James DeBacco
Veterans Treatment Court Liaison
County of Los Angeles
Doctoral Social Work Candidate
James DeBacco is a Veterans Services Officer and Veterans Treatment Court liaison at the Los Angeles County Department of Military & Veterans Affairs, where he coordinates services for justice-involved veterans across four Superior Court locations — Los Angeles, Antelope Valley, Van Nuys, and Compton. In that role he works daily at the intersection of the courts, county behavioral health, probation, housing, law enforcement, the VA, and community re-entry providers — navigating the fragmented, multi-agency infrastructure through which the most vulnerable veterans in Los Angeles County move.
His professional focus sits at the intersection of two urgent questions: how public systems share information across agency boundaries, and what it costs in human terms when they cannot. His first-hand experience coordinating care across more than a dozen departments — each operating its own case-management systems, records environments, and data-sharing constraints — has made him an active voice on the governance requirements that AI tools must meet before they can be deployed responsibly in public human-services settings.
DeBacco is completing a Doctor of Social Work (DSW) at the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, where his research focuses on governed AI in cross-agency human-services contexts. He holds a Master of Social Work from USC (2024) and a Bachelor of Science in Rehabilitation Services, Magna Cum Laude, from California State University, Los Angeles, along with a Veteran Services Certificate. His academic work extends a career-long commitment to policy-level thinking about the structural conditions that either enable or prevent effective care coordination for justice-involved populations.
Beyond his county role, DeBacco serves as a mentor and advisor for re-entry programming, co-hosts the Our Stories Matter podcast (Season 4, funded by Trauma Informed Los Angeles), and serves as President of USC’s Unchained Scholars program, a support organization for formerly incarcerated students. He is a fellow of the Norman Topping Scholarship Aid Fund and Town and Gown Society of USC, a member of the USC Phi Alpha Honor Society, and a United Nations International Youth Conference delegate. In 2021 he received a Certificate of Recognition from the U.S. House of Representatives for community contributions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
His writing on AI governance, cross-system data infrastructure, and trauma-informed technology design for justice-involved veteran populations has been published in the context of California’s evolving public AI policy landscape.
Doctor of Social Work candidate, USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work MSW, USC · BS Rehabilitation Services (Magna Cum Laude), Cal State Los Angeles