California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris has announced the release of version 1.1 of the online resource OpenJustice, which forms the newest part of her criminal justice transparency initiative.
According to the OpenJustice website, the initiative is “led by the California Department of Justice that publishes criminal justice data so we can understand how we are doing, hold ourselves accountable, and improve public policy to make California safer.”
Version 1.1 organizes data on crime, clearance, arrest rates, arrest-related deaths, deaths in custody and law enforcement officers killed or assaulted by the specific community impacted. This information is juxtaposed with contextual data on population and demography, unemployment, poverty and education attainment.
The data is grouped into six categories:
- Agency and county data
- Crime rates
- Clearance rates
- Arrest rates
- Death in custody & arrest-related deaths
- Law enforcement officers killed or assaulted
Many of the data sets (including, notably, state arrest data) include indicator variables for juvenile records, i.e. they use a 1 to indicate youth status, and a 0 to indicate otherwise, or age group classifications. From this information, it would be possible to extrapolate specific juvenile justice records on a community-by-community basis.
See the whole record database here.
