Fellowship Status Report

Code for America is partnering with Salt Lake County to build technology solutions to improve services
and strengthen the relationship between the county and its citizens, with an aim to lower the rate at
which citizens fail to appear (FTA) in court, for supervision and treatment appointments in addition to
lowering the recidivism rate. In order to accomplish these objectives we pursue three workstreams build, measure, learn - to insure we iterate quickly and that our decisions are based on data and user
focused.

Phase III - Residency (02/06/2016 to 03/06/2016)

Workstream
Build
agile
development

Goals during this phase

Understand and connect data sources to support the functionality

of an SMS reminder tool

Build an SMS (text-messaging) tool that notifies of upcoming court

hearings

Measure
data-driven
decisionmaking
Learn
user centered
design

Determine feasibility of measuring FTA

Programmatically measure FTA count and rate over time

Understand the justice system, how people move through it, and
their attitudes and behaviors towards it

Identify opportunities to design and build ways to make the

process more efficient and easier to successfully navigate

Week ending 03/04/2016

This report covers the fourth and final week of our formal term of residency. The week began with
Mental Health Court observations and the successful deployment of Jail Register at midnight on the
first of March. This tool provides the ability for CJS to make sure that the booking intake process at the
Jail remains functional during the booking restriction period. Thus, individuals could continue to have
an opportunity to avail themselves of the surrender services offered through CJS Probation would still
be presented the opportunity. From the sheriffs press conference, to newspaper coverage of the app
release, to buy-in from all chiefs at the cross-jurisdiction LEADS meeting involving all Salt Lake County
police districts, our week was characterized by a series of strong wins that framed a very positive
backdrop to entering the CourtHack competition at the end of the week. We did successfully place in a
winning category at CourtHack, but want to focus this weeks update on the proceedings of the week
itself. In our following weeks report, we will include coverage of CourtHack. As always, please feel free
to keep following along with our daily updates on the teams Tumblr: http://c4a-slc.tumblr.com/.

Highlights
Well-attended follow up event to last weeks system flow brainstorm. CJS employees
were broken up into multiple teams. Each team tackled one pain point from a list of five that
were identified through last weeks event and was tasked with brainstorming a product or
solution to an identified pain point. Video was taken of the event and has been uploaded to our
Tumblr.
Deployed Jail Register and successfully achieved buy-in from LEADS, the monthly joint
meeting of leaders from every of the multitude of jurisdictions that criss-cross Salt Lake
County. We have been invited to return for all future monthly meetings.
Completed in excess of 20 hours of in-depth user interviews with Pretrial and Probation
populations, surpassing our target interview goals for the month.

Observations

Many of the homeless population are transient, relatively recent arrivals, and have
frequently become stranded in Salt Lake.
Booking restrictions have external consequences on CJS Probation service offerings,
the consequence of Conways Law in action, via which organization operations are
intrinsically tied to human workflows. For more on this please read Kuans blog post.
Lack of coordination results in significant duplication of efforts. For example, Salt Lake
City police department operated a 4 team task force is responsible for all district-wide trainings
on mental illness, as well as case management for over 3,000 yearly cases. These cases
frequently overlap with CJS turnstile clients, but the two have no means of communication at
present.

Quotes
Im not trying to give an excuses. This is all my fault, [but] I dont have the money for
that [urine analysis tests] right now. - Probation Client
We dont like to talk, we text everything. - Caseworker describing clients behavior
I stay around here where people can see me and I can be safe. - Homeless woman
with over 12 active warrants (largely the product of an accumulation of trespassing violations
stemming from indigency) who has lived for the last 25 years in the Gateway District on the
western end of downtown
Guys who dont have a trade or a career They get in trouble, they dont have
nothing. - Probation Client

Workstre
am

This weeks accomplishments

Next weeks objectives

Build

Complete
operational base SMS tool

Deploy
operational base SMS tool
to hosted production
environment

Connect to SLCo
FTP server
programmatically

Built Jail Register

Establish programmatic
access to CJS-IJIS server via VPN

Reconfigure Utah Court

Calendar Service to extract data
from CJS-IJIS instead of from PDFs

Develop Salt Lake County Court

Calendar Service to pull court calendar
event data from SLCo FTP server

Build 2nd SMS interface to

request data from Salt Lake County Court
Calendar Service; determine integration
or parallel with current

Get SLC number from Twilio and

use that

Free text SMS tool

Measure

Draft, send data

access request form to
State

Continue w/ CORIS
administrators

Sign and return

county BAA and (data
sharing agreement)

Determine if CJS-IJIS server

can be used to measure FTA

Research how FTA is currently

calculated

Learn

Collect all system

pain points in single
document

Identify target
long-term user groups to
follow

Synthesize research notes

Send follow-ups, thank yous to

persons

Schedule interviews with

stakeholders

Track case manager/client


Identify primary
concern and break point
for CJS, Jail in light of Mar.
01 Booking Restrictions

Schedule and
conduct additional
interviews

communication through SMS tool

Identify population distribution

targets and long-term user groups

Solicit CJS review and approval of

updated process diagrams

Partner Support
We have received a great deal of support, especially at the Mayors staff level during the month of
February. This has helped us move quickly, and has opened doors that has made approaching new
organizations and aspects of the County government possible on a rapid turnaround schedule. With
that said we do have a few final closing requests for the week:
Continued support as we move forward with Court data access strategies
Notification of critical dates that you would like to make sure the team is present for in
Salt Lake County over the course of the year as we are planning out a rough travel schedule
for the year at this point
Thanks,
Kuan and Code for America, Team Salt Lake County