website at Memphis.edu/ctre, all 37 pages for anyone who's interested.

- Yeah, yeah.

Let's go to Bill.

- When you say not a lot of difference in the bail practices, is that from the original bail reform to the laws that the legislature enacted as a reaction to the first set of changes?

- Yeah, so it's a really interesting dynamic.

So historically, and we've done this for many, many years, is that the bonds are initially set by judicial commissioners, which are essentially appointed by the County Commission.

At that level, we didn't see much of a change because of the standing bail order, but we have seen an increase in bond amounts attributable likely due to 2024 sort of pushback against bail reform.

However, something that I think sometimes gets lost is the bail review process.

And so one of the requirements of the 2022 bail reform was implementing essentially a bail review hearing, where if you're still in jail after 72 hours, the defendant would be represented by an attorney.

And the prosecutor essentially tries to re-evaluate that bail amount.

That has not been taken away in any of the bail reform, in sort of the bail pushback legislation that is still there and probably is the most, in my view, is probably the most interesting part of the standing bail order, statistically.

I find that about 20% of these bail review hearings do end in a release on recognizance outcome, meaning that the defendant, even though they're prior were given a monetary bond that is sort of taken away.

- It's reduced.

- Exactly.

- So does that mean that the initial decision was an error?

- I wouldn't call it an error.

So there are certain legal standards that, to some extent, are state law, but were sort of formalized with also some additional attention to affordability of the bond.

And so essentially, what the order requires is that at each review, it's a de novo review, meaning that it's not so much you're looking at the previous bond and determining whether it was wrong.

It's more that we're gonna ignore what the previous judicial commissioner said and just review it fresh.

- Okay.

Bill, when you hear that, what's kind of your thought?

Are there too many people looking at something that everybody could have a different view on?

- No, I don't think so.

I think that the process that Jonathan just outlined is a pretty good process.

I will point out one thing that, and Jonathan kind of alluded to this, one thing that the comptroller's report pointed out.

They looked at, specifically, I believe 95 felony cases.

They were individuals were out on bail awaiting disposition of their cases.

And they pointed out that only seven had picked up new charges, which looks pretty good.

However, that may just be the tip of the iceberg because as you know, our clearance rates, our solve rates for crimes are pretty low.

So we don't know for sure, but they may have been responsible for other crimes committed, but they simply haven't been identified and charged.

So, you know, that's just something to factor in to all this.

- And that's something we hear a lot of.

Well, you don't know what else they've done.

But if you look at that statement, how do you know that they didn't do anything?

- That's right.

It's an unknown.

And frankly, I'm not sure how we, unless we drastically improve the clearance rates, which gets into staffing of investigative bureaus and so on, we won't know the answer to that.

- Well, I mean, so is that something that realistically should be factored into this?

- I don't see how you can factor it in, but as Jonathan pointed out, the legislature has made public safety as the number one factor.

So you look at the seriousness of the charge facing that individual, you look at his prior record and so on, and try to make that decision as best you can.

- Okay, so there are cases where a judge has to consider some kind of bail and a lot of times what you hear is we wanna make the bail high enough so that that person cannot be released.

Why don't we just say no bail?

- Well, first of all, in terms of setting a bail just so that someone cannot be released would be really contrary to state law.

So that's a whole different issue.

- It's in fact the state constitution as well.

It's not just the state law.

- But the state constitution provides that someone is entitled to reasonable bail unless they're facing a capital charge, facing the death penalty, in which case a judge can detain that person prior to trial without bail.

But it's only limited to that.

Now, we are about to have a referendum next year to amend that constitutional provision to provide that judges within their discretion can deny bail in other serious crimes, in other serious cases.

That constitutional amendment is gonna pass this legislative session and will be on the ballot next year.

- Pass is putting it out as a referendum.

- Putting it out as a referendum.

- A fact, unless the voters choose in what, '26 or something like that.

- That is correct.

November of 2026.

So that'll be a big item, a lot of discussion, but it will increase the ability of judges to deny bail.

Now, will they deny bail in a lot of additional cases?

Probably not, but it will give them that discretion to do so.

- Is there anything in the data, Jonathan, that is kind of a way to predict what the impact of that might be?

- Well, it's a difficult question and so something that, you know, we look forward to is, you know, sort of using policies that are implemented recently or in the future to, you know, continue our work and look at these policy impacts, which is really the focus of our work.

- One thing I would, about eight minutes here in show, around bail, one of the big questions we see, you know, in feedback on stories we do, we've talked about a lot at this table with the very people in the public safety criminal justice system is the whole rearrest thing.

So we were talking about if someone's rearrested within 120 days, again, taking out the part you brought up, that if they weren't rearrested, they may have committed a crime that no one knows about it, but we can't solve for that.

But in terms of people who were rearrested within 120 days, this is 2022 data, it was in the comptroller report, Just City, the criminal justice reform group, found about 17%.

Again, the data is muddy.

About 17% of people were rearrested while they were out on bail.

A U of M study, and I don't know if this was you or a predecessor to you, found about 15%.

So there's a number, and it's funny 'cause in in the politics of this, that will be presented as a big difference.

