Newsletters

TBS Today, May 8

Yesterday was packed with meetings, so we had to put writing on hold.

We started the day in court, catching up on cases and collecting new court records.

Then it was off to the DA's office to hear Pamela Price's first annual report. It was a high-level overview describing new initiatives but thin on numbers.

Price said the office is working to create a public dashboard that will make all kinds of data readily available. Only a few DA's offices in the state have them. Her team hopes to get it done by January and has hired a new analyst to help make it happen.

Price said the DA's office is unable to provide any breakdown of felony and misdemeanor cases at this time because of the limits to the existing case management system.

That makes it tough to know what the numbers in the annual report mean. For example, she said the office filed charges in 63% of the cases submitted by law enforcement last year, compared to 61% in 2022 before she took office — but there's no qualitative information available about how charging may have changed in felony cases or any other more granular information.

We have a Public Records Act request in for some of these stats. The DA's office has repeatedly asked for more time to fulfill the request and says it will have an update in June. We'll certainly keep you posted.

Price did say she was particularly proud of the work that's been happening in her collaborative courts program, where she said she added staff and resources to help divert more cases into supportive services that can help people get back on track. (Page 6 of the report has some numbers on that.)

After the DA's press conference (our first time back at the Oakport HQ since getting turned away last year), it was off to Berkeley High for the last Safety Committee meeting of the year and then over to City Council for council's first meeting since the spring recess.

Nothing super pressing happened at any of the meetings, but it was still good to be there and we did live-tweet council meeting highlights in a thread. (An X account is needed to view the full thread.)