Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
- Salt Lake County District Attorney's Office launches a public screening dashboard.
- The dashboard details screening processes and data dating back to 2023.
- DA Sim Gill emphasizes transparency while highlighting the office's underfunding and workload issues.
SALT LAKE CITY — The Salt Lake County District Attorney's Office wants to make its screening process more open to the public.
On Monday, the office unveiled its new screening dashboard, which includes information dating back to 2023.
"The dashboard contains multiple tabs designed to help the public better understand the screening process," according to a statement from District Attorney Sim Gill's office.
After a police agency conducts an investigation, the case is submitted to the district attorney's office, which determines whether formal criminal charges are warranted and what those charges should be.
The new dashboard shows that more than 29,000 cases have been filed by the Salt Lake County District Attorney's Office over the past two years. According to data on the website, Salt Lake County's biggest police departments screen the most cases, with the Salt Lake City Police Department referring significantly more cases than any other agency in the county, followed by the Unified Police Department, West Jordan police and West Valley police.
The most common cases screened over the past two years have been drug and assault cases, according to the dashboard, followed by larceny and obstruction.
"Making this information publicly available has been a long-standing priority for District Attorney Gill," the statement says. "This release represents the first phase of our initiative to make data from this office publicly available and easily accessible. In future phases, the district attorney's office will add data that tracks case outcomes as well."
The database explains the "screening flow" that a case goes through and how it may be reviewed multiple times before any charges are filed. The Salt Lake County District Attorney's Office says it screens 1,300 to 1,500 cases per month. The data also shows that 78% of the cases screened result in charges. The prosecutors decline to file charges for between 300 and 500 cases each month.
"By clicking on sections of the charts in both the "screening flow" and "screening outcomes" tabs, users can explore additional breakdowns, such as the percentage of third-degree felony cases that are drug, assault or sex offenses. More than 30 crime types are broken down by percentage for both screened and filed cases," the office said.
"This data is not our data — it is the public's data, and that is why we are publishing this dashboard. Over the last several years, we have made a concerted effort to share prosecution-related data with the community," Gill said. "The publication of this dashboard makes even more of that information available on an ongoing basis, allowing the public to explore the cases we file or decline and the percentage of cases submitted by each law enforcement agency."
Last year, after state lawmakers passed a controversial bill imposing new rules requiring Gill to report how his prosecutors spend their time in 15-minute increments, along with many other data points, Gill explained to KSL that his office is working.
"Right now, our office has 26,000 open active cases," he said in 2024. "We have over 200 death-related cases. We have almost 2,000 sexual assaults (and) 4,000 domestic violence cases. So, the men and women here are working."
But Gill said he doesn't have nearly enough prosecutors to do the work, noting that his office is "woefully underfunded."
