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Measures for Justice’s new CEO is a self-described “career technologist” whose background includes working on software development and technology-based solutions for industries such as public safety, health care, and youth justice.
Michael Smith, who took the reins at the Rochester-based criminal justice transparency nonprofit last month, says a personal alignment with its mission, his own employment history, and the ability to have a large impact on improving systems are what attracted him to Measures for Justice.
“That is a rare opportunity to apply your skill set and your history towards something that can truly have a generational impact if you do it right and can figure it out,” Smith says.
Measures for Justice was founded in 2011 by Amy Bach, author of “Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court.” Bach served as CEO until earlier this year. She announced in late 2025 she was working on a followup to that book and would step down from the CEO position. She plans to remain as a board member to support the organization, however.
The nonprofit, which employs roughly 60 people, reported $25 million in revenue in 2022, with the majority ($22.8 million) coming from foundations. (For comparison, from 2013 to 2021, Measures for Justice reported an annual average revenue of $4.84 million.)
Since peaking in 2022, revenues have been trending back to their previous average while expenses continue to climb. The organization had revenues of $7.46 million in 2023 and $3.46 million in 2024 with expenses of $13.1 million and $14.4 million, respectively. Its 2025 annual report listed $13.3 million in expenses; revenues were not listed.
“The broader funding environment for criminal justice work has tightened significantly over the past few years, and you’re seeing that reflected across the field,” Smith said in a follow up question about finances. “Our focus now is making sure every dollar we spend translates into real, day-to-day value for the people we serve. Good data is what helps agencies make better decisions, use resources more effectively, and build trust in the system.”
Choosing the right leader for Measures for Justice meant “finding someone who could honor our past while boldly shaping our future, and Michael Smith is that person,” says Ayanna Clunis, the nonprofit’s board chair. “He is a builder at his core: of technology, of teams, and of lasting institutions. What struck our board most was not only his impressive track record, but his genuine excitement to partner with the talented people already doing this work every day.”
Smith previously spent over 20 years as a technologist in the Las Vegas region. During those years, he was a startup mentor for the Vegas Tech Fund and founded several tech firms, including Raster Media and Evus Technologies.
In 2017, he was also a co-creator of Evertal, a secure communications platform for law enforcement, often called “Slack for cops.” The technology, which Smith says originated from “an idea on a napkin,” was sold to Genasys in 2023.
“(Evertal) was aimed at increasing transparency in police communications and giving them tools to communicate across regions, across agencies, interoperability, internally, much more efficiently in disseminating mission-critical information to those that needed it,” Smith says. “Not only quickly, but in a compliant, legal way with total transparency and auditability.”
Smith also worked on the Spirit Project, a data-driven system aimed at reducing youth recidivism, and on Alzheimer’s research with the Cleveland Clinic. He calls the approach he took in those past experiences, as well as the one for this position, “practical optimism.”
“You can’t go at it cynically as in, ‘Oh, there’s no way we’re going to solve this.’ But you also can’t go at it with blind optimism either,” explains Smith. “If we put in the right kind of work, the hard work, and have an optimistic mind, with that, we can solve this issue. I think that keeps us motivated and keeps us grounded.”
A nonpartisan nonprofit, Measures for Justice aims to foster a transparent, accessible, and accountable criminal justice system. It offers technical assistance primarily for prosecutor offices, a national data portal, and its Commons public data, which launched a dashboard with the Rochester Police Department last year. Smith commends the nonprofit for its work to this point and calls Commons a “gold standard solution of presentation.”
The Commons dashboard currently displays data for select counties and cities in California, Washington, Louisiana, and New York. Locally, it has one in partnership with the Rochester Police Department and the Monroe County district attorney’s office. Each Commons also contains a policy goal focus, determined by the law enforcement organization and a community advisory board.
The next steps required in some of these issues are unclear, however. The policy goal the district attorney’s office set in 2023 was to increase diversions, that is, giving nonviolent, low-level defendants alternatives to court, to 10 percent by December 2024.
The latest MFJ data for diversions shows that 0.5 percent of all cases were diverted in September 2025. In fact, since April 2022, the monthly value has not risen above 1.7 percent, significantly below the target.
In previous statements, Measures for Justice has stated that policy goals are intended to be regularly reassessed by both agencies and the community. Whether the district attorney’s office or the community advisory board has met regarding this unachieved policy goal is unclear at this time.
In addition, coverage gaps still exist in the front-facing tools provided by Measures for Justice. The national data portal currently covers only 19 states, contains gaps at the county level in some states, and was last updated in 2022.
Smith says he is still getting his bearings on the organization and its future plans. However, he believes that information standardization, similar to what the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System does, could help Measures for Justice’s mission by creating visibility and comparability across systems.
Knowledge is power, he says, but it must be trustworthy and verifiable knowledge to be powerful and actionable.
“All of these different efforts and different capacities that are out there, different organizations and groups after some form of justice reform, are swimming upstream, right?” Smith says. “They’re swimming against a current that makes that work incredibly hard, incredibly difficult, and the reason for that is because the fundamental layer underneath all of that, the system, the data, it’s invisible. It goes back to the old mantra, you can’t fix what you can’t measure.
“At first glance, when you hear these stories of terrible justice outcomes and whatnot, the assumption is that there’s a lot of bad actors or evil influences in that process that contributes to these,” he adds. “The reality is, it’s a bad system. It’s an opaque system with no visibility into the data and how that system is working. To me, that transparency and justice data is at the foundation of the problem.”
Jacob Schermerhorn is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and data journalist.
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