Courtrooms have life-changing consequences, particularly for people of color. From bail hearings and first arraignments through plea agreements and sentences, people of color have disparate outcomes throughout the court process, though the patterns may not always be visible to the public. And beyond the courtroom, decisions that shape communities are often made at state board and commission meetings. Thanks to innovations in the use of data and technology by local nonprofits supported by the Catalyst Grant Program, three communities have more visibility into government proceedings and are thus better positioned to hold public systems accountable.

When the public has access to court proceedings and government meetings, judges and other officials can be held accountable for their actions and decisions. Access to these events can build public trust and confidence in our legal processes, and public oversight can deter bias, misconduct, and unethical behavior and identify patterns of injustice. Accountability occurs when data collected from public hearings are analyzed and shared in an accessible manner. Online dashboards, infographics and flyers, and public reports inform communities and empower them to make informed decisions, such as voting for officials who represent their needs.

Although these proceedings and meetings are generally open to the public, they are not always transparent. Several barriers prevent full public access and oversight. Many community members aren’t aware these proceedings are open to the public. Moreover, the public often lacks understanding of what these proceedings involve and why they’re important. And information on when, where, and how to attend them is seldom well-publicized.

Monitoring Court Proceedings and Board and Commission Meetings

To address this lack of transparency in their communities, several Catalyst grantees used their funding to support programs for monitoring government proceedings. These programs empower communities to observe and record these events and disseminate themes and patterns:

• Kalamazoo Defender was purposeful in its search for court observers in its community. It hired and paid two formerly justice-involved people to lead its Catalyst-funded court observation. The observers are experts in the criminal court process in their own right, and Kalamazoo Defender gave them the training to document over 600 court hearings.
• Court Watch NOLA and Racine Interfaith Coalition recruited volunteers from their communities to observe and collect data on court proceedings and get civically involved. The programs democratized the research efforts by including community members in the organizations’ court watch programs.
• Milwaukee Turners monitored and collected data at Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission meetings and built a free phone-based app that has been shared with the public to empower community members to attend meetings and collect data at them in real time.

The grantees built coalitions for monitoring court proceedings and board/commission meetings and trained community members to serve as local government watchdogs. These community members are those most directly affected by the decisions made at these events and now have the ability to influence results and create change.

How They Did It

Nonprofits used Microsoft Forms to develop and standardize online forms for collecting data in court proceedings and meetings. Because of the sheer number of court hearings it planned to observe, Kalamazoo Defender sought to streamline its court observation process and used its grant to develop online questionnaires that guided observers through key questions. This made the process more efficient and made the data easier to analyze than free-form documentation.

Catalyst grantees also scanned PDFs to automatically pull information and use data more quickly. For example, Racine Interfaith Coalition used Azure Document Intelligence to scrape data from paper court-observation forms into a machine-readable format. The coalition has been court watching for several years and had collected an overwhelming amount of data on court hearings, and using this technology to extract key information from court observation forms made the data easier to analyze and more useful for the community. To better track case outcomes, grantees also integrated different databases of information into single trackable data sources. For example, Court Watch NOLA had access to court docket data with key information on defendants, prosecutors, defenders, and judges. This is information that observers had previously documented while in court. To make observation more effective, the organization used Azure and Power Apps to autopopulate its court watching database, reducing time spent on data entry and encouraging observers to focus on proceedings.

Milwaukee Turners created a public-facing dashboard to highlight findings from its Fire & Police Commission Monitoring Program. The dashboard highlights key meeting statistics, voting records, and agenda analyses for the broader community. This monitoring and documentation provides the public with digestible and accessible meeting insights, equipping them with the knowledge and information to act in their communities.

As those most directly affected by court and board/commission decisions, community members have a vested interest in those systems’ transparency and accountability. Court watch and board/commission observation programs offer an opportunity for the public to collect data and democratize research. This data can be used to inform the public’s choices around which judges and board/commission members represent them and what types of policy they want enacted. In the end, public monitoring and oversight of these proceedings makes for systems that better serve their communities, enables the public to hold officials accountable, and creates more civically engaged communities.

The Catalyst Grant Program supported the efforts of nonprofit organizations to use data and technology to advance racial equity and reform in the adult criminal legal system. Visit the Catalyst Grant Program Insights page for more resources and stories about the grantees.