Lawmakers should create new window into Florida's justice system

A Tampa Bay Times Editorial

Greater transparency is needed throughout Florida's criminal justice system in order to address racial and economic disparities and improve policies. A wide-reaching bill that has passed the House would establish a new system for gathering data from law enforcement agencies, courts, prisons and jails and make it searchable and publicly accessible. Collecting the information is the first step toward making Florida's justice system fairer and more effective, and as lawmakers wrap up their work, the Senate should approve this important legislation and Gov. Rick Scott should sign it into law.

The bill, HB 7071, requires data collection on all criminal cases in Florida from arrest through trial, sentencing and post-conviction. It would capture basic information such as defendants' race and age, as well as potentially more revealing points such as whether defendants were indigent, whether they were represented by a public defender or private attorney, sentencing score sheets, prior criminal records and other conditions of prosecution and sentencing. Being able to compare those factors would help the public identify patterns and disparities and inform policymakers about needed changes.

The information, maintained on an open-source website, would also reveal more about the justice system itself, including jail populations, recidivism rates, court fees and other financial information, and the caseloads of judges, public defenders and prosecutors. Some of this information is available now but difficult to access. For example, arrests and criminal prosecutions are public records but they generally must be searched by individual case. There's no storehouse where the public can search, for example, all burglary cases in Florida and glean where there are inconsistencies. Having a single, uniform access point would be valuable.

Recent newspaper investigations have examined aspects of Florida's justice system and yielded revealing findings. The Tampa Bay Times last year published "Why Cops Shoot," which documented every time a police officer shot someone in Florida between 2009 and 2014. "Bias on the Bench," published in 2016 by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, analyzed individual judges' patterns in sentencing based on race and other factors. A follow-up project last year called "One War. Two Races." investigated racial disparities in drug cases. Those projects required reporters to seek records from dozens of agencies and build unique databases to analyze the data. This legislation would save much of that legwork and provide the public an unprecedented window into how Florida doles out justice.

The bill sponsor, Rep. Chris Sprowls, a Palm Harbor Republican and former prosecutor, deserves credit for introducing such a strong tool for transparency. There is no companion bill in the Senate, but Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, has been shepherding the provisions and could add them to another bill being sent to the governor.

Fixing the flaws in Florida's justice system can only happen if stakeholders and the public are armed with accurate information. The House bill that would create a website containing comprehensive criminal justice data is a positive step toward greater accountability and it should become law.