“We did not receive that information.”
Over and over, the audience heard this answer to questions posed to Seattle-based data researchers looking at deaths in San Diego County jails.
One of the researchers, Cheryl Brown Hill, referred to her team’s correspondence with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office under the California Public Records Act in her answer.
“We asked similar questions in our CPRA requests, and on the whole we were not able to obtain any data,” she said.
Audience members submitted numerous questions during Thursday’s meeting of the Citizens Law Enforcement Review Board (CLERB) – they wanted to know, among other things, how long it took sheriff’s staff to intervene once alerted to medical distress, whether victims of in-custody homicides were charged with crimes against women and children and if deceased inmates had been in solitary confinement prior to their deaths.
Most of those audience members did not get answers, to the frustration of everyone, including board members and the researchers themselves, from Mountain-Whisper-Light: Statistics and Data Science.
“These were really good questions. They’re very insightful. They’re important questions, and we would have loved to have gotten the data so that we could have looked into those issues,” said Michele Dietch, another one of the researchers.
The research team worked for three years on studying in-custody deaths in county jails. They were able to show that the most dangerous time and place for an inmate is within the first two days of booking at one of the county’s seven detention facilities, San Diego Central Jail.
However, the Sheriff’s Office did not release data that would have let researchers compare those who died to those who lived.
“Comparing those who died to those who didn’t die allows you to identify a cause. Once you have a cause, then somebody can try to do something about changing that cause,” said Nayak Polissar, the study’s lead author. “We’ve emphasized getting the data. You can’t make any conclusions without the data.”
That data was particularly important for the Mountain-Whisper-Light team’s methods, which rely on actual deaths recorded in county jails rather than projections, models and comparisons with other counties.
“Once you close yourself into just looking at San Diego, never compared to anything in the rest of the world, what do you contrast inside? The biggest contrast: Person who enters jail and dies and person who enters jail and does not die,” said Nirnaya Miljacic, who attended the meeting in person to present the study. But lacking the data, he said, “you cut 90% of things” that could have been learned.
“It just goes away,” he told the board.
The resulting report fell short of what CLERB wanted when it initiated the study. Board members shared researchers’ frustrations over the department, led by Sheriff Kelly Martinez, withholding information.
At one point, the board hired an attorney to sue the sheriff for the release of data. It did not work; assistant sheriff Dustin Lopez explained why.
“The information that was not provided was protected by law. And that’s obviously personal medical data, booking information, charges and mental health history and stuff like that,” Lopez said during closing comments. “We’re trying to be, as an office, as transparent as possible.”
One advocate who spoke during public comments, Yusef Miller of the North County Equity and Justice Coalition, noted that the frustration the board and researchers felt was a small taste of what families who lost loved ones in jail have gone through for years while fighting for the sheriff to release information.
“Data, data and the lack of data is all you’ve heard,” Miller said. “If you were an impacted family, you can now feel some of the frustration that they have trying to get data on their loved ones. And they don’t work for the county like you do. They’re not hired (as) a contractor like you guys are.”
In an effort to circumvent the sheriff’s office, the research team submitted public records requests to five other county departments, hoping for better results. However, other than the Health and Human Services Agency, those departments said they did not have access to the data the team sought.
“We did make attempts to obtain the necessary data for the study in these other avenues, and we’re mostly unsuccessful in obtaining that,” Brown Hill said.
The researchers noted HHSA was extremely cooperative to their requests and provided data they had on whether those inmates who died had accessed mental health services.
But without mental health data from the Sheriff’s office, researchers solely relied on suicides and overdose deaths as a crude aproximation of the overall mental health picture.
“I just want to re-emphasize that we did not receive any mental health data about any incarcerated person who died, or anyone who did not die,” Brown Hill said. “So we can’t really make any statements about the impact of mental health, although it stands to reason.”
Board chair MaryAnne Pintar praised the staticians for persevering through a difficult process.
Another board member said the study was still helpful, even without reaching its intended goal.
“This was extremely enlightening, educational to me, even though we need the data that we think we should have,” said R. Lee Brown.
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