2024 IMPACT
Mission & Vision
We envision a world in which the criminal justice system is fully transparent, accessible, and accountable.
We are changing the future of criminal justice by developing tools that help communities, including the institutions that serve them, reshape how the system works.
Here’s a look back at the impact we’ve made in 2024, and the foundations we’ve laid for the future we know is possible.
from Our Founder
A simple truth: When high-quality data
meets an engaged, community, change happens. A Letter
The politics that dominate our national discourse change all the time; what never changes is the value of high-quality data to inform smart decision making. Data is not a luxury, it’s an imperative if we expect our criminal justice system to be efficient, fair, and effective at keeping communities safe. This is why for more than a decade we’ve been on a mission to make high-quality data a priority for the criminal justice system in the United States.
The fact is, every data point represents a life. And in order for prosecutors, police, and courts to make the best choices to improve those lives, the data they use needs to be accurate and reliable, not to mention available.
The problem is that the criminal justice system is years behind when it comes to data. Some offices still use steno pads. Others don’t record data at all. Some offices do record data, but not very consistently. And others lead the nation in terms of their tech and data chops, but they are few and far between.
The country’s data infrastructure needs an overhaul. So does the way prosecutors, courts, and the police use data to interface with their communities.
After all, the power of data cuts both ways. It helps law enforcement get a better handle on how they are doing their work and it helps communities pursue the change they want to see. We’ve seen this logic pan out time and again.
In 2020, we made 20 states’ worth of court data public and saw officials step up to change their policies.
In 2021, we launched a platform called Commons that brings the public and prosecutors together to set policy goals with high-quality data. Again, we’ve seen officials use the data to change their policies.
Our takeaway is this: When high-quality data meets an engaged community, change happens.
This is why we spent 2024 developing ways to help more counties get both pieces of the puzzle: high-quality data and an engaged community. Today, we offer agencies tools that focus on improving their data and making it public, and we pioneered new ways to engage with and increase data literacy in communities.
We had a great year working with:
• Eager prosecutor offices that are committed to improving outcomes in their communities and that understand that high-quality data is essential for achieving their goals;
• Police departments that are on the frontlines of unprecedented transparency into their work;
• Whole communities and individual members of the public who are committed to improving the system, and using data for change; and
• Audiences across the country viewing our Webby-nominated video series called Let’s Be Clear to draw attention to the fact that beyond every data point is a person.
We’re excited about the groundwork we’ve laid this year, ensuring more counties have access to high-quality data for better outcomes in criminal justice. I hope you join us in 2025 in our commitment to a more accessible, transparent, and accountable criminal justice system.
Amy Bach CEO and Founder Measures
for Justice
2024 IMPACT AT A GLANCE
First national set of police measures created and set to launch with two police departments on our publicfacing data platform, Commons.
Data quality improvement support via Groundwork provided to counties throughout the country, including California, Texas, Virginia, Florida, Tennessee, Minnesota, Washington, and Louisiana.
Created a national network, All In, to address the challenges and barriers to collecting, accessing, and using criminal justice data to reshape the system.
ACTIVE LOCATIONS
Launched Commons in Jackson County, Missouri, featuring prosecutor data and policy goal recommendations set in partnership with community members and the prosecuting attorney.
Advanced strategic partnerships as part of a collaborative strategy to help counties access high-quality data for change.
Hosted community events across the country to hear about their needs, share our work, and carve out various paths towards criminal justice data transparency, accessibility, and accountability.
By sharing verified, actionable data, we’re laying the groundwork for unprecedented collaboration between community members and government entities. This isn’t just about bringing issues to light; it’s about crafting innovative, community-driven solutions together.
- Kyle Hollins Executive Director & Founder
Lyrik’s Institution, Jackson County, MO, Community Advisory Board member, Jackson County, MO and Executive Director & Founder of Lyrik’s Institution
The critical piece of criminal justice reform is if you don’t have the data, you can’t hold people accountable to anything. In order to look at the decisions people make, you gotta see the trends, you need to see the data and be able to analyze that.
- Dr. Jaime Michel
Data Director, Fairfax County, Virginia Commonwealth’s Attorney Office
2025 AND BEYOND
• First Police Commons launches in West Sacramento, California, and Rochester, New York
• Prosecutor Commons launching in Thurston, Washington
• Groundwork sites across the country, including Alabama, Michigan, and New York State
• New court data for Michigan on our National Data Portal
• Expanded programming for members of the All In Network
• Rolling out data literacy efforts to more communities
Commons: The Future As We See It
Imagine your criminal justice leaders working alongside the public, providing insight into their decisions, and coming together to create new policies that spark the changes the community wants to see.
