Arkansas Legislative Recidivism Reduction Task Force

And to see, so I'm glad you all missed that. Um, that being said, we'll go ahead and get started. Gazway. Thank you. All right, um, call this meeting to order and I would entertain a motion for the adoption of the minutes. Thank you. I have a second. All in favor say aye. All right, we have a presentation. By CSG. I'll ask them to go ahead and Moved in the table. And for those joining by Zoom, just. Make sure you get my attention or um, Someone on the committee, Ms. R, would be good as well, so if you would introduce yourself for the record and you may proceed when ready. Thank you so much. Can everyone hear me? Great. I don't trust these microphones. We have a history. Um, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Estrella Lopez. I am with the CSG Justice Center. I'm joined today by two of my colleagues, Carl Reynolds will be Help me with this presentation so that you're not stuck listening to my voice the whole time and Ashley Wen is with us here today as well. I want to thank you for having us and Technology is working. All right. Maybe I spoke too soon. OK. So I wanted to give you all, you should all have copies of the presentation handouts. Thank you so much to Tony for making that happen for us, um, and before I get into the uh data portion, the much anticipated data portion of the presentation. I did want to first take a moment to Take a look back at all the presentations, all the folks who have come before this task force to speak. Um, and just sit with that for a bit before we go forward into the data on this presentation. So for this season, for this presentation we're going to be talking about a pretty limited scope. We're going to be talking about crime and arrest data in subsequent presentations we'll talk a bit more and I will lay that out a little bit more in detail, um, a little bit further on, and then at the very end we're going to talk about project updates, what have we done? What are we doing? So The summary of task force meetings to this point. So these are all the folks that this group has had an opportunity to hear from um. This is everyone who has offered some expertise who has come to speak to you about their little corner of the justice system in this state. And. Well there's been a wealth of different information from the 17 presenters, there were some common themes that emerged across the presentations, and this is not meant to be exhaustive, but to sort of topline what what has been in common from um Across the system across the speakers. So that's included that there is insufficient currently, currently insufficient based evidence-based programming that available to meet the needs of individuals in the criminal justice system? We've heard that without a mental health screening during intake, the current assessment is not sufficient or meaningful. We've heard that due to staffing challenges fueled by low pay, DOC has some limitations on what they're able to do and that data sharing can mitigate the silo effect between state agencies that serve overlapping populations. Flowing from all those presentations have been the conversations and discussions that have been had by this group, um, and again, task force members have offered a variety of perspectives and insights, and again this is not meant to be exhaustive, but some of the sort of common concerns recurring themes, if you will, that have been raised is a concern about the feasibility of funding better programming, some skepticism around. Risk assessments that rely on self-reporting. And the need for more individualized and evidence-based approaches for sentencing, reentry, and supervision. So given all that, how is that informing our work to find solutions. So, Since this, since we began this process in August of 2023, we've had at least one team member at a task force meeting for all but one meeting with the rest of our team tuning in at home as I assume they are doing now. Um, and we've been listening to experts from your state in Across the state in virtual spaces in real spaces to focus on the following. Evaluating program availability both in prisons and the community to identify the needs and gaps to help this group develop effective solutions, analyzing the re-entry process starting from intake to enhanced support for people returning to the community ultimately with the aim to reduce recidivism and promote successful reintegration. We've been conducting focus groups with correctional leadership, correctional officers, and probation and parole staff to gain insights into their needs and challenges and identifying opportunities to break down so silos and foster better collaboration. So right here we have a visual representation. It's really more of an approximation. It's not meant to be exact, but this is to show how a case moves through the system. And what questions we're hoping to identify as it relates to each phase of the system. As I mentioned for today, we are looking at the very front end of the system. Crimes and arrests, so that orange section on your slide, the part that is grayed out, it's not that we're not going to get to it, we're just not going to get to it today. We're going to get to that in subsequent. Presentations. I'm going to get into a lot more of this as we get to the data portion, but I did want to give a little bit of a teaser or a preview for the three questions that are posed here, so what are types of crimes are the most common in Arkansas? Thefts, assaults, and drug offenses. What crimes are being cleared to arrest drug offenses are cleared at a much higher rate than crimes against people or property. And people on supervision are responsible for a very small portion of violent crime in the state. So getting into the data and I say that, but I'm still gonna do a little bit more table setting before we actually get into the data. So for this section I'm going to be talking about reported crime and the source for that data is the National Incident-based reporting System, which you'll often hear too referred to by its acronym, and that's probably how I'm going to talk about it, which is neighbors. So in 2021, neighbors became the national standard for law enforcement reporting across the whole country, and I want to note that Arkansas does a particularly good job with Niber's reporting, um, according to the FBI, as of May of 2024. That's the most recent information I was able to find 99% of law enforcement agencies in the state actually report to neighbors and That means because of rounding, I assume that 100% of the population is covered by an agency that is doing divers reporting. That's pretty remarkable. Not every state has that level of reporting, so just wanted to note that. So in this section, going to be talking about 10 years' worth of statewide crime trends. That's from 2013 to 2022. Later on, Carl is going to talk about