When it started last fall, Los Angeles County’s experiment with “zero bail” immediately led to fury and concern: With the Superior Court launching an effort to shift away from its traditional money bail system, some in local law enforcement, as well as elected leaders from around the region, said the plan had gone too far.

A long list of low-level crimes now carried $0 in bail — chaos and crime waves were sure to follow, critics of the reform warned.

But nearly six months in, none of the worst fears of zero bail’s harshest critics have come true, court leaders say. And they have the data to show it.

Few of those booked under the new protocols have reoffended, said David Slayton, the L.A. County Superior Court’s CEO since late 2022. He said those most at risk of recommitting serious crimes are staying behind bars.

“This was a big change,” Slayton said. “(Money bail) is the way we’ve been doing this for decades. It’s all people really know.”

In the first three weeks of the program, out of 435 people arrested who judges released after reviewing their cases, just two were later rebooked for new offenses. Since then, with thousands more cases reviewed and about 1,000 arrestees released, a handful of those have been rebooked, Slayton said.

“What the data shows,” Slayton said, “is that individuals who go through the screening process with the magistrates, very few of them have recommitted new offenses.”

The court’s new rules determining who to keep behind bars after they’re arrested are known as the pre-arraignment release protocols, and they replaced traditional money bail with a system that assigns no bail to most low-level, non-violent crimes. For those accused of more serious crimes, a judge may keep them locked up based on individualized risk assessments.

Suddenly, offenses like drug possession, petty theft and trespassing carried no bail, instead becoming citations with a promise to appear at a future court date.  Some more serious crimes still categorized as misdemeanors would land arrestees in booking at a police station, but after completing paperwork, they were also free to go with the same promise.

A new system

The court was forced to come up with a new system after Superior Court Judge Lawrence Riff granted a temporary injunction to four plaintiffs who sued after they were arrested and held in L.A. County jail prior to being arraigned on their charges, solely because they could not afford their bail amounts.

In the lawsuit, Urquidi v. Los Angeles, Riff found that keeping arrestees in jail before they’ve been charged with crimes only because they were too poor to pay their way out was unconstitutional under California law.

Some raised alarm at what they perceived as a lack of accountability for criminals. Both current Sheriff Robert Luna and then-LAPD Chief Michel Moore questioned the new system, with Luna suggesting in an L.A. County Board of Supervisors meeting that the bail schedule would leave law enforcement with little recourse but to watch those they arrested “walk away with a citation as the victim looks on in disbelief.”

And dozens of local cities in L.A. County sued the Superior Court seeking to block it from immediately implementing the program.

But Riff’s ruling in showed how devastating the consequences could be for indignant arrestees who were held in jail only because they were poor.

None of the plaintiffs in Urquidi had been charged with crimes — the ruling dealt only with their jailing before they had faced prosecutors at arraignment hearings.

The lead plaintiff, Phillip Urquidi, is a homeless man who was arrested and booked by LAPD in 2022 on accusations of vandalism causing damage over $400. He was held for five days because he could not come up with $2,000 bail.

While he stayed behind bars, he lost access to his prescription medication. His girlfriend, whom he lived with in his pick-up truck, was forced to stay in their truck with no money for gas, according to Riff’s ruling.

Another plaintiff, 39-year-old Daniel Martinez, was arrested by LAPD in the San Fernando Valley a day after Urquidi’s arrest.

Martinez was also homeless at the time he was arrested on suspicion of receiving stolen property; he too was held for five days being unable to afford his bail. In that time, he missed an interview for a construction job that would have paid him $17 an hour.

Thus far, there’s been little to no evidence of a zero-bail induced crime wave.

Data collected by the superior court on the system so far showed the panic over whether the new bail rules would usher in a new era of consequence-free crime in L.A. County was unfounded:

From Oct. 1 through Oct. 21, out of 5,113 total bookings, the data showed just 3% of arrestees, or about 153 people, were later rebooked having committed new crimes
Of those, more than half of the re-bookings were arrestees who were still subject to money bail
Through December, of the 20,962 people booked into L.A. County jails, 1,618, or about 8%, were rebooked for new offenses
In that group, those subject to money bail again represented 58%, or 936 people, all of whom paid their way out of jail only to be rearrested
From October through December, just 682 people who were not held on money bail, were either cited or booked and released, or released by a judge, were rebooked in that time. That’s about 3% of all bookings.
Among the re-bookings, only five people released by judges were rebooked

So far, Slayton said, the data collection effort has showed not the risks of zero bail, but rather money bail.

