San Joaquin Valley sheriffs do poor job of monitoring, reporting COVID data | Opinion

California’s sheriffs are reluctant to disclose data on COVID-19 in their jails and no state authority has mandated that they do so. To date, there is little to no transparency on the pandemic’s impact on roughly 80,000 people who shuffle in and out of the 114 county jails in the state.

Jails, as opposed to prisons, primarily house individuals awaiting trial or sentencing, and are managed by independent sheriffs instead of a central state authority like the Department of Corrections. There is some publicly available COVID-19 data for prisons but nothing equivalent exists for jails except a dashboard created by the Board of State and Community Corrections. Even the state Department of Public Health, which has data sets on COVID-19 in marginalized groups such as low-income people or those residing in crowded housing, has no data for jails.

In fact, when KQED reporters uncovered a massive outbreak in the Fresno County Jail in August of 2020, and asked the Department of Public Health why they are not sharing data publicly so that outbreaks can be easily detected, a spokesperson replied that they collect information on jails from county health officials but do not publish it because it is often “incomplete.” They attributed the data quality problem to the high volume of cases and inadequate resources for counties to report them.

Through hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests to sheriff’s departments and the state, the Covid In-Custody Project (www.covidincustody.org) has tried to fill this critical knowledge gap. But only some departments were responsive. In fact, the San Joaquin Valley region, spanning ten counties from San Joaquin County to Kern County, provided little to no data and proved to be the least transparent out of all of the counties that we contacted.

For the whole state, we uncovered a total of roughly 45,000 cases for incarcerated people and 20,000 cases for Sheriff’s Department employees, a subset of whom work inside the jails. Zooming into the San Joaquin Valley region, less than half of counties provided responsive records, and 3,400 cases and one death were identified. But this is clearly a gross undercount. For some facilities, the Board of State and Community Corrections reports the cases confirmed weekly, if and only if there are more than 10 but not a running total. The broad impact of the pandemic on incarcerated people is therefore lost on us.

Further, no county in the San Joaquin Valley region provided the number of active cases per day or per week since March 2020 for the jail population and employees, which clouds visibility into key outbreak periods. Merced County stands out as it provided some historical data for staff.

Sheriff’s Departments provided a variety of reasons for dismissing our data requests. Tuolumne County described our requests as “interrogatory” and “non-specific” despite the clear categories of data we outlined. San Joaquin County stated that our requests are “overly broad and unduly burdensome” and that the drain on county resources to produce the records outweighs the benefit.

Even when agencies provided records, they were often incomprehensible and unreliable. Fresno County, for example, provided swab lists with tables containing the number of positive swabs in each housing unit. Mariposa County provided over 90 pages of handwritten test results and notes. Their documentation is unreliable, susceptible to errors, and incompatible with modern programmatic approaches to data extraction.

The lack of good quality documentation and monitoring of COVID-19 exemplifies the absence of data-driven decision making by law enforcement leadership in custody.

None of the sheriff’s departments in the San Joaquin Valley region provided a vaccination rate for the jail population. Some provided the vaccination rate for employees, but many like Fresno County insist that the data is not tracked or maintained. Merced County boasts the highest vaccination rate among correctional officers of 83% while Mariposa County and Stanislaus County fall well behind with just 12% and 36% vaccinated respectively.

The timeliness of the responses are also cause for concern. Most of the counties delayed their responses by at least 10 days under Government Code 6253(c), if not longer. Madera County took over five months to provide any records, despite multiple follow-ups and clarifications from our side. Kern County took about seven months to share records after failing to respond to one of our requests by mistake.

Open and easy access to COVID-19 data is critical for public health decision-making and academic research, and for the public to hold officials accountable when incarcerated people are impacted in an unfair manner. For this to happen, sheriffs must cultivate open data principles from the start. Documentation and transparency must be practiced in a technologically advanced manner.

The Covid In-Custody Project hopes that by revealing the deficiencies in the data available on COVID-19 in jails, public officials will build better data collection systems for future public health crises behind bars.

Aparna Komarla and Suzanne Stitt are with the Covid in Custody Project. They were assisted in data collection by interns Anumita Alur, Anjali Govindapanicker, Sophia Baltasar, Suzanne Stitt, Yu Na Choi, Madeleine Malin, Avynash Bains, Claire Beckwith, Anchal Lamba, Anqi Fan, Kyla Lum, Kai Kang and Meng Li.