arrest information. He's also going to be talking about data that we got from ACIC. And that's one year of data that's just 2022 data, so a little bit more about how neighbors. Uh classifies their data, so For all of the offense types. Neighbors puts them into one of 3 buckets. Um, person, property, or society, and we're going to talk a little bit more about that later, but they also grouped them into Group A and Group B offense types. Roughly Group A is the more serious offenses, and you see those listed on the left of the slide. Um, and the last serious again, it's, I don't want to say that as a strict proposition, but for the most part, Group A are the most serious offenses. Group B are the less serious offenses. Group A neighbors collects data for any reported incident and the arrest. For Group B, they only collect data if there is an arrest. So I'm going to be talking about crimes. I'm only going to be talking about Group A simply because we don't have the data for Group B offenses when it comes to um Incidents that are reported. So I, as I mentioned, all of these offenses are put into one of three categories. Persons, property, and society. So on the right hand of your slide, you have the definitions for each on the left hand of the slide that pie chart. Has all of the Um, the proportion for the 10 year time period of Person, property, and society we're going to use this coloring scheme throughout so that dark blue is going to be the person offenses. The light blue is the property offenses and the green is the side the offenses. Um, so crimes against persons are defined as crimes where the victim is always a person. So an example of that would be murder, rape, assault. Crimes against property are crimes where the goal is to obtain something of value money, property, or anything else of value. I do want to note. Um, mostly crimes against persons are violent crimes. There's a little bit of an exception there because of robbery, for example, is classified as a property offense, but it could be a crime that does in fact involve violence. Crimes is against society are crimes that are against the law because they have been established as being against the law. They are against social order. They do not have a specific victim, so they are often referred to as victimless crimes. These would be drug offenses, prostitution offenses, gambling offenses, that sort of thing. OK. So on this slide, um, quite a lot of numbers, but I want to orient you a little bit towards this slide. The top red dashed number is uh The total number Of Reported incidents for that particular year. That light blue line is same thing but for property, the dark blue for persons, and the green line for society offenses, so for that 10 year time period that we are talking about. Overall crime is down 11%. And that is despite the fact that person offenses are up to 5% and society offenses are up 33%. I'm sorry, incidents. Um, that's because property incidents are down 22%, and if we go back a slide, you'll recall that property offenses are over 60%, so a 22% drop in property offenses led to an 11% overall drop even though the other two categories are up. spoke too soon when I said technology was working. Here we go. So Another distinction here. Between incidents and total offenses. The prior slide talked about incidents. the coming slides are going to talk about total offenses. For any number of incidents there could be more than one offense, and I will give an example that hopefully helps clarify it did for me. If someone's house is broken into last night and things are taken from it. That's one incident. But there could be multiple offenses charged, for example, burglary and theft. So if you look here, the incidents are on the top. That's the top number represented in each of these boxes and the bottom number is the total offenses, so the offenses are always going to be a little bit higher than the incidence for the reasons that I just laid out. OK. So Getting into more of the specifics. We're talking here about property crimes and again I want to orient you to this slide. We're going to have a series of slides that look like this, so. On the left hand side of your Slide You have the total number of property crimes for any given year, the little orange number on top is just to make it a little bit easier to read, the exact number if you want to crane your head is in white in the bars, um. But so that is for each year the total number of property crimes on the right hand side, it's broken out by a fence type. And you have the 10 year total and then in the rightmost column, the percentage. So. Just to try to underscore the incident and offense distinction again if we go back. Which I feel like I'm playing a dangerous game by doing so and we look at 2022, the property offenses were about 103,000. That's the incidents. But for that same year, the offenses were about 120,000, so that's, that's the distinction there. On this next slide we have The individual crimes broken out so you can see how the trends went for the individual offense types. Robbery, burglary, and theft were down in that 10 year time period, fraud and forgery and motor vehicle offenses are up. If you look at the fraud and forgery, there's quite a spike in the time that corresponds with the pandemic that was certainly there was certainly an issue there on the federal level. I suspect that might be what was happening here as well. Um, so here, same, same as with the previous slides, but for society offenses, I would note that what's significant or noteworthy here is that if you combine the two categories of drug offenses, drug violation offenses, and drug equipment offenses, those combined account for 90% of crimes against society. And here again we have the individual offense types broken out. They all have increased from 2013 to 2022, the most dramatic increase was for drug equipment violations with a 71% increase in that 10 year time period. And here we have that same breakdown but for crimes against persons from 2013 to 2022, crimes against persons increased by approximately 9%. The peak was in 2021. And here again we have the offense types broken out. Um, So overall crimes against persons went up. 9%. Um, but. Every offense type except for simple assaults. Went up during that time period. Simple assaults decrease, but they make up 44% of the category. Another noteworthy thing in this slide, if you take a look at aggravated assaults? Which is in the bottom left hand corner. You'll see that there was a pretty dramatic increase from 2019 to 2020. There is a statutory definition change that all instances of strangulation would be considered aggravated assaults, so that that statutory change likely is what we're seeing reflected in the in the data there. So up to now we've been talking about all the offenses broken out by person property and society, and we wanted to put them together to