Montgomery County’s state’s attorney’s office will begin a two-year process this fall to investigate prosecutorial decisions in the county and determine whether they are racially biased, the county’s top prosecutor, John McCarthy, said at a press conference on Wednesday.

The study is set to examine numerous aspects of how prosecutors do their jobs — including how they charge and sentence people for crimes and how they decide who gets sent to diversion programs instead of being convicted or given jail time. The research will be done with an eye toward identifying racial disparities in the treatment of both victims of crime and people accused of crime.

“As state’s attorney for Montgomery County, my primary objective is to maintain public safety for all members of our diverse community,” McCarthy said Wednesday. “Critical to that mission is ensuring that criminal prosecutions are handled fairly, equitably across racial and ethnic lines.”

The project will adopt an approach created by the Prosecutorial Performance Indicators Project, a group that has led similar studies in 11 other state’s attorney’s offices, including in the Chicago area, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia. The project was created by criminologists at Florida International University and Loyola University at Chicago and is rooted in the idea that prosecutors, as some of the most powerful actors in the system, are central to criminal justice reform efforts.

The Montgomery County study will be led by two researchers: Melba Pearson, the co-manager of the Prosecutorial Performance Indicators Project, and Brian Johnson, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Maryland. McCarthy said the project will likely yield some data within 18 months, and researchers will deliver a complete report of their findings in two years.

“I don’t get editorial review over this,” said McCarthy. “I’m committed to publishing it.”

From there, McCarthy said that if the study finds bias in the way county prosecutors operate, “we’re going to change … that’s what the commitment is.”

Pearson, a former prosecutor in Miami-Dade County and previous deputy director of the ACLU of Florida, said the investigation “is not about the performance of individual prosecutors,” but rather about “looking at systems and the office as a whole to determine where areas of improvement lie, where change is needed, and where things are going well.”

Pearson added that the project will involve an “extensive community outreach” component. Overall, the study will cost $500,000 and the county will use grants, foundation money and possibly part of the county budget to pay for it.

“I’d been taught my entire life that knowledge is power,” Sidney Katz, chair of the Montgomery County council’s public safety committee, said at the press conference. “Someone needs to be kind enough to tell you when you’re not doing something correct. And that’s exactly the possibility that we have today.”

Though McCarthy said his office does not have good local data on racial disparities related to prosecution — a gap this study aims to correct — other data released by the county last year showed significant racial disparities in policing. Black people make up about 18% of Montgomery County’s population but represented 55% of use-of-force cases and 32% of traffic stops in 2018.