Fascinating data and transparency project from Colorado district attorneys

The Denver Post has this lengthy and interesting account of a remarkable new data project in Colorado involving numerous district attorneys.  The piece should be read in full and is headlined "Eight Colorado DAs unveil detailed data about prosecutions, racial disparities; Public dashboards show racial disparities, offer unprecedented detail."  Here is how the article gets started:

Eight Colorado district attorneys released detailed data about their operations Thursday in an attempt to be more transparent with the public amid broader criticism of racial disparities in and distrust of the U.S. criminal justice system.

The data offers a look at the inner workings of Colorado’s prosecutors in unprecedented detail, with researchers tracking 55 different aspects of prosecution, ranging from charging and bond decisions to sentencing to how long cases take to be resolved

“For too long and too often, the justice system feels like a black box of information,” 18th Judicial District Attorney John Kellner said during a news conference Thursday. “…That changes today.”

The data is presented publicly in online dashboards — collected at data.dacolorado.org — for each of the eight offices that participated in the research project, which was funded by an $882,000 grant from the Microsoft Justice Reform Institute. The research was carried out by the University of Denver’s Colorado Evaluation and Action Lab and by the Prosecutorial Performance Indicators project.