Prosecutorial data systems cannot measure defendants’ race or ethnicity reliably

Evidence

Sixth, prosecutors can collect better data and share these data with the public and researchers. As the American Bar Association (ABA) standards argue, “A prosecutor’s office should be proactive in efforts to detect, investigate, and eliminate improper biases, with particular attention to historically persistent biases like race, in all of its work” (American Bar Association, 2018, Standard 3-1.6). This would involve assessing racial and ethnic disparities at every decision point and for a wide range of offenses over time so they can learn how disparities evolve and how new policies affect these disparities. Prosecutors should train their staffs, and especially their mid-level management, in using these data to critically examine their decisions and case dispositions by race and ethnicity. Prosecutorial offices should also improve their data accuracy. For example, most prosecutorial offices currently do not have reliable measures for defendants’ and victims’ race and ethnicity so researchers are forced to rely on official labels (which generally stem from the police officers’ determinations of defendants’ race) or come up with non-perfect alternatives for estimating ethnicity. Asians and Native Americans are still often classified as “other race” in case tracking systems, making it nearly impossible to include them in analyses. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 616

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of how race data is constructed by officials rather than self-identified, echoing the earlier chapters’ discussion of bias entering at the point of official labeling. — connects to: Peremptory challenges cannot exclude jurors by race or gender. — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 832
• SEED: Angle: how ‘other race’ classification silently erases Asian and Native American defendants from disparity analyses, making reform invisible.