give a little bit of context of what the volumes are, so. Um, the most this is data just for 2022. The most common crime reported. Theft and larceny followed by assaults and then followed by drug offenses. So that was a lot. So some, some key takeaways, some summaries here. Assaults make up 94% of person crimes. Theft and larceny make up 49% of property crimes, drug offenses make up 90% of society crimes. Overall incidents of crime have decreased by 11% over the past 10 years, driven by a 22% decline decline in property crimes, crimes against persons have increased 9%, driven by an increase in all offense types except simple assaults and crimes against society increased 47%, although they make up the smallest volume of total incidents at 11%. And now you get a break from my voice. Thank you Australia. Senator Gilmore, Senator Tucker, nice to see you all again. It's good to be back. I'm Carl Reynolds. Um, uh, nice to see all y'all. It's good to be back. It's been many, many months since I was in Little Rock for for me, Estra's been here a few more times, so I also want to give you a little more background before I launch into into the the meat of the data slides. So Australia was showing us the volume of crime of reported crime, and now we're going to look at the volume of arrests. The overall point of that is to highlight the drop off between crimes and apprehension, right? Uh, and, and the policy point of that is we've got to do a better job here in Arkansas and all over the country that we see in apprehending people that are committing crimes, particularly violent crimes, so that we can hold them accountable. That's just fundamental to public safety and what this group is all about. And the, and by the way, the research is very clear that the certainty of apprehension is the most important thing in terms of deterring criminal behavior. There's a nice not a study but a sort of summary of the research on deterrence on the National Institute of Justice website. I'm going to send Tony a link to that to provide to you all. And the reason we're looking at arrests here is to look at that drop off, but, but recognize that arrests are an approximation, sort of a proxy for clearance by police, right? So clearance rates is a is a term that we use Judge Richardson's probably familiar with the term clearance rates because courts pay a lot of attention to that concept and in the court world, the clearance rate is pretty much expected to be 100%. The court's disposing of as many cases as are coming in the door. The court is keeping up, so 100% clearance rate, that's all it means one in, one out, one in, one out. In the law enforcement world, nothing like that kind of 100% is expected or or happens even for homicides where we would really like to see 100%. You'll see higher numbers in homicide as we go along here, but not nothing like that really happens in the law in the law enforcement context. But, but again, just to be clear, we're using arrests as a as an approximation of clearance by law enforcement of a crime that it's been committed and to be a little more clear about that. The FBI defines clearance rates. And they include arrests as the vast majority of clearances, and then they also have an exceptional clearance category, and that only applies to about 2.5% of cases nationwide. And that's why it's, I think, OK to use arrests as an approximation of what's happening in terms of clearing cases. I see what you mean. Uh, you saw this slide before, but the right side was grayed out a little bit. I wanted to lift this up again to remind you of the Group A offenses that neighbors collects. And to also show you in more legible text with the Group B offenses are, and as Estrella said, these are generally much less serious misdemeanor type conduct for the most part. And another thing Erea mentioned I want to underscore is that Nibers is collecting information on Group A offenses regardless whether or not there's an arrest, but they're only collecting information about Group B offenses if there's an arrest. So when I talk about clearance rates, I'm not, I'm going to be leaving out the Group B offenses. Because by definition those are offenses where there's a 100% clearance rate because they're only writing them down when there's been an arrest, so I'm going to kind of bounce back and forth a little bit. I'll tell you what I'm talking about, uh, with these groups individually. So this pie chart. Represents the entire universe of rests in Arkansas for both Group A and Group B offenses for that entire decade that Erea mentioned 2013 to 2022. Overall, over that decade, the volume is tilted 54% toward the Group B offenses, so 46% Group A 54% Group B. And that, so you know that the chart represents about 1.2 million arrests in total over that decade. 577,000 for Group A, 650,000 roughly for Group B. So what's interesting is that you've seen that that overall total, but what's happening over time is kind of an interesting shift, a flip, if you will. Um, so again lumping altogether Group B was 54%, and you can see on the left side of this graph back in 2013, many, many more Group B arrests than Group A. And as time passes on during that decade, there's sort of a trend towards a 50/50 split and then in 2020 for the first I guess 2019 just barely Group A arrests exceeded Group B arrests have remained a bit higher throughout the the next couple of years. So now we're going to look at that drop off I mentioned this bar chart is focused on arrests incidents, and arrests for Group A offenses, and again, I won't be mentioning Group B for for a few slides here. So the left two bars of the person incidents and arrests, the middle two bars are property incidents and arrests and the right to bars are uh society crime incidents and arrests, and the point here is that drop off in each set of the bars from the gray incident number. To the to to the number of arrests. So for a person incidents on the left, that's a dropping from over 500,000 incidents to 150,000 arrests, which is about a 31%, if you will, arrest clearance rate. That rate is much lower for property incidents, about 14%, and you can see that huge drop off and much higher for society in incidents at about 81%. So recall that society crimes are 90% drug offenses, so that's not really surprising when you think about the way in which a lot of those arrests are actually happening in the drug context. So we're going to use these doughnut slides for for a couple of pages here to depict the individual offense categories within each of these broad person property society categories, right? So the key on the right is explaining that the proportion of reported incidents that are cleared by arrest is the dark shaded proportion of each doughnut. So on the upper left homicides have the highest proportion of arrests, which is good. Uh, those are the cases obviously we are most urgently want to see solved