Twelve percent versus seventeen or fifteen versus seventeen.

Very different methodologies, but would seem to me you're the data scientist, about the same number.

- Yeah, and in our recent report last month, we tried to pin that down a little bit more in terms of, okay, if there's this small change, is this actually meaningful?

And so something we did is we looked at, you can look at one-week increments, so what's the rearrest rate one week before, one week after a policy has changed.

And so we essentially implemented a statistical model to try to figure out, okay, are we seeing a real change or is this just something that will happen just out of randomness?

I don't really see, from my analysis, a statistically identifiable difference before and after the policy.

- Let me shift gears a little bit, but we're having this whole conversation against the backdrop, and again, I have Just City coming up soon and DA Mulroy coming up soon.

We had Police Chief CJ Davis on the show, I think it's probably two months ago now, but still very relevant.

You get all that at WKNO.org or Daily Memphian on YouTube.

But Bill, crime's down.

Crime was down pretty dramatically in some categories just looking at 2023-2024.

I mean, just to talk about it, major property was down 20% and really close to the 2016 numbers, which was kind of the low watermark for property crime, robberies down to near 20-year lows.

Juvenile crime has been trending down, that data's kinda lagging, I think it's a little bit older.

Overall crime was down 11% last year.

Violent crime was only down 4%, but murders were down 30%.

What do we make of all this?

- Well, first of all, it's very encouraging and for the first quarter of 2025, that downward trend is continuing.

So hopefully it will continue.

But I think it's a result of doing a lot of things correctly.

I think the Memphis Police Department, for example, is doing a better job of hotspot policing than maybe it was doing previously.

They've kinda tweaked what they're doing.

To put it in context though, in most of those categories, Eric, and not all of them, in most of those categories, we're still not at pre-pandemic levels.

We're moving in the right direction, but we have a ways to go.

Can I get back to the comptroller's report real quick?

- Yeah, yeah, sure.

- I mean, the comptroller pointed out 18 examples, I believe, of where the system needs to be more transparent so that stakeholders and the public can have a better understanding of what the strengths are and what the weaknesses are.

Examples: How long it takes to dispose of cases, how many continuances were given and why.

- What's a continuance?

- Putting off the trial.

I need a continuance.

I haven't found my witnesses or whatever.

How many cases are being dismissed and why?

The sentence that's given, is that on the high range of a possible sentence or on the low range?

Those are examples of what the comptroller pointed out that there needs to be transparency for.

If I could just use, very quickly, an example of disposition of cases.

The comptroller pointed out that we had almost 9,000 charges in felony court in 2022.

And as of July 1st, 2024, about 26% of those cases had not been disposed of.

But that's not the total picture because, as I think you pointed out, normally a felony case is gonna start out in General Sessions for preliminary matters, then it's going to go to the grand jury section of the DA's Office, and then if there's an indictment, it's going to go to Criminal Court.

You have to add all three of those segments together to figure out the disposition time for a case.

And the comptroller was able to determine the disposition time in Criminal Court.

What Jonathan would like is for, I think, I don't mean to speak for you, is to be able to consolidate all three of those to have an interoperable system.

- Well, I think everybody wants that, in the sense, whether they know it or not, because they want to know what's going on and where the numbers are, where the rearrest, what policies are working.

- And that's a big challenge to get three systems to work together, but there's a way around it.

- Let me get Bill Dries in here.

We just got a couple minutes left.

- What's the way around it?

- The way around it is very simple, but it takes a lot of work and it takes the existence of a clearinghouse to work on this.

But there is a way to determine, to take one case and to determine how much time it's in General Sessions, how much time it's sitting in the DA's Office grand jury section, and how much time it's in Criminal Court.

And it's a manual effort absent in interoperable operational system, but it can be done with a lot of labor and it takes a staff to do that and it takes some entity to service a clearinghouse.

- Jonathan.

- Yeah, and what I would add to this is, I mean, it's not just about understanding how the system works, it's also adding capacity to bring external dollars to fund the things that work.

And so what I'm really interested in, as someone who works in research and evaluation with nonprofits five days a week, I'm really interested in having the capacity to be able to find the evidence.

So if we implement a diversion program or some sort of prevention program, violence intervention, that we can look at the defendants who are enrolled in that, compare it to similar non-enrolled defendants.

And so if we build the apparatus, there's just a lot of opportunities there.

- Are there parts of the system that have to be separate as part of just due process or is all of this about turf?

- Well, I think there's a way to do it without changing dramatically how the county collects data, like collecting core data elements out of each system in an interoperable sort of clearinghouse.

That is probably the path of least resistance.

- Well, in terms of individual case information, yes, there is some that could not be made public at a certain time.

However, in terms of aggregate data, that ought to be public and ought to be available to the key stakeholders.

- All right, that is all the time.

The reports we talked about are linked to a variety of articles in The Daily Memphian, including a guest column that these two gentlemen wrote for us.

But that is all the time we have this week.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you, Bill.

Again, Josh Spickler and Just City coming up soon.

DA Mulroy, CJ Davis was on the show.

Also some other shows that you can get at WKNO.org, YouTube, wherever you get your videos or wherever you get your podcasts.

See you next week.

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