California Penal Code

§ 13370

PEN § 13370 Effective Jan 1, 2023Title 3 · Part 4 · Ch. 2 · Art. 9

Statute text

(a)(1) It is the intent of the Legislature to create a workable system of criminal justice data transparency whereby law enforcement prosecution agencies will gather complete, accurate, and timely data in a uniform format, and make that data available to the public in a modern, open, electronic format that is machine-readable and readily accessible through an application program interface. In order that meaningful discussions can occur regarding criminal justice and its most challenging issues, including those regarding criminal caseloads, plea bargaining, race, mass incarceration, equity, and homelessness, the Legislature finds that it is an important state interest to implement a data collection, aggregation, and publishing process for criminal prosecutions to promote criminal justice data transparency. This data would be comprised of publishable statistics and other data from statewide prosecution offices. This section shall be referred to as the Justice Data Accountability and Transparency Act, “the Act,” or “JDATA.”

(2)It is the intent of the Legislature to create a reliable and robust methodology that is consistent county-to-county so that statewide data and trends may be accurately tracked. Further, the legislation shall set low technological and resource barriers so that every affected office may meaningfully participate to the fullest intent of this article.

(3)The expediency and accuracy of the data is best served by the Department of Justice as a single data aggregator and repository unit. The participation of the department as the final point of collection, aggregation, and publishing of this data is more efficient, will ensure the uniformity and accuracy of the data, and, by providing the technological resources and aggregation and publication of all data, will allow offices that lack adequate technology or resources to comply with the mandate. As used in this paragraph, technological resources means providing the basic systems and support necessary to receive the case data described in this article in standard formats from prosecution agencies statewide and aggregate that data using appropriate means developed by the department, and then publish the data in a format that will allow users to easily navigate and access the data they require, for example, on an internet website.

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Legislative history

Added by Stats. 2022, Ch. 787, Sec. 1. (AB 2418) Effective January 1, 2023. Conditionally operative as prescribed by its own provisions.