But Vance’s most significant initiative, one that has been emulated in jurisdictions from Brooklyn to San Francisco, has been to transform, through the use of data, the way district attorneys fight crime. “The question I had when I came in was, Do we sit on our hands waiting for crime to tick up, or can we do something to drive crime lower?” Vance told me one afternoon in his eighth-floor office at the Criminal Courts Building in Lower Manhattan. “I wanted to develop what I call intelligence-driven prosecution.”
.. They asked police commanders to submit a list of each precinct’s 25 worst offenders — so-called crime drivers, whose “incapacitation by the criminal-justice system would have a positive impact on the community’s safety.” Seeded with these initial cases, the C.S.U. built a searchable database that now includes more than 9,000 chronic offenders, virtually all of whom have criminal records.
.. When someone in the Arrest Alert System is picked up, even on a minor charge or a parole violation, or is arrested in another borough, any interested prosecutor is automatically pinged with a detailed email. People outside the D.A.’s office like parole officers or police intelligence officers are often notified, too.
.. “There’s a reason murders in Manhattan went from 70 in 2010 to 29 so far this year,” Karen Friedman Agnifilo, former chief of the Trial Division, told me late last year. (In January, Vance promoted Friedman Agnifilo to the No. 2 job, chief assistant district attorney.) “We figured out who are the people driving crime in Manhattan, and for four years we focused on taking them out.”
.. Did the Manhattan D.A., they ask, really need to set up a two-year study with the Vera Institute of Justice to realize the criminal-justice system was plagued by racial bias? And in light of its entrenched inequities, aren’t databases and targeted intelligence-based prosecution especially problematic?
.. “When prosecutors begin to compile databases and start doing so-called ‘smart prosecutions,’ you have to ask who is getting in the databases, what are the criteria and where are the outside checks?” says Steven Zeidman, director of the criminal-defense clinic at the CUNY School of Law. “More than a thousand people are arrested in N.Y.C. each day, and the overwhelming and disproportionate number of them are people of color arrested for ‘broken windows’ type offenses like riding a bike on the sidewalk or jaywalking. I was in court with a kid arrested for jaywalking; the arresting officer was from the gang unit, and he stopped the kid because he was wearing a red shirt that, according to the police, happened to be a gang color. He wasn’t in a gang, but he’s probably now in a database.”
.. It’s very clear to our D.A. that we are overincarcerating, and we need to do something different. Jail is not an economically sustainable model. We need to know for whom jail is appropriate and whom it isn’t. That’s where data becomes very useful.”