by an arrest, and the 56% proportion is not an unusual one. It's that's not unusual to Arkansas. I have a few national clear numbers that I've written down and the national number for homicides is about 53%, so very, very similar. Unfortunately, next to homicide, the lowest proportion on this page is sex offenses at 15%. And again, for context, this is a little bit of a fudge comparison, but the national clearance rate for rape offenses is 26%, so both pretty low, but a differential there. An aggravated assault on the lower left is the other one where I can quote you a national figure, and it is exactly the same as the Arkansas figure 41% clearance by arrest for assault. A salt, excuse me. So this is the same idea, but for property crimes and you can see immediately that overall the proportions of arrests are much lower. Uh, even single digit proportions in three cases and barely double digits for the category of fraud forgery at 10%. On the upper left, robbery is the highest of these proportions at 24%, and that's the only other offense where I can give you a national comparison which is 23%. So again, a lot of on a lot of these national comparisons, Arkansas is not an outlier. So remember from the bar charts on page 30 that society crimes have about an 81% arrest clearance rate, so these doughnuts are showing how that breaks down, particularly for drug violations on the upper left, 78% drug paraphernalia, 87% on the upper right. And weapon violations on the lower left at 69%. That other category on the lower right that's going to be gambling and prostitution probably those those two offenses predominantly, but they're only 1.7% of the total of society offenses, so a pretty small proportion. Now these now shifting a little bit, these are pie charts showing the proportion of clearance by arrest in different sized communities here in Arkansas. On the upper left hand corner, and these are like census categories they call places large fringe metro and medium metro, that kind of thing. A large fringe metro for Arkansas. There's only one, and that's Crittenden County, which is suburban Memphis, and it has markedly I'd say a higher clearance by arrest rate than any of these other figures that you see on this page. Medium Metro is Pulaski County, Sebastian County, Washington County, places like that, and across all these categories, medium, small, micropolitan, etc. pretty similar clearance by arrest rates. In the, in the 25% range for all of them. By the way, we have a website, CSG runs a website that is all about this topic that we're talking to you about and again I'll send a link to that to Tawni to share with you. It includes and you can look at, you can look at this data about under arrests and crime and everything state by state. And so there's a map of Arkansas in there that shows the the it's it's all about violent crime and it'll show the unsolved violent. crime rate by counting with shading by counting so you can kind of see how that differs from place to place in a little more detail than this than this provides and in a way that you will recognize because it's a map. This is the first slide where we're going to use the 2022, the one year that Estonia mentioned of ACIC data and we're using that to dig a little deeper into the arrest patterns in the state and specifically what we're doing in Australia and I didn't do this, our smart colleagues did this matching arrests to DCOOC supervision data, so they're finding the same people right in two big piles of data. And flagging the proportion of arrests that involve people who were under felony supervision at the time of the new arrest. And also I want to note that this slide depicts all arrests, both Group A and Group B offenses. So the pie chart on the right shows that of all the arrests in 2022, about 1 quarter, 26% were of people who were on supervision at the time a new arrest for someone on supervision and a small subset of that group, the pink on the right, 3.3% of the entire total here of all the arrests were arrests of people on supervision for crimes against a person. I would also note just on the left there's the list, the list of what people are getting arrested for that year and most years I would argue, very, uh, the highest proportion is failure to appear. That's the most common thing that any of these arrests happen for followed by possession of drugs, aggravated assault, possession of paraphernalia, and so on. So this bar chart is another way to look at arrests of people on supervision in 2022 again using the ACIC data. So this is showing by these broad categories what people on supervision were arrested for. In the green bar are 17,500 society offense arrests. So out of a total of 24,300 arrests of people on supervision, about 72% were for society offenses. On the right side of this bar chart are personal offenses in the dark blue, which is about 3000, 3,049, which is 12.5% of all the arrests of people on supervision. And a little bit more about the green bar. So of that 170,006,600 of those people were had an arrest for a drug offense, and I think that's highlighted on the slide itself. And much of the remaining people in the society category would have been arrested for things like failure to appear, DUI, driving with license suspended, and so forth. This pie chart is kind of another way, a pretty simple way to look again at arrests for the 83,500 people on supervision in 2022. So again, this is the same sets of data that we're looking at. And the bottom line is at some point in that year, 29% of those people under supervision were arrested again, most likely for FDA, etc. And finally this is yet another way to look and think about arrests involving people on supervision, which is that 8,083,500 on the on the left side of this Venn diagram. So what this is getting at is the proportion of arrests of people on supervision that were for person crimes. The right side of the diagram in light blue is the roughly 52,000 person crime incidents that were reported. The pink Area is the 18,400 arrests per person crimes in 2022. So dividing that into the 52,000 gives the 31% clearance rate for person crimes that we noted at the beginning of this section. And then if you look at the small area in the very middle, the dark, the dark red at the center. That's the overlap between people on supervision and arrests for violent or crimes against persons, right? 3,049 arrests of people under supervision for person crime incidents. So bottom line, people arrested for person crimes while on supervision comprise 6% of all the incidents that were reported for person crimes and more like 16% of all the arrests for crimes against 17%, I guess, give or take. So like Australia did I want to just recap some of the key points that I hope I just made. The donut charts show a rest clearance rates per person, property, and society crimes. 