Cash bail pilot grants awarded, but San Francisco officials oppose the funds

The Judicial Council approved $68 million for pretrial detention pilot projects with a unanimous vote at its regular meeting Friday. But as is now standard with any discussion of the future of cash bail, there were a few contentious moments. The money comes from $75 million Gov. Gavin Newsom set aside in the latest state budget to study alternatives to the current cash bail. Under the proposal submitted by a 12-member Pretrial Reform and Operations Workgroup, funding will go to the combination of 17 large, medium and small counties.

But much of the public comment period at the beginning of the meeting focused on a county that did not receive a grant: San Francisco.

San Francisco Deputy Public Defender Brian Cox was among the multiple speakers urging that funding not go to existing probation departments or other law enforcement agencies. He specifically spoke against the probation department in his own county receiving funds.

"A central component of any change to the status quo in pretrial services is to have the support and cooperation of that community's criminal justice stakeholders," Cox said.

San Francisco has been the epicenter of the movement against cash bail. Multiple lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of cash bail have been filed in state and federal courts in the city.

Several people involved with the San Francisco Pretrial Diversion Project were on hand to urge the preservation of that program, which CEO David Mauroff said dates from 1965 but could run afoul of new rules being developed around pretrial release. The local project uses a combination of approaches including "community courts" that focus on restorative justice. "Since SB 10 passed, we've been looking over our shoulder over elimination of our agency," Mauroff said.

That was a reference to a law signed last year that phases out cash bail, but which is on hold pending separate referendum and initiative efforts to overturn it on the November 2020 ballot.

The current grants are part of an ongoing effort to either prepare for a system without cash bail or to divert more people out of the existing bail system if it survives at the ballot box.

A quarter of the money, $17.3 million, will go toward an existing program in Los Angeles County that uses a "static" assessment criteria to identify candidates for pretrial release, with a "dynamic" assessment used to further evaluate defendants not deemed eligible for pre-arraignment release.

Another $14.4 million will go to an existing program in Alameda County. The third large county to receive funds is Sacramento, which will get $9.6 million for a brand new program. Large counties submitted a total of $106 million in proposed bids, said the working group's chair, Justice Marsha G. Slough of the 4th District Court of Appeal, Division 2.

"We did want to select large courts from diverse areas of the state, and we also did want to select large courts that were at different stages with their pretrial programs," Slough said.

The first phase of Sacramento County's proposal "will focus on individuals booked into custody for relatively low-level offenses, property and drug crimes," according to a press release from the court.

Reached after the meeting, Sacramento County Presiding Judge David De Alba said their proposal beat out strong bids from bigger counties including Orange and San Diego. One factor in Sacramento County's favor, he added, was that the Board of Supervisors approved $1.2 million of local taxpayer funding for the project, which kicked off last month.

"Our county made a commitment irrespective of what the Judicial Council determined what would have been, which I think is an indication of our commitment to pretrial release reform," De Alba told the Daily Journal.

At the other end of the scale, Calaveras, Modoc, Tuolumne and Yuba counties received grants under $1 million. These cover a range of ideas, but in each case they will seek to evaluate all arrestees within 24 to 48 hours.