In 2015, the Contra Costa Public Defender came to me with a problem. A large percentage of people charged with misdemeanors failed to turn up at court for arraignment; when that happened, the court issued a bench warrant for their arrest, which meant that the next time they came into contact with law enforcement, the officer would book them into custody.
But my research found that failures to appear were not the result of a person’s intentional decision to skip court. An average of 8.5 months elapsed between the date a person got a written citation and their first court date. All during that time, they didn’t have a right to a public defender; they often didn’t receive notices from the court; and they didn’t understand a case had been filed by the prosecutor.
I designed a new strategy to remedy this expensive and counterproductive procedural failure: make sure that the Office of the Public Defender was notified any time somebody was arrested and released on a misdemeanor charge, reach out to the person to establish a relationship, use automated text messaging to keep them informed of the legal process, and provide practical support to make sure they could get to court for their first appearance. The Early Representation Project won a federal grant, was named Defender Program of the Year by the California Public Defenders Association, and cut failures to appear in Antioch by more than two-thirds in two years.
The people who missed court weren’t defying the system; all along, the system had been failing them.
In 2017, the County Administrator’s Office asked me to design a project for state Proposition 47 funds, and I started by looking at arrests in the city of Antioch. In 2016, the Antioch Police Department made 1,678 low-level arrests of 1,217 people. Just 27 of them, 2.2 percent, accounted for 142 of those arrests. When I matched the 122 people arrested more than once against the County’s own records, half had been homeless, seven in ten appeared in the mental health system, and 62 percent had been treated for substance use. What Antioch was arresting, again and again, was untreated illness and homelessness.
With a 40-member advisory committee of police, prosecutors, public defenders, clinicians, advocates, and people who had been through the system, I designed CoCo LEAD Plus, building on the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion model first developed in Seattle. Antioch officers would divert people arrested on eligible low-level charges to peer outreach, behavioral health care, and housing, instead of to prosecution. The state funded it with nearly $6 million.
When you take a look at who a city arrests again and again, you find what the rest of the system has left undone.