Mass. district attorneys' offices use tech from the dial-up era

I'm Lisa Mullins. District attorneys are the chief local prosecutors in the state. Their thumbprints are on every case that involves serious crime. But DA's offices in Massachusetts are running on 25-year-old software. That means records of victims, witnesses, convictions, and acquittals are stored on a system from the dial-up days. DA's are taking steps to buy new case management software. Nasser Elidru says not soon enough. He worked as a senior data scientist for the Suffolk County DA and wrote a blog post that warns about state prosecutors' continued reliance on a software called Damien. Damien is a really old case management system. It was designed in the late 90s and came into being at a time when we might have had to choose between going on the internet or making a phone call. And I can't think of a technology that old in my life that is still in use, but the DA's are still using this. The DA's are using something that was brought online before we even had smartphones. Absolutely, yeah. Pretty crazy. It hasn't changed since then? Very little, very, very little. And so when you look at the system, the article includes a screenshot, it's very nostalgic, these pixelated icons. I mean, you can almost hear the dial-up screeching. Yeah, you can hear your floppy disk grinding to a halt maybe. But also it has these icons which might remind us of Microsoft Word Clipart, for example. But because it is so old, it really invites questions of vulnerability. You know, this is such an old system. And the DA's certainly deserve better. We deserve better as the public because, mind you, the district attorneys are subject to the public records law. This is the only pathway by which you or I can try to understand what's happening in a courtroom down the street. Visible and transparent to the public, which the system now is not. So to understand the importance of this, we need to know the importance of the 11 DA's across the state. What do they do and how are they engaged in the computer system? A district attorney in Massachusetts, they are all elected. When someone has committed an offense, once they make that decision to bring charges, that decision is logged into the system, Damien. And so if there was a victim or a witness, that information also gets logged. Information about the defendant, what charges were initially brought. So this is important information that goes in manually. It goes in manually, but it doesn't really report that information out in such a way as to help the DA's cleanly track and understand what happens to those cases. So for all the cases that they might be bringing, are they getting convictions on those cases? Are they getting dismissals on those cases? Why are they getting dismissed? Was it dismissed because a witness didn't show up? Or was it dismissed because the prosecution declined to move the case forward? Those are very meaningful differences. And so it's important that the data reflect that very different outcome, rather than just sort of lump it together and say dismissed by common law. You can calculate rates that help us understand whether or not things are actually making people safer. But the software, Damien, doesn't actually allow you to do that. It requires you to download all of that information and separately work on it. How would things be better if this software had been updated more than a decade ago? We would have a better sense as to what really keeps crime low in communities and what keeps people safe. What are the types of cases? What are the outcomes of those cases? And we would know more information about the prosecutors. For example, are they bringing charges that are ultimately getting dismissed, thereby wasting the time of the courts and the experience that people are having when they go through the criminal justice system? Now, mind you, bringing charges, criminal charges, immediately triggers immigration consequences for people. So this has long tentacles. It unfortunately does. Asser Elidrus is a computer scientist and researcher. He formerly worked as a senior data scientist at the Suffolk County DA's office. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Elidrus says any new software system won't correct 25 years of bad data collection overnight, but it's a good first step. The Suffolk County DA's office said in a statement to WBUR, it recognizes the current system's limitations and looks forward to replacing it.