31%, 14%, and 81% respectively. Another key point that we just touched on is that people arrested for person crimes while on supervision comprised 6% of reported incidents in 2022. Reported incident, yeah, reported incidence, and No arrest occurs in 74% of all reported Group A incidents of crime, so 30, what is that 26% of all those crimes lead to an arrest and 74% do not. And finally, going back to the first data slide I showed you, only 46% of all arrests over the decade that we've been talking about were for the most serious Group A offense types. I'm about to turn this back to Australia, but I want to give you some top line facts that we've both covered crimes against person victims crept up over the decade by 9%. There are much higher rates of arrest naturally for crimes against society which are overwhelmingly drug crime. And about 3/4 of arrests in 2022 were of people who were not on supervision. So before I turn it to a straight, I just want to mention what's the point of all this? What, what does this mean for state policy? And I, and I mentioned the website that we maintain that has to do with what states can do to reduce violent crime, and again I'll send that link to Tawny, but we have a we have an article posted there that's called Five Things can do to reduce violent crime, and the first one is to solve more violent crimes to increase accountability and deter future. and what we mean by that is we recognize law enforcement in every state is fundamentally a local responsibility, right? I mean, for the most part, law enforcement officers are either sheriff types or local police types, and states are sort of strangely removed from that, but there are things that some that some states are doing and that states can do and that Arkansas is actually starting to do to get at this issue from a state policymaker standpoint, grant programs that that help place looking and seeing jurisdictions that are having that have really low clearance rates and helping them with a grant program to improve what they're doing, making sure that your crime labs are turning turning things around quickly. That's a huge issue in many places. reducing detective caseloads if it's possible to do that through a great a state grant program in and increasing engagement with victims and witnesses. That's a huge issue both in terms of crime getting reported at all in the first place and then for purposes of solving crimes, the interactions between law enforcement and people in the community. There's got to be some trust there or things are not going to get resolved with an arrest. So those are things that states can do. Arkansas passed a bill along with the Protect Arkansas Act, another bill that passed, I don't remember the name, Senator Tucker, that was your bill that, uh, that is Directed exactly at this issue to set up a state level program that will help local law enforcement. I think it was called the Ben Gilmore Savior Act. I, I like how you give everything these catchy names, that's nice. Um, but, but Arkansas's leading the way. There's a couple of other states that are doing good stuff. Ohio comes to mind. I worked with the folks in the Ohio criminal justice realm for a while and they're they're doing a similar thing. They're helping local law enforcement address violent crime by by helping with forensic evidence backlogs and speeding up investigations and so forth. I think that's it for me. My turn again. How'd that happen? I'm back. And like me, This chart is back, which I think is probably a familiar sight for folks on this task force because I've used versions of it many times before. So today's presentation is that top line, the ACIC data or analysis of it. With some additional data that was pulled from neighbors and our research team, as Carl alluded to, smart folks who didn't go to law school like us, is currently working on the analysis of the AOC, the court data, and the DOC data, and so we will have presentations for you on each of those in the coming months. So what have we been up to? So since we started in August of 2023, collectively our team has had 121 meetings with 169 folks across the state, um. And I would love to say that we've also met individually with all task force members. I had to put almost in there. There are a few holdouts, and if you are among them, know that I will continue emailing you and hopefully we'll find the time in the coming months. I can assure you she will do that. I'm very hopeful that when I come back next month I will be able to say all, um. Listed on here are groups of folks that we have met with. We have tried. To make sure that All Corners of the criminal justice system. Their voices are being heard. The perspectives are being represented. However, if you are looking at this and you are seeing a group that is missing that has been overlooked. Please let me know. Call me, email me, flag me down after this meeting. We really want to make sure that we are talking to everybody to make sure that their perspectives are included to make sure that all this data that we're Combing through that we have the context so that it makes sense and so that the recommendations that this group makes are fueled by that. So a little bit of a visual representation. These are the places that we have been so far. Um, I will note I said at the beginning that there was one task force meeting that we did not have somebody physically in this room. That is because we were doing assessment visits in the northwest corner of the state, but this is where we have been so far, um, but we're not done yet. We are hoping to sneak a couple more visits in. before the end of a before this work comes to a close. Um, but as I said with the slide that showed all the different groups and folks that we've met with, if there's something missing, I cannot promise that we will physically make it to every state. The state is large, but if there is a something that doesn't seem like it's being represented, please let me know. We want to make sure that we talk to folks that we have that context that all All different conditions that people are working under are that we understand them, but we can only do that with your help informing our work, as I've said before, you're the experts of your state, and we rely on you to inform our work. This is what we're still planning to do, um. All before December 1st, which only makes me a little nervous when I look at the calendar. But we're still hoping to, we are going to complete the analysis of the AOC and DOC data and present that to you, um, with the AOC data presentation we're hoping to do at the next meeting in October, the DOC in November. We're still looking to speak with a cross section of public defenders and a cross section of prosecuting attorneys, though I understand that I may be having that wish granted sooner rather than later? We're going to help this group draft final recommendations and make legislative