Justice in Decision-Making: Studying Racial & Ethnic Disparities in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office
In 2018, Brooklyn District Attorney (DA) Eric Gonzalez launched the Justice 2020 Initiative with the goal of increasing community safety, fairness, and equal justice for all. The Initiative aims to establish community-based alternatives to incarceration as the default response, shifting office resources to the cases and individuals presenting the most harm—all while engaging the community as partners. These objectives demand a range of approaches, including data-driven decision-making and transparency, which DA Gonzalez recognized as critical to both advancing effective reforms and to being accountable to the public. The DA’s office partnered with the CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance (ISLG) to conduct a systematic baseline assessment of racial and ethnic disparities across prosecutorial decision-making.
This assessment explored the full trajectory of a case: from initial case acceptance and initial charges filed by the prosecutor’s office, to bail and detention decisions, disposition, plea-bargaining, and finally, to sentencing. To provide a baseline understanding of disparities, ISLG ran statistical analyses for each decision point for all cases screened or disposed between calendar year 2016 and mid-year 2019, to document whether and to what extent outcomes were influenced by race and ethnicity, both alone and accounting for other factors, including age, gender, criminal history, and characteristics of the current case (e.g., top charge class, assigned trial bureau). Given that the office’s administrative data systems did not include much information related to the plea-bargaining process, we also conducted a review of paper case files for a subset of cases disposed of by guilty plea.
ISLG’s findings suggest evidence of disparities at key decision-making points, but they were not as pronounced across all stages; moreover, they often lessened or even disappeared when demographics, criminal history, and case characteristics were accounted for. Because these factors are often proxies for other broader structural and systemic inequities, the findings do not necessarily indicate that disparities do not exist. Nonetheless, the promising findings can be attributed in part to policies and practices implemented within the DA’s office and among other criminal legal system actors in the borough. Overall, this assessment is a first step towards developing a more holistic understanding of racial and ethnic disparities to inform the DA office’s efforts to ensure safety and fairness in decision-making practices.
Download the executive summary.