Farías asks about ACS detention lists and long pending cases

Prosecutors have reported difficulty getting the names of young people held in detention from ACS.

Information needed to identify and prioritize long pending cases.

Has your office experienced this?

And what information do you currently receive from ACS?

And what do you need?

Look, we know the names of the kids.

I mean, we know what cases we're carrying.

The thing is, I don't know if they're still in detention.

And we won't know that because the court dates vary.

Some are long-term, some are short-term.

We don't necessarily know.

We have to keep in touch with the defense attorney.

Look, they have a heavy caseload just like we do.

So things get caught up in between.

If we, like for Rikers, during COVID, you talked about how we did it.

This is how we did it.

The city came to us and said, these are the people that are here.

Can you look at these cases and tell us whether or not you would agree to them being released?

And we did it.

That's what we did.

We looked at those cases.

We looked at the circumstance.

Now, we didn't agree on all of them.

Some of them were able to be released.

Some of them were not.

But at least we knew what to look at.

Like, you want me to look at all my cases?

I have a lot of cases.

But if we want to prioritize this, if we really want to reduce the population, then we need to work together.

Tell me who you want me to consider.

And I will look at it, and we can move forward from there.

But without it, I can't do it.

Because what happens is, you know, when we get the case, we immediately, when a person is detained, we have to consider whether we're going to be presenting that case before a grand jury.

We have 144, let's say 120 to 144 hours to do that, okay?

So at that point, when we're making that decision with respect to whether we're going to present a case,

case in the grand jury, we want to know who this person is.

We want to know at that point what's going on with that person.

But after we indict the case, if we indict it, if the grand jury decides that an indictment is appropriate and we present the case to court, we come into court shortly after, you know, maybe a day or so after we do a six-day appearance in front of the youth part judge.

Where we discuss whether that case should be retained in part or not.

Because even if the case is indicted, it could still go to family court.

But we then argue in front of the court, this case should be retained in the part.

Because this is a serious offense.

This is not something that should be going to family court.

But at that point, we start talking to defense and saying to defense, look, we need information from you because we need to understand what's going on with the child.

We also try to reach out to other partners to try to understand, is the child...

If the child is still detained, what's going on in the detention center and what's going to happen going forward in the detention center.

Because at the end of the day, if the child has needs and we find out that the child has a mental issue or substance use disorder or has trauma

in the family, situations that have happened in that child's life that require attention, we offer that not only to the court but to defense counsel, to anyone who will hear so that they can help that child out while that child is in detention.

Meanwhile, we're trying to converse with defense attorney to try to get a disposition on the cases as early as possible, but oftentimes we get nowhere with defense.

We have no information, additional information to help us.

understand what to do with respect to the case and we basically just have an indictment or an indicted case in front of the court, at which point the court asks us, what are we doing with the case?

And at that point, we can't do it by ourselves.

We need defense, we need everybody to help so that we can reach these types of dispositions.

And I just want to add one thing.

The reason why I built the Youth Justice Bureau is because that we were backed up with cases.

There wasn't the proper amount of attention that needed to be taken for the case.

And I have to own some of that as well because of all of the responsibilities of my assistants.

So I said, let me build a team who are focused on this population that understand what the needs are and how important it is to move these things forward.

So what I'm dealing with right now is the backlog that I had.

So some of them have been in there a long time and didn't get the attention that it needed up front.

So I'm dealing with that.

But as the case is coming in, we're doing it a lot quicker because we know how we need to approach it.

So it's a combination of both.

Yeah, I have a number of council members who have questions for the DA, so we're actually going to have to move on.

I'm sorry about that.

So thank you.

We have Councilmember Hanif, then we have Ressler, and then Sanchez.

And Councilmember Sanchez and Brewer have joined us.