That’s the total number of people who, in August 2021, were awaiting disposition of their case according to the Pretrial Release Dashboard, which the New York City Criminal Justice Agency is releasing today in partnership with the New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice and the leading national pretrial justice consultants Luminosity, Inc.

Since the passage of major bail reforms in New York in 2020 aimed at reducing the use of pretrial detention, a heated debate has unfolded in a stark, binary way about whether those reforms have reduced public safety or increased human freedom. Key facts about the pretrial population have been missing from this largely-data free debate.

The Pretrial Release Dashboard shows that many more people awaiting the final disposition of their case are in the community as opposed to experiencing pretrial detention – a reflection of New York City’s decades-long commitment to increasing the proportion of individuals released without monetary conditions.

In recent months, New Yorkers have read troubling stories about the conditions at the Rikers Island jail complex, in which on any given day about 4,500 individuals currently reside in pretrial detention, out of a total jail population of 5,500. (To stay updated on these figures, Vera’s jail tracker is an indispensable resource.)

The Pretrial Release Dashboard helps to underline the importance of continued investment in alternatives to pretrial detention, such as the City’s Supervised Release Program, which in August 2021, had 5,479 individuals under supervision – a number comparable to the 5,586 people detained in jail awaiting trial for some length of time in the same month.

As Luminosity, Inc. Managing Director Gena Keebler notes in companion commentary, the Pretrial Release Dashboard seeks to address two methodological challenges that have limited the availability and usefulness of data about pretrial outcomes. One is the fragmentation of key data, which is typically held in multiple systems. The second is long lag times in reporting key outcomes. “Having a report in 2021 on court appearances and new charges for people arrested in 2018 . . . (was) revolutionary,” Keebler writes. (New York City’s Data Analytic Recidivism Tool is a good example.) “In this age of technology and demand for accountability,” the demand is for data that “is accessible, transparent, real time and actionable.”

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