Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden. (Photo by Michael Jonas)

IN OCTOBER 2022, a reporter asked Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden about a 15 percentage point drop in the share of juvenile cases his office diverted away from prosecution – the “first time in years,” The Boston Globe reported, that more young people were prosecuted than diverted.

“That’s the first time I’ve actually seen those numbers,” Hayden answered at the time. Ahead of the September 1 primary, with the Globe, Boston Herald, and current and former Suffolk County officials endorsing a second Hayden term, voters should be asking: What is DA Hayden’s actual record, and where can we find the data to evaluate it?

We know the answers, because from 2019 to 2022, tracking Suffolk County prosecution data was our job under former DA Rachael Rollins, one of two challengers now running against Hayden in the Democratic primary.

When Rollins took office in 2019, she released a 65-page memo detailing her new policies, including a list of low-level misdemeanors the office would presumptively decline to prosecute. On day one, she invited a team of academic researchers to evaluate whether those policies would compromise public safety.

Over the next two years, those academics scoured tens of thousands of the office’s criminal cases. Their findings, peer-reviewed and published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, surprised even the researchers. Prosecuting certain misdemeanors past arraignment causes more crime, not less. For decades, indiscriminately prosecuting certain misdemeanor cases had been making Suffolk County residents less safe. The findings vindicated Rollins’s Decline to Prosecute policy, as reported by Commonwealth Beacon and other local outlets.

That was not the only data the office published. Rollins’s 44-page mid-term report (since removed from the office website, but now accessible here) chronicled her policies and initiatives: Harvard Kennedy School research found her policies coincided with a decrease in recidivism; pretrial detention of young people fell 59 percent while youth gun violence hit record lows; and, the office’s Integrity Review Bureau supported the reversal of 10 convictions, overturning 321 years of wrongful incarceration (significantly, many of these exonerees have recently endorsed Rollins and are publicly supporting her campaign).

In January 2022, our team shared a transition brief with the incoming Hayden administration. We detailed the office’s active research projects and partnerships, hoping to hand off the relationships and the data. We never received a response. When asked at the time whether he planned to alter the office’s existing research and innovation portfolio, Hayden assured a reporter, “No, not at all. In fact, we intend to see all of that through to the best of our ability.”

While publicly promising to continue data-driven innovation work, behind closed doors Hayden and his team shuttered every project and relationship without notice or explanation to the office’s many partners. Student teams from the Boston University Spark! Lab and the New York University Public Safety Lab were planning to work with the office that semester for credit. Researchers from the Harvard Kennedy School, NYU, Rutgers, and Texas A&M, were cut off from data they had been analyzing for years.

Hayden then went against the research evidence his own office commissioned and shelved the declination policy. He returned misdemeanor charging to the kind of case-by-case discretion that historically produced significant racial disparities. Four years into his term, voters looking for DA Hayden’s record will find his website bereft of data and research to evaluate.

Nine key policies are listed on the site, among them a single data point: a $400,000 appropriation, drawn from asset forfeiture funds, for his Services Over Sentences program. The site offers no annual reports, no prosecutorial data, no research findings, and no written policy documents.

Voters deserve answers on the basics of the job. In the last three years, the Suffolk DA’s office prosecuted more than 25,000 cases where the lead charge was a misdemeanor. Since the office resumed prosecuting misdemeanors its own research warned against, have those who were prosecuted committed more misdemeanors and felonies, as the research predicted? Residents of the neighborhoods most impacted by violence need to know.

In broad strokes, DA Hayden has touted his record on diversion, but did juvenile diversion recover from the decline Hayden oversaw? (Based on concerning state trends, the answer is likely “no.”)

What about his signature initiative, the Services Over Sentences program? Court Watch MA conducted an analysis of the data and found that, by its own numbers, the program is barely functioning. Since Hayden took office, according to Massachusetts Trial Court data, the Suffolk district attorney’s office has filed criminal cases against more than 50,000 people, Meanwhile, only 160 people have successfully completed the program; of just last year’s referrals into the program, 70 percent did not complete the program or are no longer participating.

A competent prosecutor would never show up to court on the morning of trial without evidence, yet that is how DA Hayden is approaching the trial of his reelection. He has had four years, a staff of more than 300, and scores of academic partners to help him publish data and research since. If the evidence for a second term exists, Hayden should produce it. The jurors — Suffolk County voters — deserve to see it before they deliberate.

Nasser Eledroos and Bobby Constantino served from 2019 to 2022 as technologist and chief of innovation and strategy, respectively, at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office, where they managed the office’s research and data portfolio.