This is what we imagine every day as we build the tools, services, and platforms necessary to get us there.
Today, our means to get to this vision is Commons, a data platform that tracks how cases are being handled at the local level. The platform currently serves prosecutor offices and police departments, and has the added advantage of being informed by community needs:
it’s created with public input from leaders in the community and features data and policy goals the community wants to see.
Commons is available in communities across the country. In each, we’ve seen the tremendous impact high-quality transparent data has on policy change for the betterment of these communities. The future we envision has public data platforms and communities that engage with them in places across the country. In that vision, high-quality data is ubiquitous, and communitycentered, evidence-based policy decisions are the norm, and communities are using data to make the changes they want to see.
We know our vision is possible because we’ve seen it take hold: from California to New York and in between, change is happening when high-quality data meets an engaged community. Here are just a few of those stories:
The Future As We See It
Yolo County, CA
Commons and Community: Listening, Learning, and Improving
Diane Ortiz is a Deputy District Attorney in Yolo County, California. She’s an unusual sight. As she puts it: “There aren’t very many Latina prosecutors statewide because culturally, we’re on the opposite side of where we should be.”
This, at least, is the attitude of some in her community: “There was a family member of mine who once said, ‘You work for the oppressors’, and I’m more like, ‘Well, wait a minute, Latinas and Latinos are also victims of crime, and I want to protect them’. They’re hardworking; they get their tools stolen from the back of their truck; there’s domestic violence. And so as a prosecutor, I want to be able to meet with a victim and say, ‘I get it. I understand you, I speak your language, I look like you. I’m here for you.’”
This perspective makes Ortiz uniquely attuned to issues facing her community. So when the District Attorney asked her to investigate troubling DUI arrest data revealed in Commons–more Hispanics were being arrested for DUIs than white defendants–she did not hesitate to step in.
Driving while intoxicated is serious— it endangers lives. But a DUI arrest can also devastate a person’s
future: loss of a driver’s license, loss of employment, and thousands of dollars in legal fees.
As Ortiz put it, “We couldn’t unsee what we saw, so now it’s our responsibility as D.A.s to look into things. We don’t want to prosecute people for DUIs. We want those numbers to drop. So how do we get these numbers to drop?”
Oritz launched an investigation that combined outreach both to the police and leaders in the Hispanic community. Her goal was to understand and address the disparity, whether that meant reducing driving under the influence among Latinos in the community, or investigating disparate arrest practices, or both.
Since her outreach began, the disparity has closed:
Ortiz began her work that month and in the months that followed, DUI arrests for both Hispanic and white defendants began to trend lower and the gap between them began to close.
This is what happens when highquality data that can be easily understood meets an engaged community–in this case, a motivated D.A. who wants to help save lives and keep people out of the system.
In September 2023, four times as many Hispanic or Latino defendants were being arrested for DUI as white defendants.
In the months after Ortiz began her work, DUI arrests for both Hispanic and white defendants began to trend lower and the gap between them began to close.
But for Commons, I don’t know how we would have known any of this was happening.
-
Diane Ortiz Deputy District Attorney, Yolo County District Attorney
As We See It
The Future
Thurston County, WA
How a Community Gets Incisive with Data
There’s a lot of disconnect between prosecutor offices and the people they serve. Besides mutual distrust, there’s just a lot of misunderstanding. Consider what we saw happen between the Thurston County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office (PAO) in Washington State and its community advisory board. Until we began working with the office on a Commons, they had never worked directly with community leaders on data transparency and policy goals. What happened was eye opening for everyone.
We began working with Tara Hughes Tsehlana, the Public Engagement Officer at the PAO. As part of the Commons effort, community leaders formed a Community Advisory Board (CAB) and worked together with the PAO throughout the process.
The CAB’s influence was outsized from the start. As Tara explains, “Just hearing what their questions were and what [the community’s] challenges are helps us be more creative, imaginative, and innovative when it comes to making shifts in our local criminal justice process. It also helps us give them an account of why we make the choices we do.”
What was most illuminating for the PAO was the information gap between what the office shares and what the community wants to see.
For instance, the CAB wanted to hear more about the PAO’s
diversion program—a means of helping defendants avoid traditional prosecution and a criminal record by completing a program of service, training, or rehab.
Specifically, the CAB wanted to know how many people were offered the program as opposed to how many people were in the program. As Tara says, “I thought that was so insightful, because to display the number of diversion programs that people are in doesn’t tell the full story, especially when it comes to the work our office does. It’s not entirely our choice. We don’t just say, ‘Okay, we’re going to divert this case’, and it gets diverted. All we can do is make an offer. But the decision depends on multiple factors that weigh risk and need.”
