While Fairfax County recently rolled out a new prosecution dashboard with detailed breakdowns of the county’s criminal caseload, Arlington data tracking lags behind.
The new Case Overview Dashboard from the Office of the Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney contains a wealth of information on the county’s criminal cases, with data on the age, race and gender of defendants as well as stats on specific charges.
Notable takeaways include the fact that violent felonies make up less than 8% of Fairfax County cases, that 76% of the county’s criminal cases are nonviolent and that about 32% of defendants are Black.
Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano has also released dashboards on bond decisions and gun removal cases.
In Arlington, however, public data on prosecutions is more limited.
While the Arlington County Police Department releases an annual report on offenses, arrests and other public safety data, a dashboard on criminal cases themselves is missing — a gap that Commonwealth’s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti attributes to a lack of county investment.
“Our data system was set up a decade ago in 2014, which, when it comes to data analysis, is akin to using a dial-up modem,” she told ARLnow.
During county budget discussions this year, Dehghani-Tafti requested $300,000 in one-time funding to have temporary personnel upgrade her office’s case management system.
The current system for Arlington and Falls Church, according to a February memo on the topic, is designed to keep track of cases and manage upcoming court dates — not to provide insights into racial disparities, case dismissals or diversions.
Not only does this limit transparency on how local prosecutors are handling their cases, Dehghani-Tafti said, but it also hinders some aspects of their work.
“It is impossible, for example, to determine whether a case was diverted into treatment, a specialty docket, or a diversion program without opening the case file itself, making it impossible to determine through a simple search why a charge was dismissed,” she wrote in the memo to County Manager Mark Schwartz. “My office has tens of thousands of cases that are impossible to sift through individually without significant time and attention.”
Dehghani-Tafti asked the county to perform a “wholesale review and clean up of data to provide accurate and meaningful information.” Expanding diversion opportunities for nonviolent and lower-level crimes was central to her campaign platform in both 2019 and 2023.
The county, however, did not grant Dehghani-Tafti’s request to improve her case management system in Fiscal Year 2025, a tough budget year that involved Arlington’s first tax hike in five years.
“My colleagues and I were happy to be able to add two positions, a Conviction Review Attorney and Director of Restorative Justice and Diversion Services, to the Office of Commonwealth’s Attorney (CWA) during this year’s Budget process,” Matt de Ferranti, the Arlington County Board’s liaison to the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, told ARLnow.
“The Board also added an additional $500K, during the final budget adoption process, to help expand the CWA’s office space,” de Ferranti continued.
He said it is “too soon to discuss any commitments” to providing more funding in the future.
“A perennial task for the Board is working with the County Manager to adopt a balanced budget that meets the needs of the public while also sufficiently supporting our county staff to deliver on those services,” de Ferranti said. “In pursuit of those goals, not every office receives all that it requests, but we do our best each year to try and fund as many priorities as we reasonably can.”
Dehghani-Tafti, who did not rank or assign particular priority to any of the five main funding requests she made this year, plans to re-file her request for data improvements next budget cycle.
“Good data, both historical and current, helps the community understand how we prosecute cases and why — and also helps us understand whether we are moving towards our goals in transforming the justice system,” she said in a statement. “Notwithstanding the challenges and obstacles we have faced from the start — from a system that lacked necessary security features to resources to reach our ideals — we are working every day to create greater accuracy and transparency.”
