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In 2007, I became the Attorney General
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of the State of New Jersey.
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Before that, I'd been a criminal prosecutor,
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first in the Manhattan District Attorney's office,
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and then at the United States Department of Justice.
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But when I became the Attorney General,
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two things happened
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that changed the way I see criminal justice.
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The first is that I asked what I thought
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were really basic questions.
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I wanted to understand who we were arresting,
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who we were charging,
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and who we were putting in our nation's jails
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and prisons.
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I also wanted to understand
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if we were making decisions
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in a way that made us safer.
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And I couldn't get this information out.
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It turns out that most big criminal justice agencies
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like my own
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didn't track the things that matter.
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So after about a month of being incredibly frustrated,
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I walked down into a conference room
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that was filled with detectives
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and stacks and stacks of case files,
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and the detectives were sitting there
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with yellow legal pads taking notes.
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They were trying to get the information
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I was looking for
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by going through case by case
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for the past five years.
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And as you can imagine,
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when we finally got the results, they weren't good.
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It turned out that we were doing
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a lot of low-level drug cases
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on the streets just around the corner
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from our office in Trenton.
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The second thing that happened
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is that I spent the day in the Camden,
New Jersey, Police Department.
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Now at that time, Camden, New Jersey,
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was the most dangerous city in America.
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I ran the Camden Police
Department because of that.
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I spent the day in the Police Department,
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and I was taken into a room
with senior police officials,
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all of whom were working hard
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and trying very hard to reduce crime in Camden.
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And what I saw in that room,
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as we talked about how to reduce crime,
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were a series of officers with a
lot of little yellow sticky notes.
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And they would take a yellow sticky
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and they would write something on it
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and they would put it up on a board.
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And one of them, "We had a robbery two weeks ago.
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We have no suspects."
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And another said, "We had a shooting in this neighborhood last week. We have no suspects."
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We weren't using data-driven policing.
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We were essentially trying to fight crime
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with yellow post-it notes.
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Now both of these things made me realize
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fundamentally that we were failing.
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We didn't even know who was
in our criminal justice system,
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we didn't have any data about
the things that mattered,
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and we didn't share data or use analytics
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or tools to help us make better decisions
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and to reduce crime.
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And for the first time, I started to think
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about how we made decisions.
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When I was an assistant D.A.,
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and when I was a federal prosecutor,
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I looked at the cases in front of me,
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and I generally made decisions based on my instinct
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and my experience.
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When I became Attorney General,
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I could look at this system as a whole,
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and what surprised me is that I found
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that that was exactly how we were doing it
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across the entire system,
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in police departments, in prosecutors's offices,
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in courts, and in jails.
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And what I learned very quickly
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is that we weren't doing a good job.
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So I wanted to do things differently.
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I wanted to introduce data and analytics
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and rigorous statistical analysis
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into our work.
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In short, I wanted to moneyball criminal justice.
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Now, moneyball, as many of you know,
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is what the Oakland A's did,
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where they used smart data and statistics
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to figure out how to pick players
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that would help them win games,
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and they went from a system that was based
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on baseball scouts
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who used to go out and watch players
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and use their instinct and experience,
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the scouts' instincts and experience,
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to pick players, from one to use
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smart data and rigorous statistical analysis
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to figure out how to pick players
that would help them win games.
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It worked for the Oakland A's,
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and it worked in the State of New Jersey.
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We took Camden off the top of the list
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as the most dangerous city in America.
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We reduced murders there by 41 percent,
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which actually means 37 lives were saved.
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And we reduced all crime in the city by 26 percent.
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We also changed the way
we did criminal prosecutions.
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So we went from doing low-level drug crimes
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that were outside our building
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to doing cases of state-wide importance,
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on things like reducing violence
with the most violent offenders,
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prosecuting street gangs,
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gun and drug trafficking, and political corruption.
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And all of this matters greatly,
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because public safety to me
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is the most important function of government.
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If we're not safe, we can't be educated,
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we can't be healthy,
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we can't do any of the other things
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we want to do in our lives.
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And we live in a country today
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where we face serious criminal justice problems.
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We have 12 million arrests every single year.
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The vast majority of those arrests
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are for low-level crimes, like misdemeanors,
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70 to 80 percent.
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Less than five percent of all arrests
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are for violent crime.
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Yet we spend 75 billion,
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that's b for billion,
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dollars a year on state and local corrections costs.
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Right now, today, we have 2.3 million people
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in our jails and prisons.
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And we face unbelievable public safety challenges
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because we have a situation
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in which two thirds of the people in our jails
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are there waiting for trial.
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They haven't yet been convicted of a crime.
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They're just waiting for their day in court.
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And 67 percent of people come back.
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Our recidivism rate is amongst the highest
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in the world.
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Almost seven in 10 people who are released
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from prison will be rearrested
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in a constant cycle of crime and incarceration.
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So when I started my job at the Arnold Foundation,
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I came back to looking at a lot of these questions,
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and I came back to thinking about how
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we had used data and analytics to transform
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the way we did criminal justice in New Jersey.
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And when I look at the criminal justice system
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in the United States today,
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I feel the exact same way that I did
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about the State of New Jersey when I started there,
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which is that we absolutely have to do better,
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and I know that we can do better.
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So I decided to focus
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on using data and analytics
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to help make the most critical decision
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in public safety,
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and that decision is the determination
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of whether, when someone has been arrested,
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whether they pose a risk to public safety
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and should be detained,
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or whether they don't pose a risk to public safety
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and should be released.
