The University of Memphis has rolled out a new crime-data project that promises to pull back the curtain on how local cases move through Shelby County’s justice system. On Wednesday, the school formally launched the CLEAR Initiative, a public-facing dashboard that will knit together jail, court, and prosecutor records so residents can follow cases from arrest to final outcome.
CLEAR, short for Criminal and Legal Evaluation using Administrative Records, will be housed inside the university’s Center for Community Research and Evaluation and led by Dr. Jonathan Bennett. The idea is straightforward but ambitious: make it possible to see how arrests move through the courts and into final dispositions, and in the process spot delays, backlogs, and patterns that usually stay buried in spreadsheets.
“Right now, criminal justice data lives in silos,” Bennett said, describing CLEAR as a way to produce a “360-degree view of case outcomes.” The initiative will pull together records from five different Shelby County agencies so researchers and the public can see arrests, prosecutorial decisions and jail stays in one place, according to WMC Action News 5.
The work is backed by county dollars through a contract with the University of Memphis, described in county meeting materials as a digital dashboard project with an initial not-to-exceed amount of $300,000 and an initial term through Feb. 29, 2028. The agreement also includes options to renew and casts the university as a neutral third-party data steward for the project, according to the Shelby County.
The CLEAR Initiative launches with a who’s who of local justice-system partners: Criminal Court Clerk Heidi Kuhn, District Attorney Steve Mulroy, General Sessions Court Clerk Tamara Sawyer, Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, and Sheriff Floyd Bonner are all listed as collaborators. County leaders offered public statements backing the effort, praising the push for transparency and better coordination when the university announced the unit, as reported by WMC Action News 5.
Not everyone is simply cheering it on, though. Commissioners and county staff have pressed for details on who will control access to the underlying data, how residents’ privacy will be protected, and what happens when the initial funding window closes. During committee discussions earlier this year, officials asked the university to spell out data-governance rules, including memoranda of understanding and county IT oversight, before wider integration begins, according to Citizen Portal.
Why Officials Say It Matters
State watchdogs have been pointing out holes in Shelby County’s criminal-justice data for years. A March 2025 report by the Tennessee Comptroller flagged gaps in what the county reports publicly and urged leaders to publish 18 core metrics and adopt a single unique case identifier so cases can be followed across different court systems, according to the Tennessee Comptroller.
The Center for Community Research and Evaluation is not walking in cold. The unit has already built pretrial analyses and tools that helped power earlier county dashboards, laying technical groundwork for CLEAR to track things like disposition times, continuances, and rearrests in a research-grade environment, per a CCRE report.
The university says the CLEAR public dashboard is expected to go live within the first six months of the initiative. During that time, the team plans to work with county agencies to finalize the memoranda of understanding and build out the underlying data warehouse before opening the site to the public, as reported by Local Memphis.
If that schedule holds, Shelby County residents could soon have a one-stop view of how local cases move from booking to final disposition. Officials and advocates say such a window could sharpen oversight and public debate over how justice is delivered. They also caution that the same transparency will only be a win if it comes with strong governance rules and careful anonymization to protect privacy and avoid people drawing sweeping conclusions from incomplete records.
