Questions the data
raises but
cannot answer.

Shannon had 8 bookings in late 2023 and returned in 2025 with no 2024 record. The gap might mean incarceration, treatment, housing, or simply leaving the county. The booking data cannot distinguish these. Whatever caused the gap is exactly what the community should be trying to replicate.

In 2025, 46 bookings were disposed as "Charge not Filed." Across 2023-2025, there were 879 such dispositions. These are people who were booked, held, and never charged. The booking data records the hold but not the reason no charge followed, nor how long they were held before that determination.

Washington State University (WSU) documented that 71% of the jail population has a behavioral health need. But the booking data has no behavioral health field. We cannot determine from this data which charge categories or length-of-stay brackets correlate with behavioral health need, even though that would be the single most useful planning figure for right-sizing both the jail and the behavioral health campus.

At roughly $130-180 per person per day, the 632 bookings that lasted 30+ days in 2025 represent a very different cost profile than the 1,153 same-day releases. A DWLS 3rd booking with a 3-day median stay costs roughly $450. A sentenced behavioral health case with a 30-day stay costs $4,000-5,400. The same booking count obscures wildly different resource demands.

469 DWLS 3rd bookings in 2025 at a median 3-day stay represents roughly $183,000-$253,000 in direct incarceration cost. Many DWLS 3rd suspensions stem from unpaid fines. Fine forgiveness and reinstatement assistance programs in other states have resolved this cycle for a fraction of that cost. This comparison has not been made publicly in Whatcom County.

Ordinance 2023-039 established a 50% upstream investment floor in the Interlocal Agreement (ILA). The ILA language is aspirational in some sections. Per PFM (January 2025), actual 2024 revenue came in 2.4% below projections. What share of actual Fund 3502 disbursements in 2024 went to upstream programs vs. facility planning, debt service, and operations? This has not been published in a format accessible to the public.

Warrant-only bookings increased from 756 to 1,213 between 2023 and 2025, and the Prosecuting Attorney confirmed this reflects booking restriction changes, not more warrants being issued. The county is projecting future bed need partly based on 2025 booking volume. If that volume reflects a policy setting that could be adjusted, the projection is sensitive to a variable that is within the county's control.

Sections 5.1(c) and 9.4 of Ordinance 2023-039 establish an 85% utilization trigger for expansion across 8 of 12 months. This is a binding commitment. Building to the Pasquo adjusted estimate of 422 beds rather than 480, and relying on the trigger if needed, would preserve $24-30M in capital for upstream investment while still guaranteeing capacity if demand materializes. This option has not been presented publicly as a viable alternative.

DOC detainers are state holds, not local charges. The county is housing people whose continued incarceration is a function of state policy. 240 DOC detainer bookings in 2025 at roughly $130-180/day represents a significant cost being borne locally for a state function. Whether state reimbursement exists, and whether it is sufficient, is a question the county should be able to answer before sizing a facility partly around this population.

The public booking CSV contains no race or ethnicity field. This means none of these dashboards can speak to racial disparities in booking rates, charge patterns, length of stay, or disposition. Whatcom County's jail population is likely significantly more racially disproportionate than the county overall, as is the case in virtually every Washington county, but the public data does not allow quantification.

Lummi PD made 285 arrest-origin bookings at the county jail in 2025. The Lummi Nation is a sovereign nation with its own Tribal Court system. The booking data reflects the subset of Lummi contacts that flow through county facilities. Whether this arrangement reflects the health and justice priorities of Lummi Nation, and whether the Behavioral Health Campus planning has been developed with genuine nation-to-nation engagement, is a question the booking data cannot answer.

The public booking CSV includes a bail amount field. In 2025, 1,376 bookings (29%) were disposed as Bail Bond, meaning the person was released upon posting bail. The data does not record who could not post bail and remained held. The difference between "held because dangerous" and "held because poor" is a core equity question in pretrial detention that this data cannot distinguish.

The STV/EP&A Behavioral Health Campus report recommended a Crisis Receiving Center as the first-build priority. Attachment B of that report was designed to quantify the diversion impact. It has not been published. Without this analysis, the county is being asked to commit to a facility size without knowing how much the investments it is simultaneously recommending would reduce that same facility's population.

The booking data records 34 "Released to Treatment" dispositions in 2025, plus 165 "Release to Drug Court" dispositions. These are the system's most explicit intervention points in the booking record. Whether these dispositions actually connected people to stable treatment, and whether they reduced future bookings, is the most important outcome question this data cannot answer. Without outcome tracking, the system cannot learn what works.

The 30 most-booked individuals across 2023-2025 are profiled in this dashboard series. Their charge patterns, agency contacts, and cycling trajectories are visible in the data. Most jurisdictions with similar data have piloted intensive case management for their highest-frequency contacts. Whether Whatcom County has a coordinated approach specifically for this population, and whether it is funded, is not visible in the booking data.

The people with 5, 8, 11, 13 bookings across three years are not abstractions. They are named in the data, their charge history is visible, and the conditions likely driving their contact with the system are documented by decades of research. Whether Whatcom County has a structured process for incorporating their perspective into jail planning, beyond the IPRTF's lived experience advisors, shapes whether any solution will actually work for the people it most affects.

Whatcom County's ILA cities include jurisdictions with very different fiscal profiles. Several small cities are facing structural deficits independent of the justice facility. Signing an ILA that commits them to 20-30 years of payments toward a $200M+ facility may represent a fiscal obligation that crowds out the upstream investments the same ordinance asks them to make. The city budget dashboards in this series show the fiscal fragility for each ILA signatory.

This is not a data question. It is the question all of the other questions are in service of. Communities that built large jails in the 1980s and 1990s did not anticipate the fiscal and human cost of those decisions. Communities that invested in behavioral health infrastructure over the same period documented measurable reductions in justice contact. Whatcom County has both options in front of it simultaneously. The question is which community it wants to be in 2046.