SAN JOSE — Significant racial disparities continue to surface in criminal prosecutions in Santa Clara County, worsened by poverty and poor feelings of safety, according to a new introspective report by the District Attorney’s Office.
Besides chronicling an ongoing over-representation of Latino and black residents in felony and misdemeanor cases, the office’s third annual “Race and Prosecutions” report highlights how prosecutors are paying close attention to the county’s most crime-affected neighborhoods, and are being tested with experimental “race-blind” case evaluations.
Latino residents account for 45 and 46 percent of felony and misdemeanor charges even though they make up just 26 percent of the county’s population, according to the report, released last week and current to 2017 — the latest year for which fully analyzed figures were available.
Similarly, while they make up just 2 percent of the population, black residents accounted for 13 percent of charged felonies and 11 percent of charged misdemeanors in 2017.
White and Asian residents continue to be underrepresented in criminal prosecutions. Thirty-three percent of Santa Clara County residents are white, but represent only 22 percent of those charged with felonies and 25 percent of those facing misdemeanor charges.
Asian defendants accounted for 8 percent of both felonies and misdemeanor charges, despite making up 35 percent of the county population.
District Attorney Jeff Rosen said he commissioned the report, even with the harsh light it shines on the local criminal-justice system, because of what the cumulative data could mean for police and community and civil-rights groups trying to turn the tide on systemic inequalities.
“We study what we’re doing internally to ensure we’re not exacerbating disproportionality that already exists. I think a report like this also helps me and helps the community see where we should be investing law-enforcement resources,” Rosen said. “It explains why we have three community prosecutors in the east side of San Jose.”
He was referring to his office’s neighborhood-based attorneys tasked with driving down juvenile crime and truancy, akin to community policing. A segment of the report focused the county’s five ZIP codes that chart the highest rates of crime, three of which encompass large portions of East San Jose. The other two are in downtown San Jose and Gilroy.
As part of a broader statistical look, the report analyzed those areas by drawing from Census data and county public health surveys. It found they all have higher rates of families with children living below the poverty line than the county average of 7.4 percent, with around double that rate in the three East San Jose ZIP codes. In 2017, the Census-designated annual income poverty threshold for a family of four was $25,000.
The report also found that in all five of the highlighted ZIP codes, 63 percent to 81 percent of surveyed adults responded that crime “is somewhat or a major problem.”
Latino and black defendants also were over-represented in gun and gang charges in 2017, with Latinos making up 47 percent of gun enhancement charges defendants and black defendants accounting for 17 percent. Seven in 10 gang enhancement charges were filed against Latino defendants, and about two in 10 were filed against black defendants.
Police academics often take issue with using Census population data as a baseline for what proportionality should look like, since that presumes crime — or at least the number of police calls — is evenly distributed throughout a jurisdiction. A self-commissioned racial-disparity report by the San Jose Police Department in 2017 used traffic-collision and crime-report figures to benchmark arrest and police stop data. That baseline narrowed the margin, but the broader disparities drawn from using Census data still shone through.
The report found an even sharper over-representation of Latino defendants in juvenile crimes, accounting for 65 to 75 percent of suspects in juvenile carjacking, robbery, burglary and auto theft cases where charges were filed in 2017.
Molly O’Neal, chief public defender for the county, credited Rosen for scrutinizing how race factors into prosecutions, but wants to see a sharper focus on what could be behind the juvenile case trend.
“We have a Juvenile Hall and a juvenile ranch that hovers around 85 percent Hispanic,” she said.
Rosen echoed his contention that the report is meant to be a reference point for other parts of the criminal-justice system, since by the time a case has gotten to the prosecution stage, many of the factors that drive the imbalances — from poverty to gang influences to policing — have already played out.
“We’re the last stop on this rail line,” he said.
Along that line, Rosen’s office has partnered with BetaGov, a research firm at New York University that helped launch the first “Race and Prosecutions” report, to conduct what they call “race-blind” charging evaluations.
In a limited trial of 74 cases, prosecutors in a control group made charging decisions mostly similar to a group of prosecutors who reviewed a set of assault, robbery and auto theft cases but with racial information scrubbed. Except in one category: For a reason that has no clear explanation, the prosecutors who did not have race information decided to charge black suspects in 21 percent of their cases, while the control group did so in 8 percent of their charging recommendations.
Any conclusions from that would have meager statistical significance, given that the office filed more than than 35,000 felony and misdemeanor charges in 2017. Finding cases where race can be effectively scrubbed for comparison purposes is tough: Any case that hinges on photo or video evidence is naturally out. But to Rosen, the mere presence of the trial works as a form of quality control for his prosecutors.
“They know we’re studying this,” he said. “It’s just a way to remind people this is important.”