recommendations and then hopefully offer technical assistance and data monitoring to ensure that the policy recommendations that are made are successfully implemented. So to recap this graphic from the beginning. Today we only talked about the very beginning of the system, crime and arrests. These are the phases that we're gonna that we're hoping to cover in the coming presentations. The blue represents the October presentation and the green represents the November presentation. And with that, Again, please don't hesitate to reach out. Uh, please call, email. Sana carrier pigeon, if you know how to do that. Um, but thank you all so much for having us and for your attention and for letting us come in and chat with you all. Thank you for the presentation. We're going to move to questions already have people in the queue that presentation was so great. We already have questions that were being offered up during the, uh, during the presentation. So first in the queue is, um, prosecutors shoe. I sometimes I'm baffled by statistics, uh, I think Mark Twain said that there's lies, damn lies, and statistics. But One was curious to me, and that has to do with nearly 3 75% of all people arrested in 2020 were not on a felony supervision and 26% um Does that figure, how does that, how does that mesh with your recidivism data and how does that speak to programs that you really should take effect 3 or 4 years after they get out of prison, correct? Well, I would think that first of all if their programs going on in prison or in the community, the ideas for that to take immediate effect that you're helping people change the way they conduct themselves. From the get-go, right? I mean, as soon as you're getting them involved in those programs, I think it would be really challenging if not impossible to To compare to, to think about recidivism and then think about the figure that you're quoting and somehow reconcile those, but I mean it is what it is that's how many people we found in the data that were on supervision that got arrested for something fresh, right? 26% of those of those arrests, and I fear, you know, we showed you that issue 3 or 4 different ways, and to me that might have been a little bit confusing. Um, but the data, this isn't even statistics, this is just literally counting what law enforcement is reporting is happening, so it's not even a statistical kind of thing. It's just the numbers, so I mean you cannot trust numbers, I guess, but this is, they are what they are. I, I agree, but part of what you're saying. Dan, would you, Dan, would you pull that mic just a little bit closer if you don't mind. I'm sorry. I do agree with part of what you're saying, but There's also kind of the in the trenches, you know, I'm not a social scientist. I just kind of deal with the cases that come to me. I try to be proactive, um, in, in the ways that I can in juvenile court and my drug courts, and my specialty courts. Um, But um I, I, I guess I, I understand your answer, and I guess I partly agree with it. Well, I suspect that the reality on the ground for you and for many people around the table is seeing people who have been in the system and are returning to the system, so you're, your impression is formed by that experience of seeing people again and again and again. Um, and that's, um, you know, I totally get that and totally believe it that that's what you're seeing that you're seeing people fail and seeing them reappear in the system, so that that shapes your view of how this is all working or not working very well. Thank you. Well, and to that point, I mean, based on those numbers, it's basically 2% of the population on supervision, which accounts for about 17%, I guess, of the arrests made if my math is correct, um, but anyway, uh, Secretary Wallace, I think you were going to comment on that, and then we'll go to Mr. McCaslin, Mr. Chairman. I was just going to say that our recidivism report only tracks those that are released from prison. And so the most recent one that we have is the 2018 release cohort. Any changes, I know we've talked a lot about, we have a lack of evidence-based programming in the department. Um, we recently hired um a programming assistant director. So we're in the process of really assessing kind of the makeup of how programming staff have been laid out in the, the two divisions of the department and there will be a lot of changes, but in terms of our recidivism report, you're not going to see any significant change. Just to the right, I think until you get 3, probably 3 years down the road as far as an official recidivism. That's a good, that's a good point to make on it, yeah, and that may be what prosecutor Xu was really getting at that for looking at recidivism you have to wait for that period to pass. Since we're on the subject really quick, then I'll go to Ms. McCaslin. Uh, how is that? How is that implementation going with programming? So I mean, I think it has been we've received very positive feedback, Ms. Cerne Bowers is the individual that we selected for that position, and she was previously the assistant, I'm sorry, the deputy director over all of the community correction centers in the state. Um, so she has a pretty significant background in programming anyways. Um, she just hit the ground running in that spot about what, a week and a half ago Maybe a week and a half ago, so it's still pretty early on, but she's been going, making visits to facilities to see what all staff are going to kind of come under her leadership in that role, seeing what kind of programming there are, um, in terms of programming that's out there, it varies wildly across the state. There's not been any, I don't, I, I don't think it's different from facility to facility. Yes sir, it is so a lot of programs, you know, the parole board may, I'm sorry, post-person. He board may stipulate that there's a specific program that they would like for an offender to have, and there may be a waiting list because it's not necessarily at every facility that there is. So I think there will be wholesale changes coming to programming, but we're, we're just at the very beginning stages of that may need to have some future discussion on facilities, programming, and how it's different at each facility and why that's the case, because at some point we want to, that was part of the Protect Act, we want to make sure it's being implemented, so. We can probably have another discussion on that. Chair McCaskill. Thank you. Um, I, I'm going back to the same uh slide that Jay did. So looking at, is it this one? Yeah, the one for the, uh, 26% on supervision crime. So I was just curious as how Arkansas compares to the national average on that. Don't have that number, sorry. This, I mean, we were, we were just looking at Arkansas data. And we, and we only have Arkansas data. We don't have case level data for what's happening all around the country, so