“If you stop and think about it for very long,” he said, “the most risky person who has access to money, I’m not sure that’s the person we want out on the street.”

Court watchers concerned

The new system, however, garnered concern from another source: Court watchers and civil rights advocates who for decades had been trying to reform and replace L.A. County’s traditional money bail system.

Alicia Virani, a UCLA Law professor who founded a program to connect her students with clients in need of representation in bail hearings, praised the new rules as a step in the right direction.

But she also called that step a “modest” one. That’s because she said her students and other court watchers have found the new system still looks somewhat like the old one.

“If people are charged with something that should have been cite and release, you would anticipate them walking in through the county courthouse doors, not chained and transported,” Virani said.

“But we saw quite a few people the bail schedule would have said cite and release or book and release, who clearly had not been released.”

Run by La Defensa, an L.A. County-based civil rights group, the court-watching program places dozens of volunteers in courtrooms around the region. Most recently, they watched bail hearings and gathered data in arraignment hearing rooms at the Superior Court’s Airport Courthouse on the Westside of L.A. and the Foltz Criminal Justice Center downtown.

The sample size of the cases court watchers observed was small, around 230 arraignments at two courthouses out of the thousands heard across the county that month. But in their observations, the court watchers said they believed around two out of every five defendants were still being transported to the courthouse in handcuffs despite facing charges that they said should have allowed them to be released.

Titilayọ Rasaki, a policy and campaigns strategist for La Defensa and a former civil rights lawyer, said the court watchers found that the new bail schedule was “rarely mentioned” during the hearings they observed.

Court watching, the activists acknowledged, is an imperfect way to collect data on the court system. Arraignment and bail deviation hearings can often appear opaque and confusing to outside observers — they may last just a few minutes, with dozens of defendants ushered through a courtroom over the course of a day.

Still, the early data from the court-watching project showed what civil rights advocates have feared for years: Judges afforded with wide discretion in how to decide cases were showing deference to law enforcement and prosecutors, holding more arrestees than they likely needed to out of a concern for public safety.

The court watchers’ numbers through February show the magistrates have reviewed a total of 9,120 arrestees to determine if they could be released pre-arraignment. So far through February, the judges have held 8,184 of them in jail, releasing just 490. An additional 446 were released by law enforcement.

Those releases make up just 10% of the magistrate reviews total since October. In the first three weeks of the program, that rate had been 27%.

Why magistrates and law enforcement have been holding arrestees at a higher rate than before was not clear. But activists said both the judges and police have wide discretion in how they interpret the law, even under zero bail.

“The data is showing that discretion is being exercised quite a bit,” said Claire Simonich, the associate director of Vera California, a civil rights group. “The magistrates are holding people eight times out of 10. I think in terms of how it’s playing out on the ground, I’m interested in who those folks are being held and why they’re being held.”

A Superior Court spokesman said the types of offenses being faced by those arrestees subject to magistrate reviews are not being collected as data.

Asked if the magistrate judges are complying with zero bail, the Superior Court in an email pointed to the judges’ discretion in deciding cases.

“Magistrate judges do not ‘comply’ with the bail schedules,” officials for the court wrote in an email. “All judges, including the judges assigned to the Magistrate Unit, make decisions based on the applicable law and available facts.”

Among the thousands held in jail even under the new system, there is no way to know how many indigent defendants might have had a chance to be released earlier than they were — under the system of magistrate judges who operate 24/7, there appears to be no opportunity for a defendant’s attorney to argue against their remaining in custody.

And few of those arrestees would have the number of attorneys required to properly represent them, Rasaki said.

“For every 1,000 examples of injustice that are happening, how many are going to end up on appeal? It takes a lot of work to get to that point,” she said. “This is a system that has very few checks and has very few levers of accountability.”

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