New Summaries of PAO Work Done by Year and Law Enforcement Agency
The King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office Data Dashboard was recently updated to include new features, functionality, and data insights.
One new feature is an enhanced main page, which allows for easy, interactive analysis of the work done by our office broken down by year and by which of the 39 law enforcement agencies in King County referred cases.
In these analyses, a “case” refers to a single court case (a
single law enforcement incident could result in multiple cases, or
multiple incidents can be combined into a single court case). The
numbers displayed are for the cases received, filed, resolved,
and declined during the selected year for the police agencies
selected.
“Filed” cases are cases in which the King County Prosecuting
Attorney’s Office has formally filed charges.
“Resolved” cases are cases that have been filed and are now considered concluded (e.g. through a conviction, plea agreement, dismissal etc.).
“Declined” cases are cases that were declined for one of the following reasons: our office lacked the legally required evidence, the case was referred to municipal or District Court for review and potential filing as a misdemeanor, interests of justice, additional investigation was requested from law enforcement (and the case could come back to our office for future review), part of a plea of filed as another case, or other (for example, the defendant is now deceased).
The sum of declined, filed, and resolved will not equal the total number of
cases received in a year because cases can take years to resolve
(i.e. some cases resolved in 2023 were received in previous years;
some cases received in 2023 will resolve in later years).
For example, the below screenshot shows a breakdown of the cases our office received from the King County Sheriff’s Office (KCSO) in 2023, as well as how many KCSO cases were filed in 2023, how many KCSO cases were resolved in 2023, and how KCSO cases were declined in 2023.
The King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office Data Dashboard was the first of its kind in Washington State, and is publicly available here: https://kingcounty.gov/paodatadashboard. Our office strives to provide the most accurate and complete information possible and the Data Dashboard is being regularly reviewed and updated.
