While detailed information about the race and gender of law enforcement officers in the U.S. has been available for decades and has prompted many police departments to diversify their workforces, there has been virtually no publicly available information to answer the question of how representative prosecutors are of the communities they serve. To address this, Stanford Law School offered two policy practicums, one last spring and a follow-up one this fall to shed light on the diversity of prosecutors in California.

The first focused on the demographics by gathering and analyzing data from prosecutors’ offices (not just the elected DAs) in 52 of California’s 58 counties, representing nearly 98 percent of the state’s population. They made this information public for the first time in their report, “Stuck in the ’70s,” which reveals that some minorities, particularly Latinos, are poorly represented among prosecutors. Latinos represent almost 39 percent of the state’s population, but make up only 9 percent of California prosecutors. The data collected also shows that women are underrepresented in the supervisory ranks of prosecutors in California. The practicum was led by Debbie Mukamal, executive director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center (SCJC), and David Alan Sklansky, Stanley Morrison Professor of Law and faculty co-director of the SCJC.

A follow-up practicum is under way this fall to explore—through case studies of individual counties—how prosecutor offices have approached diversifying their workforces. It will also analyze the gender and racial demographic composition of federal prosecutors in the United States and identify legal, financial, and policy incentives available to mandate local jurisdictions to collect and provide data on the demographics of prosecutors’ offices to the federal government. Helping with this sizable task is Joelle Emerson, JD ’11, founder and CEO of Paradigm, a company that advises companies and groups on ways to diversify their workplaces. According to Mukamal, this research project is the only one to look at the demographic diversity of prosecutors’ offices and provide qualitative data on the challenges and successes individual offices have faced in diversifying their workforces. A report is expected in the winter of 2016.