we could do that in a state where doing a project like this, but we, I don't think anyone could have that as a comparator. Sorry. We, we have done one study that's some years ago, but I'll I'll pull that up again and look at it. We did a, we were getting at this same issue. What's the proportion of crime that's happening that's caused by people who are already in the system under supervision. We did a study of 3 counties in California, I think, and so we could get some comparisons from that at least, and there may be some other things we can dig up. Mr. Chapman, you're recognize. Thank you, sir. Sonyber's numbers for a chief and a sheriff are a nightmare. We, we, you know, we really struggle trying to explain neighbors. I'm really surprised that you said 99% of the state of Arkansas is reporting. Did they give you an actual number of agencies that were reporting because that's the first time I've ever heard we were close to 100%. That is from the FBI's website that I looked at last week, so it didn't get, it did not give you a total number of agencies. 99% of. is what it says, and that that represents 100% of the population. Again, that's got to be some sort of 99. something that rounds to 100, OK. And second of all, I hate when we talk about clearance rates, um. You know, basically, when you say clearance rates and we look at those percentages, you're saying there's one person for one offense, and when we arrest someone, obviously you arrest someone for a property crime. They commit 40 offenses over a two week period of time. So I think the clearance rate conversation needs to be clarified for everyone. It's not a one for one, obviously. I think everybody in the room is smart enough to to realize that, but the presentation doesn't point that out. And and so I think law enforcement does a better job arresting people that are committing crimes, but it's not reflective in the neighbor's numbers and the presentation. So I just want to make that point. So fair enough. Thank you, sir. Any other questions? Yes ma'am, you're recognized. I also wanted to ask on this 26% of arrests on supervision that same slide. I'm understanding this to mean that those are the snapshot is people that are not currently on some type of felony supervision and so is there a Data point with regard to people who may have completed what they were ordered to do and then they have committed another offense because in terms of looking at it from the trenches, I think is what we were talking about how we see some of the same individuals coming through, I think it is, um, and it would be an interesting point to analyze whether you are are capturing that data with regard to people who are not currently on supervision that may have been. In the past, yeah, more of a, more of a recidivism type number, yeah, yeah, this is like you said, this is a, it's a snapshot of a year, uh, and, and looking at everybody who was on supervision 83,500 people and matching them with the arrest data and it turns out that about 26%, but we don't know of the 74% that were not on supervision. How many of those previously we do not know that not from this set of data. All right, thank you. Senator Tucker. I'm just curious about the, first of all, thank you. I know how much work, you know, goes into that and um so thank, thank you all so much for doing all that work and for all of the information. I want to follow up on this question about the clearance rates because I'm, I'm honestly just curious about how this works, you know, he gave an example of if someone commits 40 property crimes in 2 weeks now, This is obviously a hypothetical. The first part of the hypothetical is, oh, we know that one person committed all 40 of those crimes. I know that's never going to be the case, right? Um, but let's just say for the sake of this point, we know that one person committed all 40 of those property crimes, and then we arrest that person in the in the data. Does it then show all 40 of those crimes as cleared or just one? Well, it is incident based. That's the whole point of neighbors incident-based reporting and the incident is each individual crime that occurred, so I think so and maybe you can help us sort that out. that's what you're saying, Chris? So I know there's several prosecutors in the room, judges, so obviously it's what you can prove, right? So there may be 40 offenses, I believe that individual is tied to, but it's only the number of the the number of cleared. Incidents is based on what we can prove or they admit to. And so, yes, I believe Joe Smith committed 40 breaking or enterings or stole 40 cars, but he admits to one. I get to clear that one and again, that's, that's the issue with the neighbors reporting and the clearance rate is it's only what we can and I appreciate that, but it's also referring to an arrest, not a conviction, right? So if you, if a person's and I fully that this person may have committed 80 and we only know about the 40 and then once they're in prison, those other 40 are never going to be cleared, you know, because we just, you know, we don't know, but I do feel like, and correct me if I'm wrong, but since it is an arrest number, not a conviction number, that let's let's say they plead out from 409 to 1. Would that still show a clearance of those 40, please, I'm asking you as well, so please feel free to chime in here. So I mean from Hot Springs. where I was formerly the chief, we cleared at the point of arrest, right? Not at conviction. So that's where arrested Joe Smith for a burglary, that particular incident that we could tie him to was cleared in neighbors, but he may have committed 4 others, and we weren't, we didn't have the ability to clear those unless we can specifically tie him to that those crimes. So yes, there are, it's misleading, um, and there's no way too clear this is by no means an indictment of law enf. at all. I mean, yeah, but, but your point is very well taken, and I think, you know, generally, we, because of all of this, we understand that a clearance rate's never going to be 100%. It's it's impossible for all of these reasons, but I think the focus for us as a group is whatever our number is, to the extent we can provide more resources and support for law enforcement to help y'all boost that number, you know, that's, that's to the better side. Representative Gassway, did you have a question? Well, I might as well chime in here. Um, so I talked with Australia earlier, uh, maybe just last week, I guess it was. One of the things that we talked about in terms of clearance rates and arrests, of course, when we're talking about neighbors, that's every incident that's reported. And so when we look at, you take the extremely low because some of these are shockingly low. Based on, you know, my experience as a prosecutor and what I think likely the judge's experience and and prosecutor Xu's experience would be. These are shockingly