Intern for alternate public defender starts Uber project for clients

Sydney Segal hasn’t graduated law school yet, but she has accomplished a lot.

She backpacked in 50 countries, taught English abroad, competed on the TV series “Survivor” and attended Columbia University on a track scholarship.

But a project she started while working as an intern at the Alternate Public Defender’s Office in Los Angeles last summer might have her greatest impact, so far.

Segal was assigned to the Airport Courthouse near LAX. There she noticed indigent clients had a hard time finding public transportation to attend court hearings. So she did what any young person would do, she called Uber — and asked for vouchers.

“I just decided to draft a proposal, engage in some case law, statutes, literature and other data, to basically pitch to them,” Segal, who has accepted an offer to work at Brooklyn Defender Services, said of her first outreach to Uber.

Segal, who placed seventh of 18 contestants on “Survivor 41,” found that despite her initiative and skills she needed help to accomplish a goal. She notified her supervisor who put her in touch with an expert in county government on how to put together public-private partnerships.

Once in touch with Uber, Segal explained to the rideshare company how the county would save a lot of money in pretrial incarceration and executing bench warrants. She submitted a proposal in July 2021. Months later, the company still had not sent any vouchers.

Segal didn’t give up.

“I reached out to [Uber’s] social impact department.” she said. “One person leads me to another person leads me to another person, and I kind of got my point person from there. She read the proposal, we had a couple meetings, and she said, ‘Yes absolutely.’”

Segal figured the issue was solved and the vouchers would arrive. But she soon discovered a multitude of logistics needed to be configured before a pilot program could be implemented. Segal thought she could just hand out the vouchers to lawyers to pass on to their clients.

“Then you start problem shooting. If there’s 200 vouchers, and there’s $3 left on each voucher, then that’s $600 going to waste. We don’t want people to take advantage of having this free money.”

Segal and others working on the project initially thought the program could be used for criminal defendants throughout all of LA County but they decided it would be better to focus on the court near LAX.

“We figured, ‘It’s going to take a lot of trial and error; we’ll start with Airport Court,’” she said.

The courthouse is on La Cienega Boulevard, a freeway-standard arterial roadway just southeast of the airport. While easily accessible by car off the 105 and 405 freeways, the nearest Metro rail station, Aviation/LAX, is a 16-minute walk around a long block to the court.

“It’s tough to get there from a lot of the places the court serves,” said Brett Taylor, a consultant for LA County’s Alternative to Incarceration Office on Criminal Justice Reform Efforts, who helped Segal with the project. “The hope of this grant is to reduce failures to appear and to allow people to resolve their court cases without having what are known as technical violations.”

Speaking of Segal’s initiative, Taylor said, “This is someone working for the [alternate] public defender who quickly identified a gap and was very creative in how she resolved that gap.”

“It’s also a great example of how a private entity can support public needs,” Taylor said.

Many of the office’s clients are homeless and/or have drug problems, and because the Airport Court is not very accessible, “for a lot of these people it just made more sense, thinking myopically, to just not come to court,” Segal said.

In light of changes in bail setting, “a lot of people are now being released on … a promise to return to court or on very low bail,” Segal explained. But when they give up on trying to attend their next hearing, “they end up getting arrested on a bench warrant.”

Sometimes those who make it to the court leave before their hearing because they are worried about getting home, Taylor said.

“One person in a case wasn’t called in the morning and they were worried about… very infrequent buses to go back to where this person lived, and made the decision to catch a bus home instead of waiting around all afternoon for his court case to be called,” Taylor said.

During the pilot, participants are asked to fill out a survey. “Hopefully, seeing how many people actually use the program, then we’ll probably ... start dispersing it with the [alternate public defender and the public defender] and then hopefully to other courthouses as well,” Segal said.

“The idea right now is to also set up a system in place to track the data, take their testimonials, so that we can hopefully get more money,” she explained. “The reason it’s taking so much time is because we’re trying to set up a very strong foundation for continued success in the program.”