The problem was: the office didn’t track that data.
Thanks to the CAB’s interest, however, the PAO made a change. The office now tracks and can readily access a range of diversion data, including offers, acceptances, rejections, completions, and revocations.
This change wouldn’t have happened without the community, without a willing PAO, without Commons. And the result is a public that has a better understanding of what choices the office makes.
Just hearing what [the community’s] questions were and what their challenges are helps us be more creative, imaginative, and innovative when it comes to making shifts in our local criminal justice process. It also helps us give them an account of why we make the choices we do.”
- Tara Hughes Tsehlana Public Engagement Officer, Thurston County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office
The Future As We See It
Thurston County, WA
Better Reporting Equals Better Data
The changes in Thurston County didn’t stop there.
At one of the several meetings the CAB had with the prosecutor’s office during the Commons process, they began asking questions about how the office collected data on the race and ethnicity of defendants. The answer was surprising–both to the CAB and the PAO.
As Tara puts it: “After that meeting, we started digging around to truly understand what source our staff was using to collect race data and enter it into our system. We learned that for the most part, they were either using the police report or criminal history report. I started reaching out to local law enforcement agencies, and it turns out that there is great inconsistency in how police in our area and law enforcement in general are collecting race data.”
In part, this was because there was a good deal of misunderstanding about whether police could ask people directly for their race information.
The result was that police were inferring race and recording
their impressions as fact, like so many places across the country..
Now, based on the CAB’s questioning, the office has a “revamped and standardized process” for how to get race data that is reliable, based on self-identification. The upshot is more realistic reporting on whether equitable practices are being pursued across demographics.
Tara notes that one of “the beauties and the advantage of working with communities closely is being able to have a two-way conversation that helps clarify things.”
For both the community and the PAO. And if the result is a more reliable, accurate, and comprehensive reporting of how cases are being handled, that is a win for everyone.
The best part of all? These stories of change in Thurston County were made possible during the creation of a Commons site, before the platform was ever available to the wider public. Just imagine all of the good that will come when the entire nation can get in on the conversation, too.
One of the beauties and the advantage of working with communities closely is being able to have a two-way conversation that helps clarify things.
- Tara Hughes Tsehlana
Public Engagement Officer, Thurston County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office
DEVELOPING POLICE MEASURES
We’ve spent the past several years developing a national set of Police Measures designed with input from both community leaders and law enforcement agencies.
Policing in the United States is always under scrutiny. While some argue it’s a system beyond repair and call for its abolition, others point to rising crime rates as a reason to invest more heavily in law enforcement.
We believe the best way to enable communities to reshape a system is to help them understand as much about it as possible, and this requires clear, accessible, and holistic data to illuminate the system’s complexities and inform meaningful change.
And yet data alone is not enough. We need a way to organize that data. To know what we’re looking for and what constitutes a good gauge of performance.
The Public Spoke, We Listened
We paid special attention to hearing community concerns and creating measures to address them. Here’s an example from real conversations we had:
“[We] should decrease the number of things police respond to; for example, not traffic things.”
• Non-emergency call types, by reason for call
• Non-emergency calls compared to emergency calls
In 2024, after years of input from local communities, police departments, scholars, researchers, and experts in the field of measurement, we finalized seven dimensions for measuring policing:
1. Trust, Legitimacy, and Community Engagement
Evaluates how police departments engage with community members, for example, during officer-initiated stops.
2. Crime Reduction and Calls for Service
Examines how well departments address crime patterns including crimes reported, calls for service received, time from dispatch to arrival, time from call to arrival, and crime clearances.
3. Use of Force
Analyzes incidents where force was used, complaints received involving the use of force, and use of force incidents resulting in disciplinary action.
4. Internal and External Accountability Measures
Examines the systems in place to hold officers and departments accountable, such as complaints received, both internal and external, and complaints resulting in disciplinary action.
These measures will help police departments nationwide and the communities they serve create a more equitable and effective criminal justice system for all.
5. Officer Safety and Wellness
Evaluates programs and policies that support police mental health and physical well-being, including the hours of overtime worked, number of officers working overtime, officer deaths in the line of duty, and officer turnover.
6. Fiscal Needs and Responsibilities
Assesses how departments allocate their financial resources and ensures they meet their fiscal responsibilities fairly and efficiently.
7. Recruitment, Training, and Education
Evaluates how departments attract, hire, and train
Laying Foundations GROUNDWORK
Information is power. And in most cases, we would never make major decisions without evidence. No one buys a house without verifying its foundation is intact. Most people don’t even get dressed without checking their trusted weather source first. Why should criminal justice leaders make decisions about community priorities
like keeping people safe or reducing crime without high-quality data to back up and inform those decisions?
