SF Criminal Court Judge Elo ranks San Francisco criminal court judges using Elo ratings based on crowd votes comparing dismissed/diverted charge severity.
Key Takeaways
Judges are ranked by Elo score derived from pairwise voter comparisons of charge dispositions with no jail/prison time.
Eligible dispositions include dismissals, diversions, acquittals, deferred judgments, and discharges; excludes cases tied to federal indictment, death, or agency transfer.
Top-ranked judge Harry M. Dorfman sits at 1194.7 Elo; bottom of ranked pool Patrick S. Thompson leads in vote volume at 2294 votes.
Data sourced from jamiequint/sf_criminal_court; judge attribution uses case/date matches to department assignments, which do not confirm the actual daily sitting judge.
Defendant ratings are also tracked but use normalized names, making same-name collisions and spelling variants a known data quality risk.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters flagged that the site lacks plain-language definitions for legal disposition terms like “Diversion” or “871PC/No Sufficient Cause”, limiting usability for non-lawyers.
One commenter framed gamified civic data tools cynically, suggesting they normalize betting-style engagement with public institutions.
Notable Comments
@simonw: Calls for human-readable explanations of disposition terms and a clearer definition of the pairwise voting question.
