Pubdate: Wed, 15 Sep 1999
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Copyright: 1999 San Francisco Chronicle
Contact:  http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
Forum: http://www.sfgate.com/conferences/
Author: Terence Hallinan, San Francisco (CA) District Attorney
Section: page A27

JUDGE PERFORMANCE BY RESULTS, NOT NUMBERS

Success of S.F. district attorney's office hinges on enhanced public safety
and if we've broken cycle of social despair

Terence Hallinan

IT IS MORE THAN IRONIC that as this election season begins to churn, there
are those who are judging performance by looking at numbers and not at
results; by looking at statistics without analyzing what they mean about
the overall quality of life. It is particularly ironic because, when I ran
for office as San Francisco's district attorney four years ago, I made it a
point that my administration's success or failure would not be defined by
raw numbers wholly related to incarceration rates. I knew, like many of
you, that while slamming cell doors and herding masses of people into jails
could create some startling figures, it would not necessarily make our
community safer, stronger nor, certainly, more humane.

For one thing, locking people up is extremely labor intensive. It
overcrowds the courts, overcrowds the already filled-to-capacity jails,
overwhelming the criminal justice system that is perennially backlogged.
Locking up people is not cost-effective. It chews up taxpayers' dollars at
a staggering rate. The simplest felony case costs between $2,000 and $4,000
a day to adjudicate. If it results in a conviction, the annual cost to
warehouse the person in prison is $43,700, surpassing tuition costs at the
University of California or Stanford. And, of course, once released from
jail, the cycle starts over again with community chaos, criminal arrests,
prosecutions and jail -- presumably until the defendant dies or the
criminal justice system collapses under its own weight. So, I decided there
had to be a better way.

I decided, that for me, success or failure surely would hinge on whether
there was an enhanced feeling of public safety; it would hinge on whether
street crime was down, on whether our city parks were safer for our
children and, most of all, on whether we had made a break in the cycle that
had given rise to the social despair in the first place. I said all of this
when I first declared a run for this office. I promised to punish violent
lawbreakers and to use innovative and nontraditional ways to stunt crime.
And I am now eager to tell you that, if one uses appropriate benchmarks, my
office has succeeded. I have kept my promise.

None of this means we have "gone soft on crime," least of all violent
crime. In fact, we have done the job of putting in jail those who deserve
to be in jail, of giving long prison terms to the most violent. Our 91
percent felony conviction rate for cases that go to trial seems to bear
this out. We also have not lost a murder case in more than year, amassing
15 murder convictions in a row -- a performance virtually unprecedented by
any district attorney's office. Still, I believe the real chore for any
society is to find the proper balance between punishment and compassion, to
recognize when you have gone too far either way. This is a difficult task.
But if you only lock people up, you miss the opportunity to change people,
to alter conduct in ways that makes our city not just safer but better.
That is why The Chronicle story skewering my office for what it called a
low conviction rate was unfair. First, it said that my office's conviction
rate was the lowest of any county in the state. In virtually every other
county, the police weed out weak cases before sending them to the district
attorney's office. In other words, those arrests don't count. But in San
Francisco, police sent all but seven of the county's 16,614 cases to my
office, weak or not. The result is that conviction rates, when compared
with arrest rates, are inherently lower here.

For example, in 1998, police in Contra Costa County threw out 1,442 felony
cases; San Diego County threw out 3,872, according to state Department of
Justice data. In Alameda County, 2,003 of 17,843 felony arrests were tossed
out before they were handed over for prosecution. However, when the
conviction rate is calculated as the rate of convictions per complaint
filed, my office fares well with a 67.3 percent conviction rate.

Also adding confusion to the numbers' game is the fact that San Francisco
prides itself on offering criminal diversion programs which

- --since a successful diversion means dismissal of a court case -- also tend
to further lower the conviction-to-arrest ratio.

This year alone, there have been about 2,200 nonviolent felony cases
referred to pretrial diversion and an additional 1,025 to drug diversion.
During the past three years, there have been 2,638 participants in my
first-time offenders prostitution program, more than 500 participants in
our drug court and about 150 referrals to our mentor court.

I am committed to these programs because they have proven to me that they
work in our effort to reduce crime. For example, my prostitution program,
with its more than 2,600 participants, has a 1 percent recidivism rate.
Clearly, we are succeeding here. Moreover, my drug diversion programs this
year won international recognition from the Drug Policy Foundation in
Washington, D.C., and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
University for turning people away from dope or jail and toward productive
lives. One young man left the crime cycle for San Francisco City College,
earned a 3.7 GPA and a scholarship to Shaw University in North Carolina.
While this young man, and hundreds like him, count as a statistical loss
for my office, our city benefits big-time. Our prostitution program has
also won global acclaim as judged by the fact that it is now a model for 28
other cities worldwide, including Las Vegas, Paris, Los Angeles, London,
Seattle, Toronto, Boston and Nova Scotia. In addition to these programs, I
have a mentor court, a bad check program, a community dispute and mediation
service, drug diversion, a bad check program, community court, drug court
and pretrial diversion programs that have steered people away from crime
and our costly, overburdened judicial process.

All of these diversion cases, which are dismissed upon successful
completion of the appropriate diversion program, negatively impact my
office's arrest-conviction rate, a rate that has little to do with how well
we're really doing. In fact, crime in San Francisco is lower than it's been
in three decades. Our drop in crime has been greater than any other county
in the state. How do you account for that if we are botching cases and
releasing felons at the rate the newspaper story says we are?

HOW THE CHRONICLE GOT THE NUMBERS

On September 2, The Chronicle published a special report that found that
San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan has the lowest conviction
rate among California prosecutors.

The Chronicle's numbers came directly from the California Department of
Justice. The two methodologies The Chronicle used were the same as the DOJ
uses.

The first DOJ method calculates the conviction rate as the percentage of
convictions per felony arrests.

The second DOJ method takes into account cases dismissed by law enforcement
agencies and prosecutors before complaints are filed. This method
calculates the conviction rate as the percentage of convictions per
complaints filed.

In some counties, including San Francisco and Sacramento, law enforcement
agencies dismiss only a few felony arrests, whereas in others, including
Alameda and Contra Costa, law enforcement agencies dismiss hundreds of cases.

Both DOJ methods show Hallinan has the lowest conviction rate in the state.

Terence Hallinan is the district attorney of San Francisco.

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