This is where Groundwork comes in. We help communities with the foundational work it takes to improve their data, turning it into a trusted source of information.
- Contra Costa County District Attorney
DATA READINESS
Throughout the year we evaluated various agencies’ data culture, data infrastructure, and often the data itself. In the process, we have seen the destructive effects of incomplete and inaccurate data, and the positive effects of good data.
To be clear: When we identify data problems and help solve them, we open the door to better policy and better outcomes.
Just look at the impact we’ve seen in California alone:
LA County, CA, Public Defender Avoids Disastrous Policy Conclusion
• During the COVID-19 pandemic, Los Angeles County implemented a policy that released individuals from custody without bail. It was a controversial policy that had its detractors. We turned to the data to find out if $0 bail had an effect on people returning to court (bail is traditionally used to incentivize people to return, so it’s possible that no bail might disincentivize their return). The problem was that the Public Defender’s data system was outdated, which made it difficult to draw accurate conclusions. Even so, we ran an analysis and found that people who paid $0 bail were less likely to return to court, which was bad news for a $0 bail policy.
• We then had the chance to get an improved dataset and ran the analysis again. The results were essentially the opposite: $0 bail had little to no effect on court appearance rates. Had we relied only on the legacy system data, the policy implications would have been huge. They could have led to more people being detained pretrial for minor offenses; to increasing jail populations; and to more harm associated with jail time, like job loss, housing instability, and family separation. The takeaway? Bad data isn’t just a nuisance; it’s destructive.
Yolo County, CA, Reduces Costs
• The Yolo County DA’s Office expanded its Restorative Justice Diversion program to felony defendants in 2019. This meant that now defendants accused of felony crimes would be eligible for a program that would help divert them away from traditional jail time. In order to track the impact of the program, the DA’s office needed good data. So we helped them improve how and what they collected, and the result was the sort of information they could count on and use to track impact.
• As it happened, the data showed that their Restorative Justice Diversion program was saving taxpayers’ money—helping the county avoid more than $4 million in jail usage expenditures between 2019 and 2024. Without good data, the office would have no way of knowing how the program was working and might have made poor decisions about its future as a result.
High-quality data is a no brainer. Agencies and counties that use high-quality data to make decisions are simply better equipped to improve the criminal justice system than counties and agencies that make decisions in the dark.
Laying Foundations
ENGAGING COMMUNITIES
We help educate and engage community members, empowering them to leverage data for the change they want to see. Listen, engage, educate, repeat–this is how we work with communities to find out their needs and share skills and knowledge that help community-based organizations and motivated citizens effectively understand and utilize criminal justice data. We do this work because we recognize that communities best understand their own needs and can effectively lead the way to change while harnessing the power of data. When we think about engagement, we meet communities wherever they are on the path to data transparency, accessibility, and accountability. In 2024, we made an impact in many ways.
COMMUNITY ADVISORY BOARDS
Commons, our public data platform, brings agency and community leaders together around data. CABs are just one piece of the Commons Collective (which also includes Advisors who help select the CAB, members of our MFJ team, and the agency). These CABs play an instrumental role in contributing to the creation of a Commons for their community. And are themselves evidence of the success of Commons. In many communities, just convening a CAB to work successfully with criminal justice agencies is a feat. Decades of mistrust have hampered efforts to bring these two sides of criminal justice together. We are incredibly proud to have been able to lead this work in so many counties, with the end results being community leaders and agencies using data as a common language to get on the same page and set policy goals that benefit everyone.
This year, we worked with four Commons Collectives, which included 36 Community Advisory Board members, seven Commons Advisors, and four agency ambassadors.
We facilitated:
• Eleven in-person CAB retreats,
• Thirty-nine agency workgroup meetings, and
• Multiple online sessions to foster dialogue and collaboration.
DATA LITERACY WORKSHOPS
We began piloting data literacy workshops as a means to empower individuals to harness the potential of data, ensuring the public is equipped to drive positive change in their communities. We offer workshops on everything from what data is to how it’s gathered and processed to how to read data charts, graphs, and trend lines, to how to interpret findings with appropriate context.
As with learning any new language, when people feel more fluent and confident, they are more likely to use that language to communicate their needs.
ALL IN NETWORK
We created the All In Network as a collaborative space for advancing data transparency, accessibility, and accountability in the criminal justice system. Connecting people who care about data-driven accountability and enabling them to connect is crucial for knowledge sharing. The network offers a common ground for criminal justice practitioners, advocates, academics, and community leaders to connect and share best practices, tools, and resources.
