New Criminal Charging Metric on the Measuring Justice Dashboard

As blog readers know, the UNC School of Government Criminal Justice Innovation Lab has been developing a Measuring Justice Dashboard. Last year we released our Dashboard first metrics: Citation v. Arrest and Summons v. Warrant. We recently released a new Dashboard metric: Criminal Charging. In this post I’ll give some highlights of that tool. But in case you want to get right to it, you can access the Dashboard from the Lab’s web page (https://cjil.sog.unc.edu/); from the main page, click on “Measuring Justice.” The first tab on the new Criminal Charging metric lets you see, at a glance, the composition of criminal charging in North Carolina. For this and all tabs, you can look at statewide data or use the dropdown at top right to select a specific county. You also can pick a relevant time period. Here’s that data visualization at the state level, showing charges from January 2019 through June 2021. One takeaway from this visualization is this: The great bulk of the charges in the system are non-violent misdemeanors. The Map tab lets you look at charging rates across the state, and tailor results by time period and offense category. In the figure below, you’re seeing charging rates for non-DWI traffic misdemeanors for all of North Carolina across all Dashboard time periods. As shown in the gray text at bottom right, non-DWI traffic misdemeanors make up over 70% of all charged misdemeanor offenses. Counties with a higher charging rate for these offenses are shown in gradients of blue; [...]