low clearance rates, if you will, for, for purposes of arrest, but what it, the way that it works is, is that's every call that comes into the police department, for example. So if a call comes into the police department and it's simply logged on the police call that someone called and said, somebody stole my water hose out of the backyard. We're like, well, we'll send somebody over there. Nobody has any leads on it whatsoever. That's an incident that's counted, never led to an arrest because There's not the resources to try to solve it. There's not the evidence that exists to solve it, so on and so forth. Absolutely right. OK. You look at sex offenses, for example. Now that's the one that really shockingly low to me, 15%. Uh, but The point is, I suppose, is that's every allegation that is made to law enforcement of some type of sex offense regardless of whether it has any credibility whatsoever, regardless of if the person changes their story, says it never happened, whatever the case may be, there are numerous reasons why arrests aren't made in those cases to just add a little context specifically for sex offenses, one of the greatest indicators His victim cooperation and now we could have a whole discussion on why a victim is or isn't cooperative, but That is one of whether you have a big a cooperative or not cooperative victim is going to be one of the greatest drivers of whether there's a clearance rate on a sex offense for both arrest and for conviction, right, right, and I will say also, you know, in terms of sex offenses, I think if you have a prosecutor who's doing it correctly, those are going to be cases that they scrutinize as closely as any case that they look at for numerous reasons. One, a victim comes Comes forward. The evidence is shaky. You have to make a determination as a prosecutor as to whether or not to seek a warrant and whether or not you want to put the victim through that experience in a case that you may not be able to make. Knowing that the trauma that that could cause to a victim that they and and that you may not be able to secure a conviction so prosecutors closely scrutinize those cases and may not seek a warrant even though there's been a report maybe for that reason. Another reason, uh, is that, you know, as a prosecutor, you have to also think about When you sign that information, you know, we file that information in Arkansas. We don't do grand jury process, but when all it takes is a stroke of a pen of a prosecutor to charge someone with A Class Y felony and potentially life in prison. But when you sign that felony information, you file it with the clerk. if the evidence isn't there, you have to think about the impact on the potential defendant or on the defendant there that the case may ultimately be dismissed. You may never secure a conviction, but that person will, in many people's minds forever be labeled as someone who committed rape and so prosecutors again have to be very careful about making that decision, which again I think accounts for why on sex offenses, you likely see a low clearance rate. Would you agree with that? I don't because what you're talking about is all things that prosecutors do, and this is about what happens before the prosecutor has the case. This is all about incident and arrest. No, because you can't get a, you can't have an arrest unless there's an arrest warrant, and most police departments won't seek an arrest warrant without first consulting the prosecutor on a case like that. OK. For one though, a case like that may never, if it's a victim, for example, calls, reports the case. Then is asked to come in for next steps, whatever those may be, and the victim at that point says, change my mind. I don't want to do this. I can't do this. That would never, I mean, I'll speak from my experience that would never hit my desk as a prosecutor because it would, it's a dead end, nothing happens. There's no victim to go forward. That would be logged in these numbers, but it would not it hits the incident report which again helps account for the low clearance rate there. All of these things factor into the. I want to be clear about that. And then when we look at the property crimes again, which are shockingly low, burglary, theft, 18%. Breaking or entering 9%. But the point being is that counts every time someone called in calls in law enforcement and says somebody broke into my car last night. They make a report of it, but they're just not able to find anybody. OK. All right, just to be clear, all right. And then I have one more point to make. I'll stop monopolizing the time. Uh, when you look at the number of to the Judge Richardson's point, the number of people on supervision. That's, and you, you have the Venn diagram where there's an overlap there. Not finding it immediately here, but the point is, yeah, 83,000 people on supervision. Well, that includes even SIS 6600 SIS also probation and you know we've seen cases where people are on probation for 1015 years, they're likely not even reporting, but yet that really kind of inflates that number of people on supervision, wouldn't you agree with that? This is, this is a snapshot of the people on supervision in one year, 2022. Right. But the point is, is that there are people that are on supervision in 2022 that may have been put on supervision in 2012, and they're not reporting to a probation officer anymore. They're on, they're on supervision, they're on probation. They're on postcard probation or whatever so that you get a really high number of people there that may be far removed from their crime. Yeah, yeah, I see what you are. Thank you. All right, that's all. Yes, ma'am, you recognize. About this slide, we've talked a lot about and somebody, correct me if I'm wrong, y'all know more than I do, but the recidivvision would number measures people who are on supervision that go back to prison, not necessarily just new arrests. So if somebody had failed enough drug tests to go back to prison, that would be a person on supervision going back to prison, but it wouldn't be accounted for in this diagram because it's not a new arrest. Does that Makes sense because I see what you're saying about 26% and recidivism being almost 50. So yes and no. Yeah, yeah. Any additional questions? Speak now or forever hold. All right, uh, seeing no questions informative data. Thank you. Thank you. We will. Probably have another meeting the same week, um, in October with this that week being the 3rd week, which is ALC week, um, but we will. Send out notice of that and then we may have a, uh, some discussions and I'll think about it offline and maybe visit with CSG folks and department folks to to determine whether or not we want to have a discussion on programming at a different meeting just to see how that's going. So, uh, anything for the good of the committee before we adjourn. See nothing, we were adjourned. Thank you.