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Everything that happens in criminal cases
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comes out of this one decision.
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It impacts everything.
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It impacts sentencing.
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It impacts whether someone gets drug treatment.
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It impacts crime and violence.
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And when I talk to judges around the United States,
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which I do all the time now,
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they all say the same thing,
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which is that we put dangerous people in jail,
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and we let non-dangerous, non-violent people out.
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They mean it and they believe it.
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But when you start to look at the data,
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which, by the way, the judges don't have,
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when we start to look at the data,
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what we find time and time again,
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is that this isn't the case.
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We find low-risk offenders,
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which makes up 50 percent of our
entire criminal justice population,
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we find that they're in jail.
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Take Leslie Chew, who was a Texas man
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who stole four blankets on a cold winter night.
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He was arrested, and he was kept in jail
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on 3,500 dollars bail,
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an amount that he could not afford to pay.
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And he stayed in jail for eight months
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until his case came up for trial,
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at a cost to taxpayers of more than 9,000 dollars.
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And at the other end of the spectrum,
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we're doing an equally terrible job.
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The people who we find
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are the highest risk offenders,
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the people who we think have the highest likelihood
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of committing a new crime if they're released,
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we see nationally that 50 percent of those people
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are being released.
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The reason for this is the way we make decisions.
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Judges have the best intentions
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when they make these decisions about risk,
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but they're making them subjectively.
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They're like the baseball scouts 20 years ago
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who were using their instinct and their experience
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to try to decide what risk someone poses.
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They're being subjective,
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and we know what happens
with subjective decision-making,
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which is that we are often wrong.
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What we need in this space
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are strong data and analytics.
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What I decided to look for
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was a strong data and analytic risk assessment tool,
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something that would let judges actually understand
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with a scientific and objective way
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what the risk was that was posed
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by someone in front of them.
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I looked all over the country,
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and I found that between five and 10 percent
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of all U.S. jurisdictions
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actually use any type of risk assessment tool,
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and when I looked at these tools,
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I quickly realized why.
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They were unbelievably expensive to administer,
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they were time-consuming,
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they were limited to the local jurisdiction
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in which they'd been created.
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So basically, they couldn't be scaled
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or transferred to other places.
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So I went out and build a phenomenal team
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of data scientists and researchers
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and statisticians
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to build a universal risk assessment tool,
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so that every single judge in
the United States of America
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can have an objective, scientific measure of risk.
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In the tool that we've built,
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what we did was we collected 1.5 million cases
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from all around the United States,
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from cities, from counties,
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from every single state in the country,
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the federal districts.
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And with those 1.5 million cases,
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which is the largest data set on pretrial
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in the United States today,
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we were able to basically find that there were
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900-plus risk factors that we could look at
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to try to figure out what mattered most.
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And we found that there were nine specific things
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that mattered all across the country
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and that were the most highly predictive of risk.
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And so we built a universal risk assessment tool.
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And it looks like this.
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As you'll see, we put some information in,
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but most of it is incredibly simple,
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it's easy to use,
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it focuses on things like the
defendant's prior convictions,
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whether they've been sentenced to incarceration,
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whether they've engaged in violence before,
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whether they've even failed to come back to court.
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And with this tool, we can predict three things.
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First, whether or not someone will commit
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a new crime if they're released.
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Second, for the first time,
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and I think this is incredibly important,
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we can predict whether someone will commit
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an act of violence if they're released.
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And that's the single most important thing
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that judges say when you talk to them.
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And third, we can predict whether someone
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will come back to court.
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And every single judge in the
United States of America can use it,
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because it's been created on a universal data set.
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What judges see if they run the risk assessment tool
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is this: it's a dashboard.
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At the top, you see the new criminal activity score,
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six of course being the highest,
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and then in the middle you
see "elevated risk of violence."
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What that says is that this person
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is someone who has an elevated risk of violence
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that the judge should look twice at.
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And then, towards the bottom,
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you see the "Failure to Appear" score,
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which again is the likelihood
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that someone will come back to court.
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Now I want to say something really important.
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It's not that I think we should be eliminating
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the judge's instinct and experience
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from this process.
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I don't.
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I actually believe the problem that we see
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and the reason that we have
these incredible system errors,
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where we're incarcerating
low-level, nonviolent people
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and we're releasing high-risk, dangerous people,
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is that we don't have an objective measure of risk.
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But what I believe should happen
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is that we should take that
data-driven risk assessment
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and combine that with the
judge's instinct and experience
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to lead us to better decision-making.
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The tool went state-wide in Kentucky on July 1st,
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and we're about to go up in a
number of other U.S. jurisdictions.
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Our goal, quite simply, is that every single judge
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in the United States will use a data-driven risk tool
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within the next five years.
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We're now working on risk tools
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for prosecutors and for police officers, as well,
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to try to take a system that runs today
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in America the same way it did 50 years ago,
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based on instinct and experience,
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and make it into one that runs
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on data and analytics.
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Now, the great news about all this,
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and we have a ton of work left to do,
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and we have a lot of culture to change,
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but the great news about all of it
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is that we know it works.
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It's why Google is Google,
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and it's why all these baseball teams use moneyball
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to win games.
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The great news for us as well
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is that it's the way that we can transform
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the American criminal justice system.
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It's how we can make our streets safer,
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we can reduce our prison costs,
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and we can make our system much fairer
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and more just.
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Some people call it data science.
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I call it moneyballing criminal justice.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)