From Inquest:
Since 2018, court-ordered, pretrial electronic monitoring (EM) in San Francisco County has increased dramatically. Before 2018, the county rarely, if ever, released more than 100 people on pretrial EM each year. But by 2020, it was releasing more than 1,000 people on EM annually. The primary driver behind this striking and abrupt change was the In re Humphrey, a 2018 appellate court ruling that made two important changes to California’s bail procedures: First, that judges consider a defendant’s financial ability to pay before determining bail amounts; and second, that judges consider the least restrictive conditions necessary to ensure defendants would attend court hearings and not threaten public safety.
The appellate court’s message was clear: Individuals’ freedom should not be determined solely by their ability to post bail, and that if less restrictive alternative measures might be taken to secure the government’s interest in public safety and the court proceedings’ integrity, individuals should not lose their liberty.
Although pretrial EM had existed in San Francisco well before Humphrey, after the 2018 ruling, the county ramped up its use of this surveillance tool by over 300 percent, in the hopes of addressing concerns that community-based defendants would threaten public safety or miss scheduled court hearings. In a context where judges could no longer detain someone for being too poor to bail out of jail, judges began to rely much more heavily on pretrial EM, even though this was not necessarily the least restrictive option available to them. Program participants have been disproportionately male (88 percent), without stable housing (roughly 20 percent), and under 35 years of age. Pretrial EM participants are also disproportionately Black (43 percent) in a city with a very small (just 4 to 5 percent) and rapidly declining Black population. Continue reading >>>
|
|
|
|
