Baltimore’s public prosecution dashboard makes case activity searchable, but it is not yet a complete historical record: the office’s older data have gaps, and juvenile cases are not included.
At the dashboard’s launch at Morgan State University, State’s Attorney Ivan Bates described it as a way for residents to assess his office’s performance, according to FOX45 News. Users can examine Baltimore Circuit and District Court criminal cases, including filings, outcomes, sentencing and dismissals, and filter results by offense type and defendant demographics. Bates said the public deserves meaningful information about how the criminal justice system operates and how his office performs, the report said.
Baltimore City is one of three Maryland jurisdictions now offering this kind of public window into prosecutions. According to wbal.com, Baltimore joins Frederick and Montgomery counties in providing criminal-prosecution information and results through a web dashboard, giving the public access to case outcomes and background information across all three jurisdictions. Bates said community leaders will be able to track racial information along with case and sentencing outcomes, with the system updated quarterly, wbal.com reports.
An Office That Handles Nearly 40,000 Cases a Year Had Gaps in Its Own Records
The dashboard's construction exposed messy internal bookkeeping. The Baltimore City State's Attorney's Office, which handles almost 40,000 cases a year, did not collect some historical data that officials believed it was collecting, and the office had incomplete data for 2020, 2021 and 2022. It only began collecting genuine, reliable data around 2024, after prosecutors were required to complete specific forms to track cases and outcomes and after the office changed its internal data collection practices.
Those changes followed Bates taking office in 2023, when the office began working with Prosecutorial Performance Indicators, the framework behind the dashboard. The Baltimore office is reworking a legacy dashboard in consultation with PPI, as reported by The Baltimore Banner. The current dashboard contains data through the end of 2025, and the office plans to update it approximately every 90 days.
What the PPI Framework Actually Measures
Prosecutorial Performance Indicators is a suite of modern measures built to assess prosecutors' effectiveness, efficiency and fairness, offering up to 55 separate indicators, according to apainc.org. The framework emphasizes community well-being, prosecutorial integrity, racial equity and effective use of resources, and it is meant to help prosecutors and communities flag problems, ask additional questions, develop solutions and measure change over time, per prosecutorialperformanceindicators.org. The indicators include measures of case filing, charging and plea-offer differences by defendant race or ethnicity. PPI now has participants at more than 50 sites nationwide, with both the Montgomery County and Frederick County prosecutors' offices among them.
The Association of Prosecuting Attorneys is partnering with Florida International University and Loyola University Chicago to implement PPIs and build dashboards in prosecutors' offices around the country, according to apainc.org. Melba Pearson said the dashboards are designed to track entire-office performance rather than grade individual prosecutors.
Racial Disparities Surfaced in Earlier Data — and Bates Wants Years to Study Them
An earlier examination of Baltimore's prosecution data appeared to show that Black defendants were charged while white defendants disproportionately received outcomes labeled nol pros, though missing demographic information skewed those earlier results. Bates said transparency is a responsibility of his administration and that he plans to examine racial disparities in prosecution decisions, following the racial data for the next two, three or four years to see how it develops.
Maryland's other dashboards show what that kind of scrutiny can reveal. In Montgomery County, data showed people of color were disproportionately arrested and charged, though some of those charges may have originated directly from police rather than prosecutors, per The Baltimore Banner. A report accompanying that county's dashboard, developed with a University of Maryland-led research team, did not find overarching or systemic patterns of racial disparity in prosecutions but did conclude that people of different races have differing experiences in the system, according to ccjs.umd.edu. Montgomery County's own dashboard displays five years of metrics on guilty-plea rates by race, case types and resolutions, along with defendant and victim demographics by race and gender, the Banner reports. That effort was part of a three-year, $650,000 project, funded by Arnold Ventures and other nonprofits, that was designed from the start to eventually include Frederick County and Baltimore, per the same university feature. Some materials from Montgomery County's own state's attorney's office describe it as the first jurisdiction in Maryland to release a data dashboard designed by the PPI team, a framing not addressed elsewhere in available reporting.
Juvenile Records Still Missing From the Dashboard
One notable gap remains: the dashboard does not currently include juvenile information. The Baltimore City State's Attorney's Office found inaccuracies in previously recorded juvenile case information after reviewing individual juvenile case files, and the office plans to add juvenile data to the dashboard once that review work is further along.
Juvenile records and privacy
In February 2026 testimony to the Judiciary Committee, the Maryland Department of Juvenile Services described juvenile records as confidential, citing the importance of protecting young people’s privacy. The testimony cited here does not specify the law governing public access or which information state agencies may disclose in aggregate.
The dashboard itself was funded through Prosecutorial Performance Indicators and its partners, with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Microsoft Justice Reform Initiative. The state's attorney's office separately received federal funding for technology modernization. Bates has framed the project as part of his broader push for openness, saying his office hopes the tool will help residents identify trends, measure progress, and better understand the State's Attorney's Office's role in the justice system, according to wbal.com.