Since its inception, we have made significant progress in responding to communities eager to connect and learn from one another in reshaping their criminal justice systems through data. As part of our programming for network members, we spoke in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana with Chief Judge Johnson about data accessibility, and with Dr. Ernest L. Johnson on data literacy, in Rochester, New York we partnered with R.M.A.P.I. to see how they drive change. We also spoke with the Thurston County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office about data gaps and how they can be addressed.
As a result, the All In Network has become a space for discussions on reshaping criminal justice through data, engaging hundreds of members.
LET’S BE CLEAR
We had the exciting honor of being nominated for a Webby award and have since screened our storytelling series, Let’s Be Clear, all over the country. The series tells the stories of twelve people affected by the criminal justice system in different ways, from a police officer traumatized by his first night on the job to a man incarcerated for life for selling drugs. Each story puts a face on a data point and reminds us that data is never inhumane. On the contrary, data tells us what is happening in people’s lives and opens our eyes to policies and practices that need to be changed.
We hosted screenings in six communities:
• ROCHESTER, NEW YORK
• BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA
• PLEASANTVILLE, NEW YORK
• ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO
• ATLANTA, GEORGIA
• SELMA, ALABAMA
These events collectively welcomed hundreds of attendees, drawing people together to reflect on the series’ message about the power of data to expose problems in criminal justice and to fix those problems.
The impact of Let’s Be Clear has extended beyond these screenings, resonating in churches, family gatherings, and community groups, where it continues to foster dialogue and action–reminding us all of the power of data for change.
Laying Foundations PARTNERSHIPS
Improving the country’s criminal justice data is a heavy lift, but it’s the foundation on which we will improve the system, and our communities. This is why we work county by county, state by state. And especially why we partner widely–to secure broad reach alongside the expertise of organizations and companies that work in the space.
Thank you to all of our 2024 partners, including:
PARTNER SPOTLIGHT:
JUSTICE COUNTS
Justice Counts is a national, consensusbuilding initiative designed to help policymakers make better decisions with criminal justice data that’s more timely, less disjointed, and as useful as possible.
Backed by the Council for State Governments and the Department of Justice, Justice Counts tapped MFJ to help lead the effort to develop standardized performance metrics that have buy-in from a national coalition of criminal justice experts in multiple sectors, from law enforcement to defense counsel to community supervision.
PARTNER SPOTLIGHT: ASSOCIATION OF
PROSECUTING ATTORNEYS
The Association of Prosecuting Attorneys (APA) is a national nonprofit whose mission is to support and enhance the effectiveness of prosecutors in their efforts to create safer communities. They do this through offering nationwide prosecutorial training and technical assistance. Their membership comprises prosecutors’ offices, elected, appointed, and line prosecutors, justice system professionals, and community partners.
We’ve partnered with APA since 2021 to help prosecutor offices get more accurate, highquality, transparent data. Since then, the work has ranged from providing Commons dashboards to helping these offices improve their data infrastructure and culture as they work towards data transparency.
The APA partnership, supported by a grant from the Tableau Foundation (now part of the Salesforce Foundation), played a key role in our strategic decision to offer Groundwork services to prosecutor offices. Our work in these offices highlighted the widespread need for better data infrastructure and the support most offices require to build it.
$14,873,691 Financials
Expenses by Class*
We are a mission-driven organization, which is why 91% of donations that come in are used on program expenses.
TOTAL EXPENSES FOR 2024 MISSION
$13,571,503 FUNDRAISING
$923,152 ADMINISTRATION
$379,036
*These are 2024 unaudited financials. For more information, please visit our website to download our 990.
Philanthropic Support
Measures for Justice is grateful for the ongoing support from those who make our work possible. A heartfelt thanks to the following groups and individuals who made major contributions in 2024 as we continue to work to make data easier to get, easier to use, and easier to understand:
Anonymous
Arnold Ventures
The Ballmer Group
Constellation Brands
David Klafter and Nancy Kestenbaum
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
The McCance Foundation
Pershing Square Foundation
Rich and Sarah Barton
Thompson Family Foundation
Sands Family Foundation
Thank you to our Board, whose knowledge, expertise, and experience helps to steward the generous support that makes our work possible.
Ayanna Clunis Chair TPG Global, LLC
Rick Morello Treasurer Medtech, Family Reach Foundation
Rosemary Barkett Iran-United States Claims Tribunal
Cindy Dishmey-Montgomery Morgan Stanley
Justin Erlich TikTok
Dave Heiner Truveta
Jim Kohlenberger JK Strategies
Lenny Mendonca McKinsey & Company
Nikita Miller The Knot Worldwide
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